Early Thursday morning, Nvidia launched the first of its 3000 Series graphics cards in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. To say it was challenging launch would be an understatement. Nvidia had near-exclusivity to sell the 3080 Founder’s Edition through its own Nvidia storefront. It sold out instantly, with many believing that bot-driven scalpers claimed the entirety of Nvidia’s available cards. Nvidia has now acknowledged issues with the 3080’s launch, issuing an apology.
“We apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience,” reads a message posted in Nvidia’s official forums. In its summary of this morning’s 3080 graphics card launch, Nvidia describes demand as “unprecedented.” That goes for the launch on Nvidia’s own store, as well as on retailer websites across the world. Nvidia doesn’t clarify whether its apology is just for Nvidia store shoppers or for all potential 3080 buyers, but it can be assumed to be all-encompassing.
With regards to the specific issues that Nvidia’s own storefront experienced, Nvidia doesn’t go into detail. It does acknowledge “an error” that was encountered when traffic hit. What this error was isn’t clear, but Nvidia says that it was resolved and that “sales began registering normally” afterward. In other words, Nvidia believes that its 3080 sales were normal. This runs contrary to the belief of many PC enthusiasts who tried to purchase a new card Thursday morning.
As for whether bots or scalpers were involved, Nvidia again has an ambiguous response. Nvidia says that it’s doing “everything humanly possible” to stop bots and scalpers. Nvidia is even going so far as to manually review orders. But Nvidia does not say whether it believes there was a massive bot or scalper presence in this morning’s orders, leaving PC enthusiasts to their theories.
In other words, while Nvidia did apologize for the situation, it doesn’t clarify exactly what it’s apologizing for and it doesn’t offer any solutions regarding why a similar situation won’t happen again. As far as apologies go, it’s not the best. But at the very least, it acknowledges that people are frustrated. The 3080s are just that popular, which Nvidia is probably quite happy about.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is now available, as stock allows.
