[ad_1]
There’s an old saying that if you dislike what a company offers, vote with your wallet. That appears to be precisely what is happening with the just-launched RTX 4070 GPU. Gamers are telling Nvidia in no uncertain terms, “You’ve gone too far.” It’s the final straw for gamers who are fed up with Nvidia’s pricing for its 40-series GPUs, as now it’s being reported the company is halting production of the cards just a week after its launch.
This is an unprecedented event in the GPU market—especially for a graphics behemoth like Nvidia, as it’s used to selling every GPU it can manufacture on launch day.
The RTX 4070 launched on April 13, so it’s still a very new GPU. However, even on launch day, there were signs gamers were keeping their powder dry. We were monitoring Best Buy for Founders Edition stock and noticed they were available for almost eight hours, an anecdotal record compared with previous launches. Even today, you can buy pretty much any RTX 4070 you want, aside from the Founders Edition, on any site you wish, which is a semi-new phenomenon.
It’s been over a week and there’s still dozens of options available at MSRP for the beleaguered RTX 4070.
Credit: Newegg
Word of Nvidia’s alleged plans comes from a Chinese source via BenchLife, which says Nvidia is planning on pausing production for one month to allow its partners to sell the cards it has on hand before delivering more of them. It’s unclear if these plans are only for China or other regions, though it seems it could also do it in the US.
It’s so bad that even though the RTX 4070 is the most affordable Ada Lovelace GPU yet, it’s also been rumored that Nvidia is considering offering its partners $50 for each 4070 it orders. The partners can then pass that on to gamers or pocket the cash, but this has not been verified. So far, we haven’t seen prices drop below MSRP, but that could also be in the works. However, given the historically low margins afforded by Nvidia’s partners, that might not be possible.
When we looked at the RTX 4070 when it launched, it didn’t seem like a horrendously bad deal, especially compared with the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080. After all, even though at $599 it’s $100 more expensive than the launch price of the RTX 3070, that’s still $100 less than the RTX 3080, and the two cards are close in rasterization performance. However, many gamers recall the GTX 1070 launched at just $379 in 2016 and recoil at the thought of paying almost double to upgrade.
[ad_2]
Source link
