Back in late June, rumours began to surface on the internet that Nvidia had ended production of its GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. – Now, admittedly, at the time this was more than a little surprising. Particularly so since its new 12GB revision had only been available for (basically) a couple of months. It was, however, understood that Nvidia was getting more than a little concerned that with higher tier models seeing price cuts, the overall market viability of the 3080 was starting to get problematic.
In other words, they had no plans to reduce the price of the 3080 but felt production could end due to it basically getting squeezed out by the 3080 Ti and 3090 getting cheaper.
Following a Twitter post by reliable leak source ‘@Zed__Wang‘, however, fresh rumours have suggested that despite having only ended production just over 6 weeks ago, Nvidia might have started up its 3080 12GB GPU lines again!
Because there is too much stock of GA102, Nvidia has resumed the supply of 3080 12G.
— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) August 14, 2022
The 3080 12G just stopped production for less than two months, and recently resumed production quickly.
Nvidia RESTARTS GeForce RTX 3080 12GB Production?
We should note that it was always a matter of speculation as to whether the 3080 did really end production. I should note though that I did not see them directly list a 3080 on their retail website for over 4 weeks now which strongly seemed to confirm that if they were not making their own models, they had likely ceased production.
Why would they decide to kick things off again though? Well, as per the Twitter post, the key reason seems to be that they have too many GA102 chipsets that they can’t do anything with.
More than this though, if Nvidia is willing to start making 3080’s again this close to the apparent release of their 40XX series, it does seem to add to the ever-increasing evidence that this next-gen series might be set for a delay into either late 2022 or possibly even early 2023!
On the plus side though, it seems that a fresh batch of 3080s are going to start heading to retailers which, all going well, might see some healthy and exceptionally long overdue discounts!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
