Nvidia RTX 3080 cards are selling for thousands on eBay, and people are pissed:
The Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card was released at 9AM ET, and disappointment began only seconds later. All major online stores in the US are sold out, and there have been reports of brick-and-mortar stores each having as few as 10 units for sale. The end result: eBay scalpers are now trying to cash in, and very few people who want to enjoy the graphics card seem to have actually gotten their hands on a confirmed order.
The card is being listed on eBay for many hundreds of dollars — in some cases, even thousands of dollars — over its $699 sticker price. And PC gaming fans are mad, claiming that Nvidia held a sloppy launch just a day after US retailers similarly botched early preorders for Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5.
[Ed Note: The second link in the quoted material was copied from the source article as is]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday September 19 2020, @01:22PM
Release a small amount of Founders Edition cards, let add-in-board partners handle the rest of the demand with more expensive and probably worse GPUs (performance or efficiency).
Here's the full scoop: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/nvidia-s-ultimate-play [mooreslawisdead.com]
Also, comparisons like RTX 3080 = 2 times the performance of RTX 2080 were false. Just a bunch of tortured numbers.
In November, AMD will compete effectively with the RTX 3070, and likely compete with the RTX 3080. They will offer similar performance with up to 16 GB of VRAM instead of the 10 GB in $699 RTX 3080. Nvidia can counter with more expensive double VRAM versions (16 GB RTX 3070, 20 GB RTX 3080).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Saturday September 19 2020, @01:34PM (9 children)
Damn crybabies gotta have their toy now? I let other people buy first to see if it's any good or not.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 19 2020, @01:53PM (7 children)
I let other people buy, period. I don't have any use for a bleeding edge, flagship vid card. Price:performance:longevity ratio is what I look at when I'm buying and it is absolutely never the top of the line card.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday September 19 2020, @02:04PM
Well, I wouldn't waste money on an upgrade unless it can cut my render times in half, but when buying new, you may as well trick out the machine. Stuff as much cash as you can into the smallest box.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:10PM (1 child)
This should be filed under the more-money-than-brains department.
Bunch of crybabies.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:45PM
Shurg. I don't really care about the story. I wasn't going to buy one myself and I don't see a reason to have any sympathy for either those who were, the companies selling them, or the scalpers. Business is business. If they don't like how someone else is doing business, they can always try minding their own.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 19 2020, @04:41PM (2 children)
To put things slightly more into perspective, few games are capable of utilizing all of the 2080's capabilities. More specifically, only the most up-to-date bleeding edge games do ray tracing. Without ray tracing, the 2080 is an incremental improvement over the older 980. It's a nice increment, to be sure, but it is only incremental. With ray tracing, the card actually becomes something really cool. But, the cool is way overpriced.
The 3080 doesn't look like it's much cooler than the 2080, TBH.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 19 2020, @05:18PM
About 20-30% cooler on the really popular games put out in the last year or two. I don't like to bother unless it's at least a 100% boost across the board and I either need that boost or some specific tech in the chip to play several games I really want to play.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2020, @01:10PM
Overpriced cards have been a problem for quite a while now. Last time I was looking at graphic cards I wound up giving up and not buying one at all because the prices were so ludicrous due to shortages. Everybody and their cousin was apparently buying them in order to mine bitcoin as it remained one of the few ways that could possibly lead to making money on it without going completely custom.
BTC because driving around in a hummer isn't enough of a falcon punch to the balls of the planet.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @02:19AM
I'm even worse than that... I use whatever comes along for cheap or free. One of my everyday systems had a card found on the floor at the recycle yard... worked perfectly, did what was required of it for many years, why pay more? I can understand needing better vidcards for certain jobs, or modern games, but for everyday? If it makes a clear picture, colors are accurate, not ghosty or laggy -- good enough.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday September 19 2020, @02:23PM
Yup. Are you really going to die if you don't get one of these things right this minute nownownownownow?
Oh, and if anyone in the US wants one of these I'd be happy to sell one for USD 1,500 + shipping. I'm in a non-US country and several local retailers have them coming in over the next week or two, supply lines are a bit slow due to the pandemic.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday September 19 2020, @02:20PM (1 child)
Problem solved.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Gaaark on Saturday September 19 2020, @02:25PM
Yeah: the more stupids gotta have it now and will pay anything, the more it will happen.
Don't pay, it won't happen!
So much common sense that some people don't have.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday September 19 2020, @02:40PM (9 children)
Yeish, and I thought vintage 3dfx Voodoo 5 cards were selling for nuts prices on eBeh.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @02:22AM (8 children)
[eyes box of PCI and AGP cards, and the odd ISA... wonders what they're worth on the retro market]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:28AM (6 children)
I just checked eBay and the right cards, such as the 3dfx Voodoo cards, go for stupid amounts of money. Other cards that weren't top of the line are mostly worthless.
While the Voodoo cards were cool, I would have to wonder if I wanted to build a retro gaming computer is there a reason to use something like a Voodoo card ($200) vs. something like a Radeon 9600Pro ($10) except for the novelty of having a Voodoo card?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:39AM (3 children)
Maybe Voodoos have some special function I don't know about, but since even with retro I'd want stability first and foremost, I'd go with something like a Matrox G200 (still used as the video chip in some servers, no doubt cuz they're utterly reliable).
Fortunately for me, I already have several G200 cards, so I'm set. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:43PM (2 children)
For games of that era, Voodoo cards are a *dramatic* improvement in visual quality and frame rates over non-Voodoo cards. The Voodoo 5 card specifically is an over-the-top brute-force implementation that gives tons of performance for the time.
But as another posted noted, emulation gives you even better quality+performance if you can live without having original hardware.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @06:30PM
So, $200 for an old vidcard, or a few minutes for a download of VirtualBox... decisions, decisions...
[Good info, thanks. I'm not enough of a gamer to keep up with any of those nuances.]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 21 2020, @04:07AM
There are glide wrappers for windows that will play the windows era Voodoo games. If you need DOS games there are patches to dosbox that may work, but as far as I understand, aren't mainlined. They also suck up a lot more cpu/gpu than the vga emulation did, so from that point of view a Voodoo might make sense for playing DOS era games.
But then again: I played through that era without texturing and given the shoddy quality of textures on the 3dfx editions, I didn't find it necessary to have them until maybe the DirectX 8 era, when they finally got high enough resolution and fast enough to improve game performance.
Another point about the 3dfx cards: They only did 3d acceleration in 16bpp with no Transformation and Lighting support (That wasn't added until the R100/R200 and the Nvidia equivalents.) 32bpp combined with Nvidia deciding to buy them outright after they successfully won their lawsuit against Nvidia for ptatent infringement dealt the final blow to 3dfx.
*Said with a Voodoo 3 3000 16MB sitting in the bin next to him, but since it is only AGP 2x only the Pentium->early Pentium 4 boards can even slot it, and about half support much better cards for Windows 9x/Linux usage.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:40AM
Or you could get a cheap x86 APU to use WINE and emulators for retro gaming.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday September 20 2020, @08:32PM
Emulators can change the way a game looks and feels. The main popularity of the 3DFX cards is due to its DOS GLIDE API implementation, that was used by many games. Originally, most competing cards did not even implement that, and those that did was just an interpretation of the API - it would not look quite the same.
It might not seem important but subtle differences can be a big thing to gamers. A little bit of lag from emulation can become very annoying. Even a slight graphics difference throwing off artwork can be a nuisance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2020, @01:14PM
Probably not much to people that aren't morons. DOSBox has had glide support for years, I don't think it's complete support yet, but the stuff you have to have in order to make use of one of those cards is a rather big inconvenience and if something breaks it's getting hard to find a replacement at all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:06PM
They get both what they deserve and what they should have always expected from buying Nvidia: headaches.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 4, Funny) by oumuamua on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:20PM (7 children)
this is!
Kind of comforting actually since it confirms America is still in the 1st World.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:41PM (6 children)
You never have to wonder that since the phrase literally means "the US and its (generally NATO) allies". If you want a phrase that means something else, you have to make a new one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2020, @03:16AM
I always chuckle because technically the "first world" includes Somalia.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 20 2020, @03:21AM (4 children)
Wrong. That's not how the English language works. The definition of words in English is determined by popular usage, so if enough people agree to use a word to mean something different than what it originally meant, that IS the new definition. A prime example of this: the word "decimation". It's "supposed" to mean to kill 1/10 of your soldiers (or otherwise to remove 1/10 of something), hence the root "dec" from Latin. That's not how English speakers use it now. They aren't all wrong; the definition has changed.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 20 2020, @03:56PM (3 children)
That a lot of people are wrong in the same way does not make them magically right.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:14PM (2 children)
Actually, it does. That's how English works. Would you prefer a language where the language is defined by an organization of academics, and you're not allowed to use the language in a way that deviates from their official texts? French is like that.
Of course, there's resistance when people are wrong: people correct their usage of the language, and try to bring them back to using it consistently with other English users, which keeps it from becoming utter chaos. But when enough people adopt the same "wrong" deviation, so much so that it becomes commonplace, then it "magically" becomes "right". How do you think English evolved to the point it is now?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 20 2020, @11:14PM (1 child)
Interesting. Would you be so kind as to point me to the official authority on the language then? No? Okay, I'm going to continue calling people out for incorrectly using words then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday September 21 2020, @09:23PM
If you're going to call them out, then you need to cite the authority you're using to justify calling them wrong. Since there's no official authority on the English language, you're going to have a hard time with this.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:29PM (10 children)
So, if the scalper's price is too high, don't pay it. If no one buys the scalpers item, the scalper is taught not to repeat the attempt with the next card.
I.e., the scalper only profits when foolish people pay the scalper's prices. Simply do without instead and you'll see the rate of scalping go down to zero.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:38PM (2 children)
The only foolish people here are the ones ineffectually shaking their fist at supply-and-demand realities. You can complain. You can make a scene. But you cannot deny fundamental aspects of reality without looking like a fool.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2020, @07:50PM
It will go away. Fake News. MAGA!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2020, @01:17PM
The issue is that they've both left a bunch of money on the table and screwed a bunch of their customers at the same time. They probably could have raised their prices a bit, but they definitely didn't produce enough boards.
It's pretty much a worst of both worlds situation.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Saturday September 19 2020, @03:58PM (3 children)
Ultimately, this is just the free market at work. Supply and demand at its finest. The whiners can bitch and moan about nVidia and the downstream suppliers all they want, but ultimately *they* are the ones that are creating the sellers market that leads to scalpers, and the only possible solutions to that are NOT something they are going to want; authorized supply chains with preferred vendors, anti-grey market legislation, restrictions on the resale of new goods, mandated sales prices... It's a pretty simple choice otherwise; pay the market price that you helped to jack up, or wait/choose an alternative product - any maybe cut back on some of that entitlement while you're at it.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @02:34AM (2 children)
What this really did is teach Nvidia that next time they should make their intro price a whole lot higher.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday September 20 2020, @09:09AM (1 child)
You just know they're going to sell out...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @01:21PM
I foresee for you a storied career in the exalted halls of marketing...
Me, when I see something with a blinged-up price, even if I need the thing, I resolve to wait til it's last year's model and sanely priced. Then again, unlike the target audience, I actually have to work for my money...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 20 2020, @03:29AM (2 children)
Basically, scalping is a big gamble and risk. It's a bit like any kind of investment, really. It's interesting how we call some things "gambling", and others "investments", but they're really all the same. Buying stocks in a blue-chip company is supposedly an "investment", but it's also a gamble, and a risk: the value could go down, or the company could even go out of business, making your shares worthless. With a blue-chip company, it's not too likely, but it is possible. Just look at Sears or JC Penney.
Scalpers buy stuff like this because they're gambling that the $700 video card they just bought on the release day is going to be so coveted that other people who weren't lucky enough to snag one will be willing to pay more, sometimes much more, to get one for themselves. If they're right, they can double their money or better. If not, they can probably still sell it, but for a modest loss. But this only happens because, apparently, there's enough suckers out there actually willing to pay MORE than MSRP for this electronic item that's going to lose much of its value in the next 1-2 years.
So why are these people complaining? If they don't like it, they don't have to buy it. Let the scalpers get stuck with these worthless video cards, and have to sell them for 1/2 of what they paid for them. That'll teach them. Will this happen? No.
If this stupid video card is so valuable, though, why did Nvidia price them so low? Sounds like a missed opportunity.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:38AM (1 child)
For a lot of these scalpers, there's actually very little risk. They'll know pretty quickly if the card is going to sell at a profit. If it turns out the answer is no, they'll just return the card from wherever they bought it in a few days and get a refund. So really no financial risk, all they are out is some of their time. Meanwhile the people who actually want and use these graphics cards can't get their hands on them without paying inflated prices or waiting, which is why they are complaining. These scalpers are scum and their behavior should not be rewarded.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 20 2020, @05:20PM
So exactly what incentive do the scalpers have to NOT engage in this behavior, given the conditions you've outlined?
And why are they scum? Because they're taking advantage of people so stupid they're willing to pay more than MSRP for a graphics card on Ebay because they just *have* to have it RIGHT NOW? Sorry, I don't feel sorry for these idiots at all. If the graphics card users were all patient enough to not fall for this, and simply refused to buy this card for more than MSRP from a normal vendor (rather than some guy on Ebay who somehow has this just-released $700 graphics card), then scalpers wouldn't bother doing this because it'd be a waste of their time. The fault is entirely on the end-users, for being stupid suckers. This isn't like hoarding toilet paper or some other essential supply: no one NEEDS a graphics card. Every normal modern computer has built-in graphics now; these stupid cards are only used for playing video games, which are just a luxury. You might as well try to get me to feel sorry for Rolls-Royce and Bentley owners who get overcharged for parts and repairs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2020, @06:15PM (2 children)
Brand new electronic gadget sold out on launch day?
Shocked!
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday September 19 2020, @07:05PM (1 child)
Ends up on eBay for an outrageous price on that day...
equally shocked
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 20 2020, @01:25PM
I'm reminded that warranties generally only apply to the original purchaser....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Sunday September 20 2020, @03:25AM
Paying a lot for depreciation is God's way of saying you have too much money. They used to say that about cocaine, too; but then they came out with crack, so really they were paying for depreciation too. You can mess yourself up with drugs and video cards so much more cheaply if you're just willing to wait.
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