Nvidia Allegedly Readjusts Production Capacity To Make More Ampere GPUs

News
By
published

More Ampere for everyone

Image of an RTX GPU
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

The latest unconfirmed rumor coming out of China is that Nvidia has reportedly adjusted its production strategy to inject more GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards into to the market. It comes from Board Channels, a forum meant for employees at board partners and distributors in China. If accurate, the news will come as music to consumers' ears as Ampere-based cards are among the best graphics cards on the market, but have been absent from store shelves for a long time now. (Note: Nvidia said it wouldn't comment on rumors or speculation.)

At the peak of the great graphics card shortage, Nvidia decided to bring back fan favorites, such as the GeForce RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti, in an attempt to satisfy the demand for graphics cards. The current rumor is that Nvidia has notified its partners that it will slice the supply of GeForce RTX 2060 (Turing) GPUs in half for this month. The objective behind the decrease is to shift the freed production capacity over to Ampere.

At first glance, limiting Turing supply might not appear to impact Ampere's availability. Turing and Ampere are on completely different nodes from different foundries, after all. Turing is based on TSMC's 12nm manufacturing process, while Ampere leverages Samsung's 8nm process node. However, our theory is that Nvidia is probably freeing up substrate, memory chips, and OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) capacity.

The members of Board Channels only spoke of Ampere in general and didn't specify if Nvidia was prioritizing a certain SKU over others. With the recent addition of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, Nvidia expanded its Ampere offerings up to seven models. In any event, we will hopefully be seeing better Ampere availability in the upcoming months and hopefully, prices will start stabilizing.

See more GPUs News
Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • gargoylenest
    now, will they start producing more to profit from the inflated price, or are they gonna sell at reasonable price? I am afraid to know the answer...
    Reply
  • daworstplaya
    False hopes .....
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    gargoylenest said:
    now, will they start producing more to profit from the inflated price, or are they gonna sell at reasonable price? I am afraid to know the answer...
    Nvidia isn't responsible for the 2x to 3x over MSRP pricing for the 2nd hand market. There isn't really anything they can do about it. Newegg shuffles are the only source we have to give us any idea what manufacturers are charging for cards to retailers, and AMD cards are selling for significantly higher margins above MSRP than Nvidia cards are.
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    Why does Everyone blame NVIDIA for the high prices.
    They are producing and selling video cards in record numbers.
    Then we have a 25% tariff on video cards coming from china which raises the retail cost
    Crypto miners ans scalpers are the cause of video card shortages and absurd high prices.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    gargoylenest said:
    now, will they start producing more to profit from the inflated price, or are they gonna sell at reasonable price? I am afraid to know the answer...
    https://shop.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/store/gpu/?page=1&limit=9&locale=en-us&category=GPU&gpu=RTX%203080%20Ti,RTX%203080
    Not a single card on this list is up for sale at eBay's prices.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    spongiemaster said:
    Nvidia isn't responsible for the 2x to 3x over MSRP pricing for the 2nd hand market. There isn't really anything they can do about it. Newegg shuffles are the only source we have to give us any idea what manufacturers are charging for cards to retailers, and AMD cards are selling for significantly higher margins above MSRP than Nvidia cards are.

    Yes and no, while in general they have not been to blame they did increase the price of the 3080ti from $999 to 1199 just a couple of hours before they launched it.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    thisisaname said:
    Yes and no, while in general they have not been to blame they did increase the price of the 3080ti from $999 to 1199 just a couple of hours before they launched it.
    Is there any definitive proof they did this? Because as far as anyone knows, the $999 price tag was just a rumor.

    And with a time frame that short, everyone up and down the supply chain would have to be in the know. A company can't just change its MSRP hours before launch and have every store magically catch up to that.
    Reply
  • funguseater
    There is a shortage of substrate materiels, this isn't going to solve ANY supply issues.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    Unolocogringo said:
    Why does Everyone blame NVIDIA for the high prices.
    Mainly because Nvidia talks about how important gamers are to them, markets their GPU products and technologies aggressively, but then forces gamers to compete with miners and scalpers when it comes to buying Nvidia products. The result is that most gamers aren't able to acquire GPUs at MSRP or anywhere close. Nvidia could repair their reputation by selling GPUs through gamer storefronts where play time, game libraries, and purchase controls can separate the gamers from the scalpers and miners clogging up Best Buy.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    bigdragon said:
    Nvidia could repair their reputation by selling GPUs through gamer storefronts where play time, game libraries, and purchase controls can separate the gamers from the scalpers and miners clogging up Best Buy.
    They also wouldn't be able to sell as many, considering the data from Steam hardware survey suggests that the vast majority of people who use said services stick to $200 or so cards. Plus adding a time and monetary gate when they already have to spend the the amount to buy those video cards isn't going to sit well with people (It's not like this is Ferrari where there's prestige in owning a RTX 3090, and in fact a lot of people will mock you for it). Plus such restrictions only delay the inevitable. You need 10 games? Okay, just buy 10 $1 games. Need 100 hours? Okay, just sit on a game for 4-5 days.
    Reply