Monday, September 21st 2020
NVIDIA Responds to Criticism Surrounding the RTX 3080 Launch
NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card went on sale last week, and practically its entire inventory was gone in sixty seconds. The NVIDIA GeForce store exclusively selling the Jewelry-like Founders Edition card was hit by sophisticated scalper bots originally designed for limited-edition apparel sales, and one scalper gloated on the web having picked up over three dozen cards to auction off on e-bay for tens of thousands in profit. Frustrated genuine buyers were left disenchanted with NVIDIA over the handling of the launch.
NVIDIA posted an FAQ on its GeForce blog attempting to explain much of the criticism surrounding its handling of the RTX 3080 launch. NVIDIA's main explanation appears to be an unprecedented market demand for its RTX 3080. The company claims that "The demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 was truly unprecedented. We and our partners underestimated it," NVIDIA says. On scalping, NVIDIA explained that while its store had certain anti-bot measures in place, they underestimated the sophistication of scalping bots this time around. NVIDIA also claims to have manually cancelled hundreds of orders suspected to have been placed using bots. "While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, NVIDIA has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship."
Find other interesting answers by NVIDIA to FAQs below.
What happened? I was really excited for the GeForce RTX 3080, but the launch has made it near impossible to find one and this is really disappointing.
The demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 was truly unprecedented. We and our partners underestimated it.
Over 50 major global retailers had inventory on the day of launch. Our retail partners reported record traffic to their sites, in many cases exceeding Black Friday. This caused crashes, delays and other issues for their customers. We knew the GeForce RTX 3080 would be popular, but none of us expected that much traffic on the first day.
What's the overall GeForce RTX 3080 stock situation?
The GeForce RTX 3080 is in full production. We began shipping GPUs to our partners in August, and have been increasing the supply weekly. Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand. We understand that many gamers are unable to buy a GeForce RTX 3080 right now and we are doing everything we can to catch up quickly. Keep checking in with your favorite retailer to be notified of availability. You may use the GeForce RTX 3080 product finder to find available cards at local retailers.
Why does availability start with such low inventory? Why not wait until more cards are produced?
We have great supply - just not for this level of demand. It is typical for initial demand to exceed supply for our new GPUs. Our global network of partners are ramping as hard as they can to get the new GPUs to the more than 100 million GeForce gamers around the world. Our philosophy has always been to get the latest technology into the hands of gamers as fast as possible. As we race to build more GeForce RTX 3080s, we suggest not buying from opportunistic resellers who are attempting to take advantage of the current situation.
What changes are you making to the NVIDIA Store moving forward?
As with many other etailers, the NVIDIA Store was also overrun with malicious bots and resellers. To combat this challenge we have made the following changes: we moved our NVIDIA Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection. We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.
You said the NVIDIA store would have GeForce RTX 3080s at 6 a.m. on September 17th, why did the store immediately go from "notify me" to "out of stock"?
At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live. Instantly, the NVIDIA store was inundated with over 10 times the traffic of our previous generation launch, which took our internal systems to a crawl and encountered an error preventing sales from starting properly at 6:00am pacific. We were able to resolve the issues and process orders later than planned.
I saw individuals who use bots/scripts celebrating the purchase of multiple GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs! Did bots get all of the available supply?
No. While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, NVIDIA has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship.
Why did the NVIDIA Store not have any preventative measures in place to battle bots (i.e. CAPTCHA,etc)?
The NVIDIA Store had many behind-the-scenes security measures in place which proved sufficient for previous launches. This is the first time that we have seen bots at this scale and sophistication. Since launch, we have been quickly working on numerous security upgrades, including CAPTCHA. We will also continue to manually monitor purchases to help ensure cards get in the hands of legitimate consumers.
Why did NVIDIA send "Notify Me" emails knowing that RTX 3080 FE was out of stock?
We intended for "Notify Me" emails to go out at 6:00 a.m. with the targeted start of availability. Due to the extreme demand and site traffic, we were unable to properly process orders on time. The emails were held back until the errors were resolved later than morning. Still, inventory sold out very quickly, so we were sold out by time most people opened their emails. In retrospect, we should not have sent the "Notify Me" emails.
Source:
NVIDIA
NVIDIA posted an FAQ on its GeForce blog attempting to explain much of the criticism surrounding its handling of the RTX 3080 launch. NVIDIA's main explanation appears to be an unprecedented market demand for its RTX 3080. The company claims that "The demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 was truly unprecedented. We and our partners underestimated it," NVIDIA says. On scalping, NVIDIA explained that while its store had certain anti-bot measures in place, they underestimated the sophistication of scalping bots this time around. NVIDIA also claims to have manually cancelled hundreds of orders suspected to have been placed using bots. "While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, NVIDIA has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship."
What happened? I was really excited for the GeForce RTX 3080, but the launch has made it near impossible to find one and this is really disappointing.
The demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 was truly unprecedented. We and our partners underestimated it.
Over 50 major global retailers had inventory on the day of launch. Our retail partners reported record traffic to their sites, in many cases exceeding Black Friday. This caused crashes, delays and other issues for their customers. We knew the GeForce RTX 3080 would be popular, but none of us expected that much traffic on the first day.
What's the overall GeForce RTX 3080 stock situation?
The GeForce RTX 3080 is in full production. We began shipping GPUs to our partners in August, and have been increasing the supply weekly. Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand. We understand that many gamers are unable to buy a GeForce RTX 3080 right now and we are doing everything we can to catch up quickly. Keep checking in with your favorite retailer to be notified of availability. You may use the GeForce RTX 3080 product finder to find available cards at local retailers.
Why does availability start with such low inventory? Why not wait until more cards are produced?
We have great supply - just not for this level of demand. It is typical for initial demand to exceed supply for our new GPUs. Our global network of partners are ramping as hard as they can to get the new GPUs to the more than 100 million GeForce gamers around the world. Our philosophy has always been to get the latest technology into the hands of gamers as fast as possible. As we race to build more GeForce RTX 3080s, we suggest not buying from opportunistic resellers who are attempting to take advantage of the current situation.
What changes are you making to the NVIDIA Store moving forward?
As with many other etailers, the NVIDIA Store was also overrun with malicious bots and resellers. To combat this challenge we have made the following changes: we moved our NVIDIA Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection. We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.
You said the NVIDIA store would have GeForce RTX 3080s at 6 a.m. on September 17th, why did the store immediately go from "notify me" to "out of stock"?
At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live. Instantly, the NVIDIA store was inundated with over 10 times the traffic of our previous generation launch, which took our internal systems to a crawl and encountered an error preventing sales from starting properly at 6:00am pacific. We were able to resolve the issues and process orders later than planned.
I saw individuals who use bots/scripts celebrating the purchase of multiple GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs! Did bots get all of the available supply?
No. While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, NVIDIA has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship.
Why did the NVIDIA Store not have any preventative measures in place to battle bots (i.e. CAPTCHA,etc)?
The NVIDIA Store had many behind-the-scenes security measures in place which proved sufficient for previous launches. This is the first time that we have seen bots at this scale and sophistication. Since launch, we have been quickly working on numerous security upgrades, including CAPTCHA. We will also continue to manually monitor purchases to help ensure cards get in the hands of legitimate consumers.
Why did NVIDIA send "Notify Me" emails knowing that RTX 3080 FE was out of stock?
We intended for "Notify Me" emails to go out at 6:00 a.m. with the targeted start of availability. Due to the extreme demand and site traffic, we were unable to properly process orders on time. The emails were held back until the errors were resolved later than morning. Still, inventory sold out very quickly, so we were sold out by time most people opened their emails. In retrospect, we should not have sent the "Notify Me" emails.
121 Comments on NVIDIA Responds to Criticism Surrounding the RTX 3080 Launch
Do we blame Nicholas Cage for this?
We're even worse customers than bots, world really doesn't need humans. :-)
All is going according to plan, (artificial) scarcity will push the price of cards higher, and we will happily pay more just to have the chance of owning such a gem! And of course this will not go away after a month or two - cards have to hold their high value for two years.
Did Turing even had any sales or lowering of prices later on? Even 2080 held it's value when they launched a faster 2080 Super at the same price, and most of the cards available in Europe are NOW, two years after the launch priced higher than at beginning. Same goes for other cards in the lineup...
I do see Nvidia being at fault here but not entirely.
If they can do other measures like making sure all these orders aren't being shipped to the same address and so on that would be great but then again it's not like a group of people can't act together to get some or even "Hire" some folks just to place an order on your behalf.
I saw it coming and knew it was going to be a huge mess at launch with sky-high prices from scalpers trying to make a fortune by leveraging the available supply.
Even without the scalps stock was way to low compared to real market demand, they are now using the scalps as scapegoats and blame them to save face.
One retailer got over 20000 orders for the Zotac 3080 Trinity (you read that right, 20K orders) and that was for only one SKU from that retailer, does this sound like scalps botched the release.
(Zotac has gone out in a press release saying they are very sorry but they cannot even come close to filling the 20K orders of that one retailer even less the total world orders of the Zotac 3080 Trinity)
Reports suggest MORE THAN 20X higher demand than nvidia predicted for the 3000 series over the 2000 series, IF TRUE how can it even be possible to be that wrong.
How come they did not make proper research in time to predict real market demand, other companies do it, it now really looks like nvidia just winged it.
Also they are so paranoid and secretive til last second that they really have no possibility to prepare for a release with proper stock.
Why purposely keep partners in the dark til the last second so they have a hard time getting stock ready and shipped out to retail on release day.
Look at Sony and Microsoft, WORKING WITH RETAIL LONG IN ADVANCE releasing prices and taking pre-orders of PS5 and XSX up to 2 months in advance making it possible for them to predict proper demand in different parts of the world and have millions of units in stock available to fill those orders when release day comes.
NO, this screw up is ALL NVIDIA's own doing... they WINGED IT and don't get to blame anyone else but them self's!!!
NOTE! I have now seen several retailers starting to increase prices with up to 12%, this a VERY BAD TREND NVIDIA MUST STOP and if nvidia does not magically produce more stock quickly prices will go up even further not only on 3080 BUT also on 3070 when it comes. With higher 3080 prices you will probably see increased prices of 3070 partner cards at release too.
What is even more disturbing is what my friend and marketing expert suggested to me, "nvidia has probably learned from the price chaos of the mining days, by knowing there is a massive market demand they created an artificial shortage by limiting release stock so they quickly could increase the prices and make more money." He said that IF nvidia increases the price of the Founders Edition's this was their plan all along.
For me the hype train has passed for now. I was ready to buy a 3080 FE card but the whole situation really pissed me off. I would not pay more than the 700€ that were promised anyways.
Nvidia can give all the fake explanations they want but the fact is, they launched a product when they didnt have enough stock to even fill a tiny part of the market. I mean its not like there are some boards missing here and there, but in fact only maybe 1 in 10 or even 1 in 100 people who wanted one, got one. This is just bad and however nvidia tries to bend that fact it just stays bad.
So now I will at least wait for Red October and see what AMD has to offer.
This time I really hope RDNA2 is better than Ampere and all those people that went empty handed now, will get an "Ampere-Killer Radeon 6800 xt 16GB" for 650$ on October 28th :)
I'm sure we're in this for a long time, situation will not magically improve and stores will not suddenly get their stocks and lower the inflated prices. I predict this will go on for months, and prices can get much higher, remember the great GPU shortage during cryptocraze in 2017?
I know it's not the same market, but Canon launched a high end mirrorles camera EOS R5 three months ago, with minimum stock and a story on how COVID in China and Japan impacted the production of cameras. Three months later and there are still no cameras available anywhere in Europe - you have to step in a waiting line and preorder with unknown date of delivery and that's a camera for 4385 EUR - that's 5150 USD...
Later it has been confirmed by Igor's Lab that the VRAM can reach 104C in one spot
A quick fix is putting some thermal pad on the back side of the PCB in that particular spot LOL
Seem like the OEM who make the FE model is still shoddy just like with the Turing launch.
Anyway I don't want to discuss why running GDDR6X at 100C is not a good idea, it just obviously is. Unless you want to play space invaders.
The VRAM on the TUF version run at like 60C, Asus built a sophisticated secondary heatsinks just for the VRAM area, so yeah lower temp is always better.