This was supposed to be the shining moment for gaming PC enthusiasts everywhere as Nvidia released the first of its RTX 3000 series cards this week with the RTX 3080 – a successor to their 2080 and 2080 Ti.
Reviews across the board were great, the first-party card offering a 25% gaming frame rate jump over the 2080 Ti and consistently able to deliver 4K/60fps gaming with ray tracing on for basically every title bar the odd exception (hello “Microsoft Flight Simulator”). In terms of a jump over the most common in use generation – the GTX 1060 – 1080Ti cards – it essentially doubled their power. Third party versions of the cards offered a further boost of up to 7% over Nvidia’s Founders Edition as well.
However the game’s launch yesterday was marred by scalpers who, using bot programs, bought out the entire stock of first party cards within just 1.2 seconds after they went live on the store and third party cards from the likes of MSi and EVGA within seconds as well.
Emails notifying users the cards were in stock came over an hour after the sales actually began or never came, making it useless. Shortly after some scalpers bragged about their acquisitions of dozens of cards on social media as the cards almost immediately went up on eBay with some going for $2000 (nearly three times retail) and others demanding ridiculous numbers of up to $80,000.
Nvidia has come under fire from infuriated PC gamers for not instituting some basic bot protection (like CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA) on its purchasing site or limiting purchases to one card per account.
In a statement the company says their store was inundated with traffic and encountered an error which they resolved. They also say: “To stop bots and scalpers on the Nvidia store. We’re doing everything humanly possible, including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers. Over 50 major global retailers had inventory at 6am PT. Our Nvidia team and partners are shipping more RTX 3080 cards every day to retailers. We apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience.”
Whether the same thing will happen again next week with the launch of the RTX 3090 isn’t clear or next month with the RTX 3070 isn’t clear as yet.
