back to article Now Nvidia's monster GeForce RTX 3090 cards snaffled up by bots, scalpers – if only there had been a warning

Geeks eager to nab Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards were left disappointed after all the stock on the tech giant's online store was snatched up almost instantly when the cards went up for sale on Thursday. The hardware is also sold out from major retailers, such as Newegg and Best Buy. Websites struggled to process …

  1. whoseyourdaddy

    If it helps...

    It must be galling to the folks at NVidia that freetards are ff-ing their website to grab a $600 graphics card to sell for $3,000 on Ebay.

    Why not wait until you can satisfy demand? Like the phone industry...

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Richard Boyce

        Re: If it helps...

        Maybe because the bot users could simply place fake bids to block any auctions. In addition, the retailers would have to be denied stock, at least at first. They would not be happy.

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

          1. Michael Habel

            Re: If it helps...

            Ebay is the place of last resort.. and, thats if I cant get it local (coof via eBay Classifides), or Amazon, first.

        2. Ogi

          Re: If it helps...

          > Maybe because the bot users could simply place fake bids to block any auctions. In addition, the retailers would have to be denied stock, at least at first. They would not be happy.

          I don't understand how that would work. e.g. say I bid £1000 on auction, then you bid £20,000 to "block the auction", the price (on ebay) will probably be £1,500 unless someone else bids it up.

          If nobody else bids, but then you refuse to pay on auction end, what happens is that the offer goes to the next bidder in line, so I get it anyway for £1,000.

          You have not blocked the auction from happening, nor did your £20,000 bid result in a silly high price visible on the auction page to put other people off.

          1. max allan

            Re: If it helps...

            Make one 20K bid with one account. And then another fake account with a 21k bid. As soon as you can when the auction starts.

            And the auction is now blocked and shows as 20k. When it ends, both fake accounts just ignore mail and if anyone did bid lower then it would be offered at like £500 or whatever they bid first, hoping for a bargain. And the vendor thinks "feck that".

      2. Michael Habel

        Re: If it helps...

        What is giving you the impression....That they are not?

    2. RM Myers
      Unhappy

      Why not wait until you can satisfy demand? Like the phone industry...

      I assume you were being sarcastic. This has been a hellacious year to buy tech products, including CPU's, GPU's, laptops, cams, etc. I'm guessing the new consoles and AMD's Zen3 CPU's and "Big Navi" GPU's will continue the trend.

      1. chuBb.
        Flame

        Re: Why not wait until you can satisfy demand? Like the phone industry...

        you dont even want to know about the cluster fuck that xbox all access has turned into thanks to klarna, currently have a direct debit created on my account, a credit search, but no confirmation that i have or havnt been sucessful, and the retailer i placed order with seems utterly incapable of running a help desk

    3. Michael Habel

      Re: If it helps...

      Yes I sure its really breaking their hearts....

  2. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Don't Buy Them Until The New Year

    Wait til Jan / Feb. Will be lots of stock then and no one will be buying as everyone will have splurged for Christmas. Best time to buy.

    Anyone buying a card second hand from a scalper is an idiot and a contributor to the problem. Let them watch their cards depreciate on the shelf.

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Don't Buy Them Until The New Year

      Plus AMD's latest cards will be out by then. They may or may not have something to compete with the 3090, but lower down the range they'll be applying some competition.

      Oh, and by the new year more of the bugs in the drivers (and potentially games) will be fixed too.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    And if one doesn't get their hands on an RTX 3090 Right!!! Now!!! ...

    ... what happens? The world is coming to an end?

    The only reason scalpers are doing what they're doing is because they know there is a market to be scalped.

    1. chuBb.

      Re: And if one doesn't get their hands on an RTX 3090 Right!!! Now!!! ...

      You just haemorrhage vapid twats who followed you on some social platform, some bizarre youth cult based around paying at least list price (with added points for paying a scalp price then bitching to your 10's of followers at the outrage, and why wont brand name just send me there stuff for free) for retail items, while spewing chod over the quality of the packaging, and spouting marketing proof like its gospel, love how the "hardware" scene from hackers is still relevant, literally words come out with no understanding.

      Or as bill hicks was fond of saying "its like showing a dog a card trick"

  4. Ken Y-N
    Terminator

    Couldn't AI work out who was a bot?

    I hear that NVidia might have some expertise iin that field.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pricing...

    Just put the price up.

    I can see why performers want a concert venue to be full but flogging chips cheaper than they could be makes no sense at all.

    1. Andy The Hat Silver badge

      Re: Pricing...

      It's what Intel do every time - new product at stupid prices for short time then reduce it over a period to smooth demand. More profit for Intel, punters more or less happy as those who want to pay will pay, supply chain relatively stable. Simples.

    2. ibmalone

      Re: Pricing...

      Put the price down. Sell for 10-20% mark up for the first x weeks, drop after a little while. Scalpers are now taking a risk that they will be undercut at some unknown point in the near future, so the only people paying over the odds are the "must have it now" crowd, who know what they're getting into.

  6. Michael Habel
    Coffee/keyboard

    Ok.. now pull the other one....

    Where to start they under apprciadted demand.... Well I'm sure whenever ASUS, and Gigabyte get 'round to selling their marked up versions of the 3090, will of course be mighty greatful for that screw up.

    They will do better next time... HAHAHAHA Does anyone even buy that? Why the hell would they care? It would not surprise me in the slightest if the Bots were on the insde, to snag as many Fleabay Specials as possible.

    Fools and money parting like the Red Sea....

  7. SoulFireMage

    Hope each scalper loses their business

    Never had sympathy for predatory scalpers, of any kind. They're just parasites on any economy.

    Of course, they would exist unless there were idiots dumb enough to let their impatience rule them and pay the stupid excessive prices too. So, both sides are wrong, and one lot are idiotic.

    Don't feed the scalpers and they'll eventually have no business.

    Not sure what people like nvidia can or even will do to prevent it as excess demand is good for them really.

    I'd like one of these cards, but maybe the delay will give me time to see if their opposition has a better deal.

    I'll wait till I can have one via next day delivery. Until then screw queues and scalpers. There are more important problems in everyone's lives, this is just a nice to have really.

    I'm slightly ashamed I did have some impatience about it, because really in context, this is just buying another toy. Nothing more.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    funny

    Last 2 years, NV ran onto the no-competition and crypto-currency bubble.

    Now, they run onto the scalpers' ride. Cool.

    For everyone, like was already said, wait until mid next year to buy one as the MSRP

    has become sane again, thank you AMD.

    Myself, I'll be still running a newly acquired 1080ti !

    1. Piro Silver badge

      Re: funny

      1080 Ti is the gentleman's choice.

      To buy one a couple of years ago before the cryptocurrency bubble inflated their prices was the winning move, as AMD still, today, don't have a card that adequately competes with it, and NVIDIA don't have anything that's worth getting (2080 Ti is horribly overpriced, 2080 is roughly 1080 Ti perf) or can be bought right now (3080).

      1. Christopher Reeve's Horse

        Re: About Time

        I'd completely agree with that. And to add, even if you can get a 3080 right now you'd obviously get extra performance over a 1080ti, but you also consume significantly more wattage. TDP is up from 250W to >320W.

        Unless you're using a 4K display, using high end VR, or you specifically need the RT or Tensor capabilities beyond gaming, I recommend sticking with the trusty Pascal cards for a while longer yet.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nothing new

    Have a 2 per person limit or allow bulk only through wholesale accounts.

    Same scalpers hit concert tickets too - not that thee is many happening this year.

  10. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

    Next time...

    ..they should manufacture 20x as many cards as they expect legitimate buyers to want, and then put most of them on sale on launch day at twice the price they are intending to sell them at.

    A week later, put the rest of the cards on sale at the "real" price. Anyone who bought one at the "full" price gets a refund on the first card they bought.

    Result: scalpers and bots are stuck with a load of cards they paid over the odds for, that they can only shift at a loss. This hits the "get rich quick" scumbags hard.

    Sane buyers won't have tried to get hold of the things on launch day anyway. The few who were "lucky" enough to get in before the bots get their money back. Everyone is happy, except of course, for the people who deserve to be unhappy.

  11. Gordon861

    The best thing Nvidia can do now is just keep drip feeding the stock into the supply chain slowly. If people see more cards becoming available over an extended period then they are less likely to pay the scalpers inflated prices and wait. Sooner or later the scalpers are going to run out of purchasing power and need to sell something.

    They should also be limiting the number of cards going to any address/email too.

    The way I see it, if I have 1000 units in stock and expect another 1000 in a month, the best way to sell is gradually release them to the market over the month. If I sell the whole lot in the first 24 hours customers are going to be desperate after not seeing any stock released for the rest of the month that they may pay over the price to scalpers. But if they know more are coming available all the time they are more likely to wait.

    1. rd232

      Perhaps.

      But the best thing Nvidia can do for free publicity is not necessarily the best it can do for the punters...

  12. knarf

    New Xbox sold of as quick as

    Hmmm maybe there is a pattern here.

    NVidia should drop the price and take preorders.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I live in the past

    When it comes to hardware and games, I wait until they are well out of style.

    Cheaper.

    Easier.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I live in the past

      Still having a blast with Pong eh?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I live in the past

        OP

        Not THAT far back son.

  14. Rol

    Nature's way of finding a balance

    If scalpers were not emptying shinyshinytards wallets, then the people with the least self discipline would have money spare to mess another part of the economy up, or worse, help fund something utterly diabolical. No, the fact a fool and his money can be so easily parted is a good thing, as fools with money can be the most dangerous creatures on two legs.

  15. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Hefty price

    What are people planning to do with a $1500 graphics card? Why are they so eager to buy these? Is it just to play Fortnite a 4K 120fps?

    1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

      Re: Hefty price

      To be fair, it has got to the point where the frame rates these things will pump out far exceed the capacity of most monitors. I don't know about you, but the two QHD monitors I'm using have a 60Hz refresh rate (they have HDMI inputs, so it's a hard limit). Sure, you can buy 120Hz monitors, but guess what? That's about 5x the refresh rate that the human eye can actually detect.

      The (admittedly quite expensive) graphics card I bought earlier in the year for £320 or so was a replacement on a 4-5 year cycle. It will quite happily produce that resolution at 60Hz for any games I care to play, even with 2x supersampling turned on (which works out at the equivalent number of pixels as 2 4K monitors). I suspect that if I had a monitor capable of it, it would churn out 120 FPS. There's no way on Earth I need that capability, and it's largely an insurance against the future, if games get a lot more graphically demanding. So the obvious question is - if a not-quite-top-of-the-range graphics card from 2019 will produce effectively the same output as a top-of-the-range one from 2020, for any practical gaming needs, who are these things aimed at?

      1. Christopher Reeve's Horse

        Re: Hefty price

        Oh not another one... "tHE hUmAn EyE caN oNLy seE 30 fPs"

        Although I suppose maybe some people don't notice the difference, but I suffer from noticing motion judder on almost every camera pan, especially is there's moving text.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hefty price

          the average person will see notable differences in fluidity up to 100-120 FPS, a trained eye will see notable differences in fluidity up to 200-250 FPS. Beyond that, seeing notable differences is highly unlikely and probably more due to placebo effects.

        2. Rol

          Re: Hefty price

          I laugh out loud when watching TV at 25fps. All the actors appear to move like robots and the scenery blowing in the breeze looks like it was live animated by a recovering alcoholic.

          Thank God we have 120fps now. I hope they can use some kind of AI to remaster some of the old classic films...hahaha.

          Yeah, I'm joking. But why can we watch TV at 25fps and not perceive anything like what we do when viewing a game at 25fps?

          1. John PM Chappell

            Re: Hefty price

            Short answer - very different technologies and issues.

            Longer answer: the frames have motion blurring, to make motion appear smoother.

            Long answer: research the question on a search engine of your choice - monitors displaying a computer video image are very different to film/TV images displayed on a projection screen or TV, and how the human eyes perceived motion is affected by a lot of things including ambient light levels and the overall brightness and specific colours in the images. Our eyeballs do not have a "FPS" limit, and neither do our brains.

        3. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

          Re: Hefty price

          Although I suppose maybe some people don't notice the difference, but I suffer from noticing motion judder on almost every camera pan, especially is there's moving text.

          There's not many games I can think of that feature fast pans across text / fast moving text. I can't imagine they would be either fun or easy to play.

          The most common use cases for these high-end graphics cards will be either playing FPS games (first-person shooters for those not au fait with the lingo) at high frame rates, or for rendering. Rendering I can appreciate that you want as much grunt as possible. If you're playing a FPS, panning around wildly and paying attention to how smooth that panning is, I can safely assume your K/D ratio will be very poor. In other words, if you're actually engaged in playing the game, you're unlikely to even notice the quality of the textures, let alone the frame rate. It might make a difference if you're streaming it, but then again, the number of people who want to be youtube stars vs the number who actually make money from it is a very poor ratio...

    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: Hefty price

      They are planning to mine cryptocurrencies, which will sell for about $0.15, and consume a lot of electricity.

      1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Hefty price

        Zimbabwean dollars, right?

  16. IGotOut Silver badge

    Rolls eyes.

    Spoilt brats complain they don't get bragging rights on <insert media platform>.

    May have to wait a whole week or two extra instead.

    Tickets to I get as there is a limited supply. Hardware, well they just make more to suit demand. Just wait a little.

  17. Marcelo Rodrigues
    Devil

    Let them buy it by the truckload!

    Why one should worry about scalpers buying graphic cards? It's isn't like they are hospital beds. Let them buy - and do this (as already pointed out)

    1) Start selling a little above intended price. Let's sat 20%.

    2) In about 2 or 3 weeks, drop the prices to the expected selling price.

    3) Let the scalpers inflate their stock to high havens - having bought it at 20% mark on launch.

    4) Set the production at full throttle: spew as many GPUs as possible, in the least amount of time. That will take care of market anxiety and will brake the scalpers business, as the price will drop fast, and they will have to sell at a loss.

    Is it perfect? No, it isn't.

    Will people complain? Of course they will. People get the lottery ticket and complain about paying taxes.

    Will the scalpers go away? No, they won't. But I think this will help to keep them at a minimum.

    Don't I care about the early buyers, that have to pay the scalpers? No, I don't. One doesn't HAVE to pay the scalpers. Just sit and wait. Otherwise, pay the price.

    1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Let them buy it by the truckload!

      1) Start selling a little above intended price. Let's sat 20%.

      Then don't do anything to reduce the price, because shareholders!

  18. BigAndos

    The GPU market seems to attract the same levels of fanboy-ism that consoles do. I'm in the market for a new GPU to replace my ageing 960 GTX. I'll wait to see what AMD bring out but I'm edging towards a 3080 at the moment. However, I'll be purchasing next year so stock and pricing settle down.

    I'll look forward to AMD and Nvidia fanboys having screaming rows about things like CUDA Cores in comments on news articles when neither person clearly has the first idea what they're actually arguing about.

  19. Cynic_999

    I really don't understand this

    Yes, for many people it's nice to have the new shiney immediately it becomes available, but it's hardly a huge hardship to wait a month or three. The scalpers are making money from the impatient idiots with more money than sense. If people were sensible, they would wait until manufacturing catches up with demand, at which point the prices will probably have reduced - and the scalpers will be stuck with product that they can only sell for less than they paid for it.

    But if the idiots are willing to pay the inflated prices, that's just capitalism at work. A few people make money, and others lose only what they have voluntarily and unnecessarily chosen to lose. If the product was never going to be available again, or was a necessity, I'd have a different view. But it's a graphic card, not a once-in-a-lifetime concert or life-saving medicine.

  20. Phil Dalbeck

    The 3090 is a pup - ludicrously over priced but only 8-10% faster in actual gaming benchmarks than the (very capable) 3080. All that video memory and nothing to use it for, as practically nobody is legitimately gaming at 8k any time soon - and those few that are even running PC games at 4k@60hz (rather than generally more useful 1440p@144hz) will be very well served by a "basic" 3080 - especially on titles with DLSS 2.1 turned on.

    Combined with the fact that the drivers are intentionally hamstrung (SRV-IO disabled etc), artificially crippling performance in many of the high end productivity use cases that could benefit from 24GB of fast VRAM, I fail to see who the market is for these cards. It's got to be very niche, and/or full of morons.

    Paying over the odds for any of these cards is a mugs game. Supply will catch up with demand in relatively short order - and there are some ludicrous deals to be had on cut price NOS or gently used 2080ti's right now if you're really desperate for something - as they were never cost effective for Crypto mining (unlike the flood of run-ragged 1080ti's that hit the market a while back).

    Couple that with AMD chucking out something later in October that might compete or at least put pressure on the midrange market, and you'd have to be mental to throw more than RRP at a 30xx card right now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "as practically nobody is legitimately gaming at 8k any time soon"

      Even at 4K, a lot of people have doubts it is worth it.

      https://www.wepc.com/tips/1080p-vs-4k-gaming/

  21. Maelstorm Bronze badge
    Mushroom

    Obviously.

    It is quite obvious that people care about this stuff, and if I was younger, I would too. As far as I'm concerned, nVidia can take they GPUs and stick up their ass. I've been burned too many times by them with failed hardware just outside the 1 year warranty period. You won't see me standing in line for one because even at $1499, they are still a piece of shit. So nVidia, eat this *drops nuke*. So far, I have had really good luck with ATI (AMD) cards.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    GTX860

    Kepler isn't as good as Pascal but it does work.

    One big advantage with older cards: they are cheap.

    Other advantage: easier to repair when/if they do break because the solder balls are held on with

    iron containing pads allowing clever tricks like induction based reflow while monitoring parameters.

    I "invented" this technique after trying oven reflow and a hand held gadget could feasibly be used

    from the card back without even removing anything but the HSF assembly.

    Building induction module into an E cig casing is possible and these are plentiful these days.

    Writing up for Hackaday now!!

  23. Rob Fisher

    Choices

    It's amazing how many people are wedded to the idea of fixed prices for things. You can have a lottery, a queue or an auction. And lotteries and queues have a tendency to turn into auctions.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like