Nvidia says store was 'overrun with malicious bots and resellers' for RTX 3080 launch, promises more cards are coming

Nvidia has published a blog post clearing up some of the questions it faced following the perilous RTX 3080 launch last week. Nvidia says the launch "was simultaneously the best GPU launch ever and the most frustrating," and admits that its own webstore was not prepared for the number of bots attempting to claim stock to resell at a later date.

So it's safe to say the RTX 3080 launch didn't go quite to plan, although a large part of that was due to the graphics card's popularity. You only have to read our RTX 3080 review to know what all the fuss is about—it's easy to see why the first card built from the Ampere architecture was so popular, even generating more traffic than Black Friday for some retailers.

Nvidia now confirms that the RTX 3080 is in "full production" and that the first cards shipped out in August to retailers. The supply is reportedly increasing weekly, which bodes well for a stable market in good time. Nvidia offers no exact timeframe for stock to normalise, however.

Nvidia confirms it has "great supply," which also tallies what we've heard from the GPU maker when pressing about Samsung's 8nm process, which is the basis for all Nvidia GeForce Ampere graphics cards so far.

"As we race to build more GeForce RTX 3080s," Nvidia says, "we suggest not buying from opportunistic resellers who are attempting to take advantage of the current situation."

Many customers are giving as good as they're getting too, with some taking to eBay to protest reseller listings at extraordinary prices with some well-deserved trolling.

At least Nvidia says its store will be a better place to shop come the RTX 3090 launch on Thursday, September 24, and the RTX 3070 launch in October. Nvidia has shifted its online store to a dedicated environment, streamlined code for protect its servers from crashing, integrated a CAPTCHA at checkout, increased capacity, and added further bot protection and security to avoid a rerun of the 3080 chaos, which saw cards sell out within seconds of availability going live.

Nvidia has also cancelled hundreds of orders from known resellers manually in order to free up space for genuine customers.

Following complaints that 'notify me' emails were not despatched until long after stock was run dry, Nvidia has at least specified why this occurred. While still unfortunate for users, these emails were held back until Nvidia's inundated servers were restored, although, in retrospect, Nvidia says it "should not have sent the 'notify me' emails at all given the circumstance.

The lesson has been learned now, leaving space for Nvidia and retailers to improve and prepare for the incoming RTX 3090 launch this week, and, more importantly, sure-to-be-popular RTX 3070 release come October.