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On a recent Brooklyn morning, Andrew Okun, 22, and his father Damien staked out their local Micro Center at 6 a.m. in the rain to purchase a two-month, $ 700 graphics card for Andrew’s PC. It was their third attempt to get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. This time they would be the first in line.
Since its release on September 17, the stock of the 3080 has been severely limited. And for weeks now, Micro Center employees across the country have been arriving at work to find enthusiastic gamers – sometimes more than a dozen of them – not so patiently waiting for the hot GPU. Ebay resellers list graphics cards for around $ 1,200.
At 9 a.m., Micro Center employees brought in the Okuns and several other players, including K. Kim, who had just dropped his son off at school. Once inside, an employee wearing a face mask solemnly told the group that, unfortunately, they only had four 3080s to hand out. Kim was fifth in line.
“It’s pretty crazy – in the midst of a pandemic,” said Kim, holding his Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, a less sophisticated version of the GPU he had hoped for. “I didn’t think the apocalypse would turn out like this – you know people are lining up for $ 700 video cards.”
When Nvidia released the Series 30 on September 17 – its most powerful graphics cards yet – GPUs promised to deliver gaming resolutions up to 8K and handle 4K without sacrificing performance. Just a ton of pixels, right in your eyeballs. With upcoming blockbuster games like Call of Duty: Cold War Black Ops, Cyberpunk: 2077, and Infinite Halo, gamers strive to optimize their PC versions for ultra-ultra gameplay.
Then disaster: In a blog post describing the RTX 3080 launch, Nvidia describes it as “both the best GPU launch ever and the most frustrating.” The supplies on websites like Best Buy and Amazon were gone in minutes. The robots recovered dozens of 3,080 before customers could. Graphics cards were suddenly the new Supreme drops. In one PC Mag article, an administrator of a robot organization explained, “When given [the] luck, I’m sure most people would buy 10+ units if they have the capital and are looking to make over $ 25,000 + USD in a single day from [the] secondary market. “
The recent launch of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series of processors – which UK retailer Scan describes as “the best-selling processor launch we’ve ever seen” – has seen similar turmoil. With online shopping options blocked by bots, desperate gamers brave the risks associated with the pandemic and the influx of brick-and-mortar vendors Best Buy says it only sells Series 30 online, in the category ” technology retail chain ‘, leaving Micro Center.
On the day of the 3090’s release, cybersecurity worker Nate, 31, camped outside a micro center in Duluth, Ga., For 26 hours to get the premium $ 1,500 GPU. It was worth it, he said, because Destiny 2 or Far Cry 5 gameplay that could average 100 frames per second, “with zero dips below 60.” To get ready weeks earlier, Nate went to Target and bought a tent, sleeping bag, and lawn chair. At 8 a.m. the day before the launch, he expected to be the only person in line.
“There were already 10 people there,” he says.
Micro Center employees warned Nate and the others that it was not safe for them to stand in a large group during a pandemic and asked them to sleep in their cars. But the players were irritated at the idea; for the 3080’s launch a week earlier, the opportunists waited in their cars for the employees to leave, then rushed to the store again. An empathetic employee walked in and returned with a roll of duct tape to mark out the 6-foot squares. On the morning of the launch, Nate says, 80 people were in line. The store had 10 GPUs in stock.
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