By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings…
OH, NVIDIA. This hasn’t aged well. For those of you who are unaware, all of Nvidia’s RTX 4000 Super series cards had a slightly different strategy towards their launch. The RTX 4070 Super touted a 25 percent internal componentry increase on average (CUDA cores, ray tracing units, ROPs, the lot). Pricing remained static. The RTX 4070 Ti Super received a 10 percent componentry increase, but more importantly, jumped from 12GB of VRAM up to 16GB, with pricing once again remaining the same. Lastly, there was the RTX 4080 Super. By far the least impressive of the three, it received only a meager five percent internal hardware bump. More importantly, it came with a $200 price drop on its recommended retail price. That would theoretically bring it all the way down to a humble $999—sub $1,000 at last, for an 80 series card. Huzzah!
Fast-forward two months, and we’ve hit a major roadblock: there’s no stock. Cards that were debuting at $999 or slightly over (being overclocked variants with aftermarket PCBs) have skyrocketed in price by, you guessed it, $200-300 across the board, and all of the 4080 Supers that have been listed at $999 or thereabouts are now out of stock, on back-order, or just no longer available, even on Nvidia’s own website. That’s a hard pill to swallow, and makes that five percent hardware bump look pretty bad.