Nvidia says it has underestimated demand for RTX 3080 FE cards and apologizes – Computer – News

Nvidia has officially apologized for the shortages of the RTX 3080 FE graphics cards. The company says demand for the newly released video cards was higher than previously estimated.

Nvidia writes that it expected high demand for the RTX 30 series, but that the enthusiasm was “overwhelming” and the demand “unprecedented. The company says it was not prepared for this level of enthusiasm and neither were its partners. “We have a great supply, but not for this high demand,” writes Jensen Huang’s company.

The manufacturer gives some examples of the high demand, in the form of figures to illustrate the difference with the release of previous generations. For example, Nvidia states that its own website received four times as many unique visitors during its release, ten times as high peaks in requests per second and more than fifteen times as many click-outs to partner websites.

According to Nvidia, 50 major global stores were stocked the day the video cards became available, but their websites had record traffic, which in many cases exceeded traffic around the Black Friday period. That led to crashes, delays and other problems for customers, the company writes. Such high traffic on the first day was not expected.

Nvidia emphasizes that the RTX 3080 is currently in full production and that partners are also in the process of increasing capacity to meet demand. “We understand that many players will not be able to buy an RTX 3080 now and we are doing everything we can to catch up quickly,” the company writes.

The questions and answers also pay attention to the irritation about bots and resellers and the impact they had on limited availability. To address that, the Nvidia Store has moved to a separate environment with greater capacity and more protection against bots. The company also says it has updated the code to handle server load more efficiently. Furthermore, Captcha is integrated in the checkout phase to prevent bots.

Incidentally, the maker of the RTX 3080 FE cards states that bots were not responsible for taking the entire stock. Nvidia says that while there were individuals who showed images of their email inboxes with confirmed orders, it manually canceled hundreds of such orders before they delivered. According to Nvidia, there were many invisible security measures in the Nvidia Store and were sufficient with previous releases of a new generation of video cards, but this was the first time that bots had been deployed on this scale and with this level of sophistication.

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