The GeForce RTX 3080 release was… well, let’s call it less than ideal. Within seconds of the sales going live on at 9 AM, September 15, the 3080 was sold out everywhere. Getting one of Nvidia’s brand new cards was more a matter of luck than actually having the cash on hand to pay for it.
While Nvidia blamed overwhelming demand, PC gamers blamed scalpers and bots for snapping up the entire first batch of RTX 3080s before anyone could even click the “buy now” button. Angry gamers even took to eBay to drown out scalpers trying to resell their cards for a profit by posting fake ads for RTX 3080 toilet paper or printed images of the GPU.
Nvidia has promised that things will be different for the RTX 3070. While the company continues to fight scalpers and bots with internal systems, the graphics card maker plans to fight overwhelming demand for the next-gen GPU by simply taking some extra time to make sure more of them are available come launch day.
To that end, Nvidia has announced a two-week delay on the launch of the RTX 3070, pushing it from October 15 to October 29.
“We know this may be disappointing to those eager to purchase a GeForce RTX 3070 as soon as possible,” the company wrote on its blog, “however this shift will help our global partners get more graphics cards into the hands of gamers on launch day.”
To tide us over until the end of the month, Nvidia followed up the bad news with some good news in the form of a chart.
Nvidia promises the RTX 3070 will deliver “similar or faster performance than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti,” and the chart largely confirms this statement. Most of those big green bars showcase how the RTX 3070 will outperform the 2080 Ti on various software render tests, but it does seem to beat the 2080 Ti in certain games, namely Doom Eternal, Minecraft RTX, and Wolfenstein Youngblood. However, it seems that Control (with RTX on) and Borderlands 3 are still better played with the RTX 2080 Ti.
That said, there’s really no comparison between the RTX 3070 and the older RTX 2070, with Nvidia saying the new card will be “60% faster” than the old one.
Even if it turns out to be merely 50% or even 40% faster, that’s still an enormous leap in performance that many PC gamers will want to grab for themselves. A two-week delay seems prudent to ensure that stores aren’t completely slammed come launch day on October 29.
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