With the holiday season in the rear-view mirror, most of us are looking forward to CES 2024. This year’s event will be PC-centric, with new releases from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. Team Blue will look forward to showcasing its 1st Gen Core Ultra notebooks, hopefully with better results. Its Red rival will want to maximize adoption of the Ryzen 8040 processors among OEMs, banking on the various shortcomings of the Core Ultra family. As for NVIDIA, the RTX 40 Super graphics cards are set to be unveiled during a “Special Address.”
The retail GPU channel isn’t doing so well. NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 cards are in short supply, with higher-end SKUs priced well over their MSRPs. The RTX 4090 debuted at $1599 but has been going over $2000 at Amazon. At $1199, the RTX 4080 was poorly priced from the very beginning. Today, most AIB models are listed between $1400-$1500. For reference, the RTX 3080 sold for $700 to $749 by the end of the mining boom.
The reasons behind the graphics card shortages aren’t clear, but if I had to guess, it’s the result of deliberate measures implemented by Team Green. Ahead of the RTX 40 Super launch, NVIDIA will want to raise the prices of the RTX 4070 Ti and 4080 to make their successors look good (even though they might not be as competitive).
The H100 and its derivatives are the most valuable GPUs ever produced. There’s a chance that Jensen and Co. are diverting manufacturing capacity from gaming to data centers to maximize profits. There’s also the matter of the custom-designed variants for the Chinese market. Word on the street is that they just entered mass production and may be to blame for the GeForce RTX shortages.
