Given the awful launch and publicity that Nvidia continues to suffer through, one would think that AMD learned a thing or two about what not to do. Apparently that’s not the case though, with neither the Ryzen or Radeon products being easy to acquire. The Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT cards launched on November 18, but the lack of AMD stock felt oddly familiar to the Nvidia RTX 30 Series launch. Perhaps even worse.
What really took people by surprise were the misleading statements made by top AMD employees in the months leading up to the launch, though. Frank Azor is just one example, in which he boasted about the RX 6000 Series being anything but a paper launch. Fast forward to today though, and that certainly appears to be the case. The lack of stock completely blindsided most prospective buyers, which subsequently created a lot of outrage. In this case, it seems justified, as AMD clearly failed to set launch day expectations in line with reality.
Adding to the confusion, several major retailers apparently didn’t even receive stock. Best Buy’s website continues to read “coming soon” for the 6800 product listings, while you can’t even find a direct purchase option from AMD itself. There do seem to be a decent number of AIB (rebranded reference model) cards out there already, but we only know that due to the eBay listings where scalpers are showing off what they managed to get their hands on.
I look forward to taking your $10 🙂
— Frank Azor (@AzorFrank) September 24, 2020
It costs to look good
Once again, buyers are ponying up the big bucks just to get cutting edge graphics. I suppose when putting things into perspective with the costs of previous generation 2080 Tis, some are still willing pay up. Still, these are large premiums for AMD cards that MSRP at just $650 USD. There’s no telling how long enthusiasts will have to deal with scalpers before the situation gets better either.
It’s simply poor communication on AMD’s part, and customers certainly deserve a little more transparency about when to expect more availability given the misleading information from those like Azor. We reached out to AMD ourselves for comment and only received the following response: “We are currently working to restock our retailers after the successful launch of the RX 6800.” Great.
There is some good news despite all of this fuss though. The AIB custom models will launch on November 25. Hopefully that stock supply of AMD Radeon 6800s will make it into more of the right hands. In the meantime, perhaps you can have a chuckle or two at the various fake listings for 6800s on eBay. Some are too absurd not to love. Let’s just hope people don’t actually think these are real.
