Nvidia graphics cards could soon see much reduced stock levels, if a new rumor is true, a prospect that brings with it fears of GPU price increases, although hopefully not to the extent we’ve seen in the past .
Wccftech pointed to a report from tech site MyDrivers that claims industry sources in Taiwan say Nvidia’s GeForce gaming GPUs are starting to see lower supply levels starting in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Of course, be wary of that report, as with any rumor, and we’re not told which Nvidia graphics card models in particular are affected, although it appears this is more or less across the board for consumer models.
This speaks to the Asian market as the likely hardest-hit region, but the report also mentions stock shortages in the US and Europe, where Nvidia GPUs could also become harder to find.
The expectation according to MyDrivers is that the supply of Nvidia boards could be “very limited” in the near future, which is worrying, and it is mentioned that prices for at least some products may increase.
Analysis: Do contradictions abound?
We’ve already seen this to some extent, of course, with the RTX 4090, but that was a special case due to its ban in China (which Nvidia circumvented with the incoming RTX 4090 D variant, although not before a lot of vanilla). 4090 were shipped to Chinese retailers, which had a substantial impact on the overall price of Lovelace’s flagship).
The concern is that other Nvidia graphics cards, or at least some Lovelace models as mentioned, may follow in those footsteps. We are told that the reason Nvidia is withdrawing production and supply of GeForce GPUs is that it is prioritizing the manufacturing of chips for AI cards.
AI GPUs are where the big gains are (massive gains lately, in fact), so it makes some sense. What doesn’t make sense is that Nvidia is about to produce a bunch of new RTX Super upgrades – three of them are supposedly launching throughout this month, challenging for a spot in our ranking of the best graphics cards, after a reveal at CES 2024 at the beginning of next week.
If production capacity is going backwards significantly, why press ahead with a bunch of new releases? Well, Nvidia needs to realign its mid-to-high range with Lovelace, having made a hash of the GPUs available here (the RTX 4080 with its supposedly dire sales levels in particular), so perhaps it’s considered a necessity. move forward in that direction. Saving face against AMD in the consumer GPU market, so to speak.
Additionally, Nvidia is phasing out the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti (theoretically, they’ll be replaced by the RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super), so it’s a matter of swapping in and out, rather than making new cards like-for-like.
Although this was stated, the new RTX 4070 Super will run alongside the existing RTX 4070; the latter isn’t going anywhere. Furthermore, the price of these new RTX Super models is supposed to be quite competitive, which again doesn’t exactly jibe with the idea of stock shortages and therefore upward pressures on prices in the near future.
On top of this, the MyDrivers article seems pretty short and incomplete, and we’re not sure how much material (pardon the pun) we’ll put into it at this point. Anyway, let’s hope that’s off the mark, because the last thing we need is to be staring down the barrel of a new round of GPU price hikes from Nvidia.
