News Nvidia Delays RTX 3070 By 2 Weeks to Avoid Another Disappointing Launch

[Admin]

To ensure this launch goes smoother than the last two, Nvidia is delaying the RTX 3070 by two weeks.

Nvidia Delays RTX 3070 By 2 Weeks to Avoid Another Disappointing Launch : Read more

 

[sizzling]

Seems like the media and hype are forcing a perceived benefit of delaying when actually none exists. If they can have X number available by 29th October that doesn’t change if they start selling on the 15th October, it just delays getting to market. There might be a perception of a better launch but they won’t have any more cards to market come 29th October.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

And have they solve the problem of scalpers

 

[Endymio]

They "solved" the problem of scalpers by making all buyers wait another two weeks, instead of only half of them. Congrats to all the ***-clowns who complained about scalping.

 

[Flayed]

They will sell out in 3 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds lol

 

[King_V]

October 29th specifically?

And this is not, perhaps, because of Big Navi being announced on October 28th? Awfully coincidental, maybe.

 

[InvalidError]

And have they solve the problem of scalpers

The only way to "solve" the scalper problem would be to flood the market with more units than they can afford or be bothered to buy, anything else will merely slow them down a little while they figure out how to get around purchase limits.

The next best option might be to go the industrial route: vendors quote a 3-4 weeks lead time, take your order and you aren't guaranteed to get your card any sooner than that, may not guarantee that orders will get fulfilled in any specific order within several days from order either, so two orders placed on the same day may end up shipping a week apart around the lead time estimate.

 

[SiliconMage]

And this has NOTHING to do with a certain other companies announcement on October 28th (they forgot to put that part in the Article) .....

 

[Flayed]

The only way to "solve" the scalper problem would be to flood the market with more units than they can afford or be bothered to buy, anything else will merely slow them down a little while they figure out how to get around purchase limits.

The next best option might be to go the industrial route: vendors quote a 3-4 weeks lead time, take your order and you aren't guaranteed to get your card any sooner than that, may not guarantee that orders will get fulfilled in any specific order within several days from order either, so two orders placed on the same day may end up shipping a week apart around the lead time estimate.

There ought to be a clever technical solve for the scalper problem. Dynamically changing the store code every so often or something to confuse the scalper scripts

 

[Endymio]

There ought to be a clever technical solve for the scalper problem.

As the prior poster stated, the only solution for scalping is to have supply equal demand. When pricing is imbalanced so that demand exceeds supply, there will always be scalpers about.

 

[spongiemaster]

Seems like the media and hype are forcing a perceived benefit of delaying when actually none exists. If they can have X number available by 29th October that doesn’t change if they start selling on the 15th October, it just delays getting to market. There might be a perception of a better launch but they won’t have any more cards to market come 29th October.

That would imply there is no level of stock that could combat scalping. That's a false statement. If they dump enough into the market at once, the scalpers are only going to be able to buy so many. If you trickle them out over time, the scalpers have time to sell what the bought, gauging demand by how much they sell for and determine if it is profitable enough to keep picking up the slow stream of cards being released. I don't know how much 2 weeks is going to make a difference though. We'll see on the 29th.

 

[spongiemaster]

And this has NOTHING to do with a certain other companies announcement on October 28th (they forgot to put that part in the Article) .....

Moving the release to the day after indicates Nvidia couldn't care less. If they were actually worried they would have kept the launch where it was and sold what they could before the AMD announcement.

 

[JamesSneed]

Seems like the media and hype are forcing a perceived benefit of delaying when actually none exists. If they can have X number available by 29th October that doesn’t change if they start selling on the 15th October, it just delays getting to market. There might be a perception of a better launch but they won’t have any more cards to market come 29th October.

It may give them enough initial volume to prevent needing to buy from scalpers.

 

[JamesSneed]

The only way to "solve" the scalper problem would be to flood the market with more units than they can afford or be bothered to buy, anything else will merely slow them down a little while they figure out how to get around purchase limits.

The next best option might be to go the industrial route: vendors quote a 3-4 weeks lead time, take your order and you aren't guaranteed to get your card any sooner than that, may not guarantee that orders will get fulfilled in any specific order within several days from order either, so two orders placed on the same day may end up shipping a week apart around the lead time estimate.

I'm certain Nvidia could get enough stock to stay ahead of outages if they wanted. Of course AMD announcing the day before might also shift some sales away if the cards are really good. I'm just going to hang and watch it play out. I do want to replace my 1070 but not going to hurry this purchase.

 

[Endymio]

I'm certain Nvidia could get enough stock to stay ahead of outages if they wanted.

Yeah, if they'd just tighten their belly muscles a bit more, I'm sure they could force those EUV lasers to etch the silicon wafers faster. Obviously there can't be any capacity constraints at the root of this. 🙄

 

[InvalidError]

I'm certain Nvidia could get enough stock to stay ahead of outages if they wanted.

Nobody wants to have hundreds of thousands of cards sitting in warehouses for months in the run up to a launch, that is a huge expense and liability just to prevent scalping and price gouging by retailers which neither hurt or benefit the manufacturers.

 

[Giroro]

I think with the current systems in place, scalpers actually can afford to buy arbitrarily large numbers of GPUs. Credit cards exist, as well as a lot of other ways to borrow money short-term.

They have a bot buy and relist all available stock as fast as possible, sell as many as they can in 2-3 weeks, and then return all unsold stock before they need to make payments. There's a lot of financial motivation and not that much risk, so long as a retailer will let somebody return a lot of graphical cards for free; or more likely one person using dozens of accounts to return a couple at a time.

Restocking fees and short return windows would help make that move more risky, but as a normal customer I don't like that solution.

 

[csm101]

delays will not remove the scalper threat. they will win again and sell these cards at ridicules prices. all I can ask from this community is not to buy a card from eBay or any such sites where scalper sell those.

 

[InvalidError]

I think with the current systems in place, scalpers actually can afford to buy arbitrarily large numbers of GPUs. Credit cards exist, as well as a lot of other ways to borrow money short-term.

Credit cards may exist but if you limit orders to one GPU per billing/shipping address, then even if you had 1000 credit cards, you would still be limited to one GPU per store for each address you have a credit card for. Should slow down the scalping by a fair amount, albeit at the expense of pissing off people who don't have a normal credit card or have to go through POBs.

 

[Endymio]

Credit cards may exist but if you limit orders to one GPU per billing/shipping address, then even if you had 1000 credit cards, you would still be limited to one GPU per store for each address you have a credit card for. Should slow down the scalping by a fair amount, albeit at the expense of pissing off people who don't have a normal credit card or have to go through POBs.

a) One per card per store still adds up to a large number, if a scalper uses multiple cards.
b) What about non-scalpers who wish to buy two cards?
c) I'm still not convinced that scalping was more than a small fraction of the total cards sold, and
d) NVidia can solve the problem much easier, and with much less hassle for them, simply by increasing the price to what people are actually willing to pay. A $700 card that blows far past a $1200 one? NVidia should have made the MSRP at least $200 higher, at least in the short term.

 

[bigdragon]

d) NVidia can solve the problem much easier, and with much less hassle for them, simply by increasing the price to what people are actually willing to pay. A $700 card that blows far past a $1200 one? NVidia should have made the MSRP at least $200 higher, at least in the short term.

Pricing the cards high furthers the "chicken or egg paradox" hurting RTX adoption. Nvidia has openly said they are disappointed with the lack of market penetration of their RTX Turing cards. Nvidia needs to get GPUs in the hands of consumers to solidify their ray tracing implementation. If Nvidia gives AMD a way in, then the R&D spent on RT cores and Tensor cores might become a sunk cost as cheaper generic RT implementations take over. Nvidia may also have contracts with developers and publishers to push a certain number of RTX cards. Scalpers artificially manipulate the supply by hoarding GPUs and do lasting damage to Ampere's market penetration and reputation.

 

[InvalidError]

a) One per card per store still adds up to a large number, if a scalper uses multiple cards.

Not if you use the credit card's billing address for the address check, then you are still limited to only one GPU per store regardless of how many credit cards you have.

b) What about non-scalpers who wish to buy two cards?

You can't SLI anything less than the 3090, so there is very little reason for any single person to need two GPUs at launch and if the goal is to put cards in the hands of as many different people as possible, a limit of one per customer until demand stabilizes would be more than fair enough IMO.

 

[Endymio]

Pricing the cards high furthers the "chicken or egg paradox" hurting RTX adoption.

No. This is true only if a higher price reduces demand below the level at which a manufacturer can supply the product. As long as NVidia is selling every card they can make, there is nothing more they can do to increase market share or further adoption. Furthermore, there is nothing in setting an initial price that precludes a price drop a month or two later, when supply has (hopefully) increased.

Not if you use the credit card's billing address for the address check, then you are still limited to only one GPU per store regardless of how many credit cards you have.

What I was really thinking of was scalpers using the cards of friends, family members, etc, to game the system.

You can't SLI anything less than the 3090, so there is very little reason for any single person to need two GPUs...

Except in my case, where I need one for me and one for the spouse.

...if the goal is to put cards in the hands of as many different people as possible, a limit of one per customer until demand stabilizes would be more than fair enough IMO.

But is that the goal? Perhaps I'm being myopic here, but I think my getting two and you getting none works just as well for Nvidia as you and I both getting one each. 😀

 

[InvalidError]

Furthermore, there is nothing in setting an initial price that precludes a price drop a month or two later, when supply has (hopefully) increased.

Yes there is: reviewer opinion takes pricing into account and if something launches at a price that is too high for what it delivers, you get negative reviews. Most reviewers don't revisit products after price drops so the bad reviews based on the original MSRP usually stick around for a long time.

There will be unhappy people regardless of which scalper management strategy gets used. The fairest way IMO is to open the order books with an initial lead time of 3-4 weeks and ship in partially randomized order as cards roll off the packaging line. That way, scalpers have no means to know how many orders they will be receiving while their orders are still relevant. The down side is you may end up waiting 3-4 weeks, possibly more depending on how much of a backlog builds up, for yours to ship.

 

[Endymio]

Yes there is: reviewer opinion takes pricing into account and if something launches at a price that is too high for what it delivers, you get negative reviews. Most reviewers don't revisit products after price drops....

A. Given the 3080 is what, 30% faster than the $1200 card it supplants, a price of $900 would still have generated very favorable reviews.
B. Just in the past few months, I've seen dozens of stories on Toms alone about price drops. Your #1 news story right now is about a Coffee Lake price drop, a chip that's been out a couple of years now. If NVidia dropped prices significantly 30 days after release, it would be headline news on every site.