Nvidia GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Supply Issues; High Demand or Lack of wafers from TSMC?

Latest reports from industry insiders suggest that Nvidia’s recently-released Pascal based graphics cards, namely the Geforce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, are selling excellent. However, the unprecedented demand has apparently caused product shortage, with majority of retail outlets running out of stock. It’s been around a month since Nvidia launched the new GeForce cards, but there are numerous buyers who are still having a hard time getting their hands on the cards.

Thanks to this shortage, some retailers have started price gouging on the new GeForce cards, with some custom cards being sold far above MSRP of $599. For instance, we previously spotted an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0 card, which was priced at $1,999 over at Amazon.

There are also reports which claim that it’s not only the high demand that is causing the product shortage, but Nvidia is also facing some serious yield issues that are affecting the GPU supply. If these reports are to be believed, Nvidia’s primary foundry partner TSMC is currently unable to make 16nm based silicon wafers as fast it was expected to be – which in turn slows down the development of Pascal GPUs.

On contrary, multiple reports state that the GeForce GTX 1080 is the biggest-volume high performance graphics card that has been launched by Nvidia to date. The card was available in the retail market in even more units than the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti, and all of these units sold out in a single day.

But, these are all rumors at the time so better treat them with a grain of salt until something concrete surfaces.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 are both based on the next generation Pascal GP104 GPU which offers significant performance increase over the old 28nm based GM204 counterpart. Featuring a total of 2560 CUDA cores, both Pascal cards outperform last-gen flagships; the GTX 1080 on average is about 25% faster than an overclocked GeForce GTX Titan X. Custom cards from AIB partners perform even better as they come factory overclocked with better cooling solutions.