AMD RX 6800-series to "be gone in a few minutes" so I'm sticking with my place in the RTX 3080 queue

(Image credit: AMD)

The thousands still wailing and gnashing their teeth over delayed Nvidia 30-series cards could soon be joined by AMD fans waiting impatiently for their AMD RX 6800 cards, if reports out of Scandinavia are to be believed.

A now-removed post on the Sweclockers forum (via WCCFTech and Linus Tech Tips) claims that a representative of ASUS Nordic has warned of low stock levels on the 6800 and especially the 6800 XT at the cards' launch, in a mirror of the RTX 3080/3090 situation back in September.

"We expect that everything will be gone in a few minutes," said the rep, who goes by the particularly AMD-friendly name of Peter Hammer. "So you need to hang on the lock," he continued, which we assume is a charming Scandinavian idiom for ‘get online early and hammer the refresh button like crazy’.

The reports from the frozen north were echoed in a video from RedGamingTech, which quoted a 'reliable source' as saying there would definitely be shortages, and that they could be 'fairly bad', though still better than that of the RTX 30 cards.

The popularity of new tech is being felt across the industry right now, with the new console launches coinciding with new CPUs and GPUs. It's been a frustrating time, especially for those of us who placed orders in good time, only to see the estimated delivery date whizz by like Mary Poppins under her umbrella.

Two months later, it's almost upsetting to get a weekly update email about your order, only to see that there are still 200 people in front of you in the queue, and the dreaded letters 'TBC' on the shipment update page from a major retailer. Pity those who left it even later, and have to wait for 600 other people to get their silicon surprises before it’s their turn.

Your next upgrade

Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest

It’s not really the retailers' fault, of course, they’re hardly going to turn away that many customers in these turbulent times. The blame lies somewhere back up the supply chain, where someone over-promised and under-delivered, or someone just didn’t say 'STOP!' in time.

But then also demand is super high too in these working-and-playing-from-home times too. Just look at what happened to the launch of the new consoles, the Ryzen 5000 launch, and the fact it's still almost impossible to buy a power supply.

For those of us still waiting on our RTX 3080 deliveries though, the delays to the RX 6800 prove one thing—that we were right to keep our orders in place rather than cancelling them in the hopes Team Red might have a better chance of actually getting a card to us. Unless of course it’s all a conspiracy to drive prices up, of course.

Having to play Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Call Of Duty Black Ops Cold War on last generation—or even older than that—is gutting. And the idea that it's because your new card is stuck in a shipping container somewhere at the mercy of the Cape Horn Current, Indian Ocean pirates, or a bored sailor with an EMP device and shares in one of Nvidia’s competitors, is more than just frustrating. It's positively exasperating.

But the cards will come, the settings will go to Ultra, the framerates rise, and the resolution climb. A golden age of PC gaming is coming, something even better than what’s gone before, driven by strong desktop hardware and powerful consoles. We just have to hold on, and keep refreshing the stock status page.

Ian Evenden has been doing this for far too long and should know better. The first issue of PC Gamer he read was probably issue 15, though it's a bit hazy, and there's nothing he doesn't know about tweaking interrupt requests for running Syndicate. He's worked for PC Format, Maximum PC, Edge, Creative Bloq, Gamesmaster, and anyone who'll have him. In his spare time he grows vegetables of prodigious size.