The best graphics cards for gaming have been in tight supply for nearly two years now due to strong demand amid insufficient supply, but Nvidia says that shortages of its GPUs will ease in the second half of 2020. Given the timeline, it looks like Nvidia implies that the supply situation will improve when it launches its next-generation GeForce RTX 40-series 'Ada Lovelace' family of graphics processors.
"Throughout all of calendar 2021, we have seen strong demand for GeForce and it continues to remain stronger than our overall supply that we have," said Colette Kress, chief financial officer of Nvidia, at the 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference (via SeekingAlpha). "We feel better about our supply situation as we move into the second half of the calendar year 2022."
Nvidia did not elaborate what is set to happen in the second half of 2022 that should improve its supply. But we can speculate here a bit. Given the fact that Nvidia tends to release a new GPU family every two years, this fall will be right on time for the company to launch its GeForce RTX 40-series 'Ada Lovelace' lineup.
Just like other companies, Nvidia never discloses when it plans to release its next-generation products (so take everything with a grain of salt here), but it is pretty much consistent with its two-years consumer GPU cadence.
Row 0 - Cell 0 | GeForce RTX 40-series | GeForce RTX 30-series | GeForce RTX 20-series | GeForce 10-series | GeForce 700/800/900-series |
Architecture | Ada Lovelace | Ampere | Turing | Pascal | Maxwell |
Launch Time | ? | September 2020 | September 2018 | May 2016 | February – September 2014 |
Nvidia's Ada Lovelace GPUs are expected to be based on TSMC's N5 node, which is in its third year of high-volume manufacturing and with decent yields. Given strong and growing demand for its products, Nvidia has likely adjusted its order at TSMC accordingly, which is why it is confident about supply right now. Additionally, the Taiwan-based foundry has spent tens of billions of dollars on N5-capable capacities last year, it should be hopefully able to meet Nvidia's demands later in 2022.
But for gamers who want to play here and now, the launch of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series 'Ada Lovelace' later this year may not be such a good thing as it means that Nvidia is not really inclined to order significantly more GeForce RTX 30-series 'Ampere' GPUs from Samsung Foundry to manage stock.
It remains to be seen what exactly Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series 'Ada Lovelace' graphics cards bring to the table in terms of features and performance, but if the new family significantly improves supply, gamers will certainly appreciate it.