A global shortage of GDDR6 memory is said to be contributing to the supply issues faced by AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 and Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series GPUs.
That’s according to a report from French publication Cowcotland, which claims that both AMD and Nvidia have been hit by GDDR6 supply constraints and will likely continue to face shortages until early next year.
This means that the availability of AMD and Nvidia’s latest graphics cards is unlikely to improve until February 2021. Even then, it will stick take a few months for the supply chain to catch up with demand and a for surplus to be established, the report notes.
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It’s worth noting that only the Nvidia RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti use GDDR6 memory, while the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 use GDDR6X and are said to be less impacted by the shortage. However, shortages of the two top-end Ampere GPUs are expected to also continue into 2021 nonetheless.
It’s also possible that GPU shipments could be further disrupted by global efforts to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine.
Speaking at the Credit Suisse 24th Annual Technology Conference, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress admitted that the company continues to face supply issues.
"We do have supply constraints and our supply constraints do expand past what we are seeing in terms of wafers and silicon, but yes some constrains are in substrates and components", she said. "We continue to work during the quarter on our supply and we believe though that demand will probably exceed supply in Q4 for overall gaming."
Though Radeon RX 6000 series cards are also in short supply, AMD is yet to make a public statement pertaining to their current supply constraints.
In spite of these ongoing delays, both AMD and Nvidia are expected to announce yet more GPUs at the virtual CES conference in January. The former is likely to showcase its Navi 22-based Radeon RX 6700 series, while the latter is expected to launch the standard Nvidia RTX 3060.
