A redditor shared info from an Asus marketing rep indicating that top-trim STRIX versions of the RTX 3080 will not be making an appearance for tomorrow's official launch of GeForce RTX 3080 Ampere graphics cards. Instead, they will be delayed to the 21st in a best-case scenario. We've pinged ASUS for confirmation, but there are already other signs of a looming shortage.
Overclockers3d.net also reported on the Reddit post, adding that they've heard reports from a lot of Nvidia's AIB partners indicating their flagship RTX 3080 cards won't be available on launch day, either.
This could show that rumors about Ampere's low availability at launch are true, and it shouldn't be too surprising. If you look back at the 2018 launch for the RTX 2080, volume was very low, and it took Nvidia a few months before volume normalized. The new Ampere GPUs also feature a brand new Samsung 8N process, and there aren't any early indicators of how well the process yields in the fab. There's also a chance Nvidia didn't give AIB partners enough time to finalize and build their custom parts for the 3080.
In any case, if you're dead set on buying an RTX 3080 after reading our review, be prepared for launch day tomorrow. Given the huge generational performance improvement, demand for the RTX 3080 will probably be higher than we've seen with other recent GPU launches (much more than RTX 2080). Check out our review of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition for more performance details. Also, with no pre-orders available for Ampere (another hint at bad volume), expect further delays before you can grab a fresh new RTX 3080 for yourself.
