The flagship card from Nvidia’s Pascal generation, the GTX 1080 Ti, might have seen a jump in popularity after the somewhat lackluster launch of the RTX Turing series, but it wasn’t to last. Production of the cards has reportedly now stopped and supplies of the powerful GPU are running low. If you want one, waiting for Black Friday might mean missing out.
As powerful as the new 2080 Ti is, our review and many others found that the performance between the more conservative RTX 2080 and the last-generation 1080 Ti was pretty close. That led to a big upswing in purchases of the 1080 Ti, as its price came down a lot with the debut of the new cards. But that may not remain the case for long as supplies supposedly begin to dwindle.
Production for the GTX 1080 Ti reportedly stopped earlier this month, and GamersNexus reports that manufacturers are now running low on inventory. This is leading to shortages at retailers, who are presumably trying to source cards from other territories to try and keep some stock in the U.S. ahead of the planned tariffs that will come into play in early 2019, potentially raising prices for all manner of hardware, graphics cards included.
There hasn’t been much of an effect on the second-hand market as of yet, with lots of 1080 Ti’s that were once used for cryptocurrency mining still being sold. That does present a potential upgrade path for those who are keen to stick to last-generation hardware, but it is important to remember that such cards were likely run hard for long periods of time, which won’t have done much for their longevity. And they likely ship without any kind of warranty.
The question now arises as to what such dwindling stock will do to the price of RTX-series cards. Nvidia effectively stacked the new generation of GPUs on top of the Pascal generation, rather than replacing it, so there isn’t a clear, similarly priced alternative to the 1080 Ti just yet. Nvidia may adjust prices to fix that, especially with talk of new, affordable AMD cards on the horizon, but we’ll have to wait to find out.
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