14 DAY TRIAL // There's nothing that can kill a product's chances to sell well and make its maker money quite like undersupply can, and NVIDIA is experiencing that as we speak with the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 graphics cards.
In theory, the GeForce GTX 980/970 video boards, based on the Maxwell GPU architecture, shouldn't even come close to this problem.
After all, being high-end boards they don't have as many buyers as mid-range adapters. Also, they are built on the same 28nm manufacturing process as Kepler, so there's no “poor chip yields at TSMC” excuse in play either.
And yet, the graphics processing units are experiencing supply problems regardless, according to a report that just started floating on the Internet.
Almost no cards are in stock
It wasn't NVIDIA that pointed out the short supply of video cards, nor did Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company step forward to reveal some sudden problems with its fabrication capabilities.
Instead, the low availability of the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards, as well as their many OEM variations, became known after a retailer search.
Newegg is the most telling. To make sure that the Internet rumors were true, we conduced our own search of the site and found them to be quite accurate: most Maxwell graphics cards are out of stock.
Considering that all those products went up for sale just a couple of weeks back at most (even if the official release happened a bit earlier), this is not a good sign. Especially since there was no sudden sellout.
There are about sixteen GeForce GTX 970 video cards listed on Newegg, as well as twelve GeForce GTX 980, and none of them are in stock.
Now, this could have been dismissed as a website posting error (on the grounds of make-believe if nothing else), but we have a hard time believing that the error could last so long without being fixed. A successful hacking or robbery of the warehouse would have come to light by now as well.
A shame really, since the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 are quite well positioned to score NVIDIA some nice sales, what with their advantages over both GTX 700 and AMD Radeon R9 series video cards.
Why has this lack of supply come to pass?
No one really knows, at least not yet. NVIDIA did cite yield issues for the GTX 600 shortages, all those months ago, but the 28nm technology has been around for too long for that to be the case. Maybe they did already sell out? Because of currency mining, since they benefit greatly from parallel processing capabilities that GPUs are really good at providing.
Amazon has some cards for sale, though not from its own warehouse. Only from third-party retailers, and the prices are about 100 dollars/euro higher than they should be. At least the shortage seems restricted to the US.