So my plan for last Thursday was pretty simple. Wake up, drink coffee, sit at my desk with the Best Buy page for the RTX 3080 already loaded, and click "Add to Cart" the second stock went live. I had a second tab open on EVGA's site too, just in case. I had my card details memorized. I was ready.
I did not get a 3080. Neither, as far as I can tell, did almost anyone else who tried the normal way.
If you weren't following it, Nvidia's RTX 3080 launched on September 17th at $699, which honestly felt like a decent price for the jump in performance people were reporting. Then the 3090 followed a week later on the 24th at $1499, which is a genuinely absurd amount of money for a graphics card but apparently there's a market for it because that sold out too, fast, everywhere. Best Buy's site partially fell over under the load. EVGA had people sitting in a "queue" that some folks swear just reset itself or dumped them out with zero warning. I refreshed Micro Center's inventory page so many times I'm surprised they didn't flag my IP.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me, and it's not really about missing out on a video card. It's the bots. There's a pretty well documented cottage industry of scalpers running scripts that snipe inventory the second it's listed, sometimes before a human could physically click a mouse, and then relist the cards on eBay for two or three times MSRP. I saw a 3080 listing at $1,400 within literally hours of launch. That's not "the market working," that's just someone with better tooling than a retail checkout system taking the thing you wanted and selling it back to you at a markup for doing nothing. I don't think this is a hot take, everyone in every PC subreddit and Discord I'm in was saying some version of the same thing that week, but it's the kind of thing where being unoriginal doesn't make it less true.
I'll admit some of this is just 2020 doing 2020 things. A lot of people are stuck at home right now with nothing to spend money on except their PCs, so demand for anything GPU-shaped is higher than it would normally be in a September. Combine that with whatever supply constraints Nvidia and its partners are dealing with and you get a launch that was basically guaranteed to be a mess before a single bot script got involved. I don't think Nvidia planned this. I do think they probably could have built a better allocation system than "first come first served on a webpage," but hindsight and all that.
Anyway. I'm still running a GTX 1070 that I bought used off a guy on Craigslist back in early 2018, and it still plays basically everything I throw at it if I'm willing to turn a few settings down, which I am, because I am cheap and also thirty-four years old and don't have the reflexes for competitive shooters that would benefit from 200 fps anyway. So the actual cost of not getting a 3080 this month is: nothing. I'll try again for the 3090 restock, probably, mostly out of stubbornness at this point rather than actual need. Or maybe I won't. Ask me in November.
One small unrelated complaint while I'm here: whoever designed the "queue" UX on some of these retailer sites needs to sit in a room and think about what they've done. A queue implies order and fairness. A page that silently reloads itself and dumps you back to zero is not a queue, it's a slot machine with extra steps, and calling it a queue is doing a lot of work to make people feel better about a system that isn't actually protecting them from bots at all.
I did order a new case fan and some cable ties while I was in the shopping mood, so the afternoon wasn't a total loss. Small victories.