Supply problems that could last for two to three months... at least?
In just a few days - barely a week if NVIDIA doesn't change its mind at the last minute - the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 will be released by NVIDIA and its partners. By NVIDIA, this means that some of the cards manufactured on its behalf - the famous Founders Edition - will be available in extremely limited quantities and at the prices announced by NVIDIA. On the other hand, the mystery remains unanswered when it comes to cards produced by partners of the firm with the chameleon. The first question is at what price these cards, which are not obliged to respect NVIDIA's prices, will be sold. As we're used to, partners don't hesitate to throw labels around and follow the law of supply and demand... and that's where it's going to hurt.
PowerGPU
Several sources close to manufacturers such as ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and Zotac, to name but a few, have already spoken of the impossibility of these brands supplying the new GeForce in quantity. It has been said time and again that NVIDIA was very late in finalizing the cards' BIOSes, preventing production from starting until the end of December: far too late for the lines to be able to supply enough cards to support a demand that we imagine to be considerable... even at high prices. Quoted by VideoCardz, PowerGPU is particularly pessimistic in this respect, announcing shortages of GeForce RTX 5090s until at least March. Also quoted by VideoCardz, a representative of Zotac South Korea is no more optimistic: for him and therefore for his brand, there will be no question of offering RTX 5090s before mid-February, quite simply.
In the case of the GeForce RTX 5080, things might be a little different, but... we really don't know anything about it. The Zotac South Korea representative was not very encouraging, saying that "the schedule is being finalized" and that he would "come back for an update when the schedule is finalized". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that things aren't looking any brighter on the RTX 5080 front, and the question is already being asked for the GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti, whose release was originally scheduled for early March: will NVIDIA be able to pull off this quadruple launch? To make matters worse, this kind of situation tends to encourage speculation, making the cards even harder to find for "honest" users. That leaves us with the option of waiting quietly for the situation to calm down.
