In a year that will undoubtedly be remembered largely for crap reasons, the latter part of 2020 (putting COVID-19 to one side) has been notably dominated by the fact that getting hold of new technology has been difficult bordering on impossible. In terms of both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, however, an interesting theory has been put forward suggesting why the supply of new GPUs has been so poor.
Put simply, in a report via Videocardz, the amount of GDDR6 memory available has been cited as a major contributing factor to the overall lack of production!
GDDR6 Shortage Gives AMD and Nvidia Supply Woes!
Now, to explain this correctly, there are certain aspects that need clarifying. To start with, not all Nvidia 30XX GPUs utilize GDDR6 memory. The 3080 and 3090, for example, utilize the newer (and more comparatively expensive) GDDR6X platform. With that cleared up, however, what we are left with is the entire AMD Radeon 6000 series utilizing GDDR6, and, not only that, but also Nvidia’s relatively newly launched 3070 and 3060 Ti graphics cards.
Put simply, there’s not enough GDDR6 memory to apparently go around and, as such, as much as new stock is desperately needed and wanted by consumers, the manufacturers might simply be struggling to make what little cards they can and have produced so far.
What Do We Think?
It is unclear, at the time of writing, why GDDR6 memory is in such short supply. One solid guess, however, would simply be in stating that the demand for it has never been this high. AMD has based it’s entire Radeon 6000 platform on the GDDR6 platform and, while Nvidia has shown signs of transitioning to something newer, even they still widely utilize it.
I still don’t entirely accept this as a valid excuse for the shockingly poor quantity of new graphics cards available. I can, however, perhaps agree that this would be a significant contributing factor and one that would undoubtedly cause major problems!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
