Nvidia made the decision this week to delay the launch of their GeForce RTX 3070 GPUs ahead of the planned launch. The previous 30-series cards, the 3080 and 3090, have been plagued by stocking issues across the board. The rush to pre-order the cards led to thousands of PC gamers being unable to get the new GPU anywhere. Nvidia and its partners are using the delay to produce more stock of the Nvidia RTX 3070 GPUs to alleviate future problems. They clearly don’t want to see these cards disappear in a matter of minutes as the company gets swamped with orders.
Reports from Nvidia and retailers suggest traffic and demand for the new cards has exceeded the level of users for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So yeah, this was probably a good decision. There is another issue here though that can’t be easily solved by having more stock. Scalpers have been using bot accounts to check for stock at various retailers and buying the cards up in bulk. The same thing happened with the Nintendo Switch and other high-demand items, and it has been an ongoing issue for months.
The RTX 3070 has a noticeable bump up in performance compared to the likes of the previous generation 20-series. The 2080 was heralded as a major upgrade, with the 2080 Ti sitting at the top of the stack and reigning like a king. Nvidia has already begun phasing out the previous generation to make room for the new GPUs.
AMD on the other hand may be about to deal with similar issues of bots and low stock. Reports have suggested that the new Ryzen 4th Generation CPUs will be out before the end of the month. Despite not having the same stock issues in previous launches, it could be very hard to get the new 5000-series CPUs on launch day.
The Nvidia RTX 3070 launch will now take place on October 29, which is exactly a two-week delay. That puts it right inline wiht the supposed launch of the new AMD CPUs, by the way.
