The Great GPU Drought / Samuel Smith

Published on 14th January 2021

The Great GPU Drought

The graphics card shortage is an ongoing problem for everyone in the PC building & hardware industries – and their customers. From professional crypto-currency miners, to children who want a top-of-the-range gaming PC for Christmas, purchasing a high-end GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is becoming a near impossible task in late 2020; and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been disastrous for business globally, and the hardware market is no exception. At first, more people staying indoors and isolating themselves from the outside world seemed promising for GPU manufacturers. What better activity is there to burn away hours and hours in the comfort of one's own home than playing video games, or investing in an industrial computer rig for home-based media production? Unfortunately, it seems that the manufacturers were not prepared for this influx of new customers. COVID restrictions have also left GPU manufacturers stuck indoors and unable to travel; less air travel has drastically slowed down the supply of computer components to manufacturers and retail outlets as well.

This increase in market demand combined with the lack of foresight by manufacturers, along with the issues that the COVID pandemic has caused, has led to some bizarre occurrences. Top-of-the-line RTX GPUs by top manufacturer Nvidia are all out of stock on the company's website as of December. The same is true for Nvidia's main competitor, AMD, who have publicly apologised for the supply shortages of their new Radeon RX 6000 line. Furthermore, TechRadar have reported that a global shortage of GDDR6 memory means that production has been almost halted for AMD and Nvidia, and that this issue may not be resolved until February 2021 or later (even then, as TechRadar reports, it may take months for the global supply chain to catch up and be able to give customers what they want).

Nvidia's lack of stock, December 2020. (source)

This is not the first time a GPU shortage has hit the PC hardware market; in 2016-17, the hype surrounding crypto-currency led to massive amounts of digital-entrepreneurs investing in powerful PC setups, with the goal to “mine” (run complex hash-functions) valuable crypto-currency like Bitcoin (read more here). However, two current issues have made the GPU shortage far worse in 2020: COVID-19 and “scalping”. As mentioned above, the COVID pandemic simultaneously increased market demand and slowed down (or in some cases stopped entirely) the shipping of GPUs and GPU components.

This has led to “scalpers” taking advantage of the GPU shortage by hoarding large quantities of graphics cards to then sell at extortionate prices to the very wealthy (or plain desperate) PC enthusiast. ASUS, Nvidia and AMD graphics cards have been listed on resell platforms like eBay at incredibly high prices, with scalpers looking to make a quick profit using autonomous bot scripts to continuously refresh and buy-out GPU stock from online retailers. This has led to images circulating of GPU listings at ridiculous prices, with resell scalpers selling graphics cards for anywhere from 5 to 500 times the original retail price. The issue of “scalping” has become so problematic that Nvidia announced an update to their websites retail pages, to try to prevent less-complex bot scripts from instantly buying out RTX graphics cards, and requiring buyers to verify that they are genuine customers.

Some extortionately high eBay listings by "scalpers" (source)

There is a silver lining: for those of us that don't currently have the funds to be building a top-spec PC, the good news is that slightly older graphics cards are still readily available for purchase from various outlets. Of course, PC components become “outdated” and lose their value rather quickly – but needing to replace a computer component in the future is not the end of the world – and, we might find that the graphics cards currently being sold for exorbitant prices may become affordable as early as Spring of 2021. However, as of December 2020, global shipping may face a new problem: the massive quantities of the COVID-19 vaccine that need to be shipped around the world may take precedent over computer hardware components. Stay tuned...