TECH TALK
Hello GPU Shortages, Again
LAST YEAR’S DELUGE of graphics card launches felt like a good thing. Ampere brought new levels of performance from Nvidia, and AMD closed the gap— at least in rasterization performance—with its RDNA2 GPUs. Everybody wanted one, and the result was that every GPU launch was accompanied by out-of-stock notifications. Six months on, things aren’t much better.
Jarred Walton
It all started with COVID-19. While the impact on graphics cards might seem like a relatively small item in the grand scheme of things, the manufacturing plants that produce graphics cards— from the GPUs themselves to the memory chips, VRMs, capacitors, PCBs, and other components— were all affected to varying degrees. The problem is that our manufacturing supply chain doesn’t deal well with delays, and it can take days if not weeks when restarting production lines to get everything running smoothly again.