With Nvidia’s new line-up of excessive finish graphics playing cards – the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 – poised for launch on the finish of the month, retailers and firms have began warning potential patrons that the playing cards would possibly endure from inventory shortages.
In response to WCCFTech, one of many massive firms making the graphics playing cards, MSI, has already warned of inventory shortages. Experiences have indicated that this scarcity in GPU shares comes from poor communication between Nvidia and its associate firms, like MSI, who didn’t appear to get sufficient chips for their very own customized releases of the graphics playing cards.
The identical studies additionally point out that, whereas there will probably be shortages at launch, shares of the GPU are anticipated to be extra secure a while in February. This nonetheless signifies that some potential patrons would possibly discover it troublesome to get their arms on the brand new graphics playing cards, nonetheless, because the stabilising of GPU shares will probably be extra of a gradual course of.
Retailers have additionally spoken concerning the suspects, with Overclockers UK stating on its boards that launch-day shares for the RTX 5090 are solely accessible in single-digit figures. The RTX 5080, however, will probably be extra accessible, with a couple of hundred items in shares, however they are going to nonetheless doubtless promote out fairly rapidly.
“We expect better demand than 40 sequence, however with the launch simply previous to CNY and plenty of different rumours circulating preliminary waves of provide are poor and can most likely take a while to construct up,” posted Overclockers UK workers member Gibbo. “So the inventory we’ve will probably be made accessible from the launch through the webshop however I do know what we’ve is more likely to final solely seconds, minutes at most.”
“We may even be attempting to restrict what number of pre-orders we take, we are going to take some pre-orders however not 1000’s as we wish to guarantee prospects get lifelike expectations and should not ready months.”
Whereas it’s at present unclear what this might imply for the GPUs and their pricing, going by historical past, we’re more likely to see fairly a little bit of scalping happening with massively inflated worth tags. Which means that each the $999 RTX 5080 in addition to the $1,999 RTX 5090 will probably be accessible by scalpers at a lot larger costs than they need to be. We final noticed this occur round 2021 with the cryptocurrency growth and the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series graphics playing cards.
Nvidia itself has posted an announcement on the supply of its upcoming graphics playing cards, stating that the corporate and its companions are transport extra inventory to retailers in an effort to curtail inventory shortages.
“We count on important demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and consider stock-outs might occur. NVIDIA & our companions are transport extra inventory to retail daily to assist get GPUs into the arms of avid gamers,” reads the assertion.
The GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 have been unveiled throughout CES 2025 earlier this month alongside the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti graphics playing cards. For extra particulars, try our protection of the announcement, and take a look at among the new DLSS 4 options whilst you’re at it.
