Nvidia's 'doing everything humanly possible' to stop RTX 3080 bots and Ebay resellers

Nvidia RTX 3080
(Image credit: Future)

The Nvidia RTX 3080 launched today and it's been rather popular. Well, the card has, not the actual launch day retail experience. Nvidia "encountered an error" on its own store when it went live and is now apologising to customers "for this morning's experience." 

The green team is also hard at work trying to keep cards out of the digital hands of bots and the filthy hands of Ebay resllers. Though that's going to take some doing. 

The impressive new Ampere-based GPU outpaces the former "fastest graphics card in the world," the RTX 2080 Ti, by quite a margin, and for significantly less cash. Via traditional retail outlets anyways. Unfortunately cards have appeared on eBay as soon as conventional stock ran dry, for upwards of $80,000. But those bids may not be legitimate.

The demand has been so massive that both Nvidia's own RTX 3080 Founders Edition, from its storefront, and third-party cards from more than 50 different retailers across the globe, were snapped up almost immediately. Social media reports of disappointed would-be buyers provide anecdotal evidence of the problem:

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Our own Phil sat on Nvidia's site at 6am PT trying to pick up an RTX 3080 FE—because it's kinda the best version—and in the blink of an eye the purchase button went from "Notify me" to "Out of stock."

We've spoken with Nvidia representatives today and they've now told us about an error that occurred first thing.

"This morning we saw unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 at global retailers, including the Nvidia online store. At 6am PT we attempted to push the Nvidia store live. Despite preparation, the Nvidia store was inundated with traffic and encountered an error. We were able to resolve the issues and sales began registering normally."

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We do know some real humans that have managed to purchase cards, so they're not all going to fakers, but Nvidia is aware that it's an issue.

"To stop bots and scalpers on the Nvidia store," they continue, "we’re doing everything humanly possible, including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers.

"Over 50 major global retailers had inventory at 6am PT. Our Nvidia team and partners are shipping more RTX 3080 cards every day to retailers.

"We apologize to our customers for this morning's experience."

We'll continue to monitor the situation around RTX 3080 availability, and there are full systems that you can order today. But please steer clear of whatever listings you see on eBay. It's a great card for sure, but it's not worth spending over $1,000 on one. And definitely not $80,000. The RTX 3090's coming next week, after all.

Dave James
Managing Editor, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.