In context: Nvidia says the launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 was “overrun by malicious bots and resellers,” so it has issued an apology to gamers and promised to bolster the security of its online store. The company says it is stocking up new cards as fast as it can to get them to “more than 100 million GeForce gamers around the world.”
Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 30 series of graphics cards last week to much fanfare and took the world by surprise with an exceptionally good pricing matrix that gave everyone hope for a substantial upgrade. For instance, the RTX 3070 has a MSRP of $499, despite being more powerful than an RTX 2080 Super that retailed for significantly more than that.
Today, the graphics giant issued a brief apology over the not-so-well-managed launch of the RTX 3080, which has led to it becoming sold out at many places and scalpers immediately offering them up for sale online at outrageous prices, some pushing into five figures territory.
Apparently, the high demand for the new graphics card resulted in a tenfold increase in traffic when compared to the launch of the RTX 2080, and most of the people who had been waiting to get their hands on an RTX 3080 have missed the pre-order window. Nvidia says that it encountered technical issues while processing orders, so it hit pause on notification mails and then failed to deliver them on time for many prospective buyers.
The same traffic spike has been observed by many other retailers, who told Nvidia that they were overwhelmed by a larger demand than they typically see on Black Friday. This further amplified the issues with the availability of the card, but the company claims it has the situation under control now.
To name a few other examples, hardware maker Zotac claims it received over 20,000 orders from Amazon (in Europe) and is now working to fulfill those orders. US-based maker EVGA has also said it’s making thousands of graphics cards that will become available in the coming weeks.
Nvidia confirmed reports that some people have used automated bots to grab as many cards as possible, but those orders were never sent out — at least when it comes to the official store. The company explained that it manually cancelled hundreds of orders made by bots, and has now integrated a CAPTCHA at checkout to prevent further abuse of its online store.
Moreover, Nvidia promises it is pumping out cards as fast as possible and increasing supply targets every week to account for the pent up demand.