Nvidia Delays RTX 3070 By Two Weeks to Avoid Another Disappointing Launch

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Can we beat the bots this time?

GeForce RTX 30-series lineup
(Image credit: Nvidia)

It's no secret that Nvidia has a marketing team that's great at their jobs — perhaps even a bit too good. With the launch of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, demand for the new GPUs was so high that Nvidia was not only unable to keep up, but it got beaten into the ground for not ensuring there were enough cards available. That's not even taking into account the stability issues, which were later addressed with the 456.55 drivers. Now, Nvidia wants to do it right for take three, and has therefore delayed the launch of the RTX 3070 cards to October 29th, pushed back from the original October 15th launch date. (Via VideoCardz)

In light of this, the company outed the following statement.

"Production of GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards are ramping quickly. We’ve heard from many of you that there should be more cards available on launch day. To help make that happen, we are updating the availability date to Thursday, October 29th." - Nvidia

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Of course, delaying the launch by two more weeks will have some inevitable consequences. There might be more leaks with performance figures, (more) partner board designs will leak out too, and we all have to wait even longer for the $500 GPU that is said to outperform the last-gen $1200 RTX 2080 Ti. Also of note is that the new launch date is one day after AMD's planned Radeon RX 6000 reveal.

If an additional two-week wait with a few minor inconveniences along the way is what it takes to ensure 'okay' availability, and beat the bots and scalpers, then so be it. The RTX 3070 will almost certainly still sell out quickly, but maybe that will mean 15 minutes instead of 15 seconds this time.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

54 Comments Comment from the forums
  • 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.
    Reply
  • And have they solve the problem of scalpers
    Reply
  • 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.
    Reply
  • Flayed
    They will sell out in 3 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds lol
    Reply
  • King_V
    October 29th specifically?

    And this is not, perhaps, because of Big Navi being announced on October 28th? Awfully coincidental, maybe.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Mandark said:
    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.
    Reply
  • 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) .....
    Reply
  • Flayed
    InvalidError said:
    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
    Reply
  • Endymio
    Flayed said:
    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.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    sizzling said:
    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.
    Reply