Much like most tech hardware released in late 2020, NVIDIA's latest range of graphics cards are woefully hard to buy.
Stock shortages and scalpers have plagued the gaming industry in the past six months, as manufacturers scramble to put together enough products to satisfy demand from an increasingly frustrated consumer base.
To ease these problems, NVIDIA has reportedly come up with a pretty unique solution, that may seem quite odd...
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Rumour: NVIDIA producing more GTX 1050 Ti cards
According to the tech channel Tech Yes City, NVIDIA is producing more GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards as a solution to stock shortages. This is based on a conversation with a retailer, who confirmed the 2016 GPU would be making a return.
As PC Invasion state, the Pascal-based graphics card does not use the same components as NVIDIA and AMD's latest GPUs, utilising GDDR5 memories and older 16nm nodes. While the 1050 Ti isn't exactly the most powerful card, it could act as a temporary fix to a shortage, giving those wanting to get into PC gaming an affordable graphics card that can run games at 1080p/60 FPS.
It appears that there is already quite the demand for the 1050 Ti, with the PALIT NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti being one of Scan's 'Hot Seller' products.
Of course, this alleged return has not been confirmed by NVIDIA, who may instead want to focus the majority of their energy on creating and distributing the latest 30 Series cards, if they can.
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Why is NVIDIA suffering from shortages?
Stock shortages for the likes of Sony, Microsoft, AMD and NVIDIA are a multifaceted problem.
NVIDIA and AMD both utilise similar substrate components for their graphics cards - components that are also required for the next-gen consoles' chips.
As a result, NVIDIA's CFO Collette Kress confirmed that the demand for its 30 Series of cards was outpacing its supply. "“Our overall capacity has not been able to keep up with that overall strong demand that we have seen," she said. "We’ve seen in terms of constraints, constraints really from the overall global surge of compute and the overall capacity, capacity that may be necessary for assembly and test and/or sub trades as well.”
In looking towards the future and restocks, AMD's Lisa Su said that its AMD chips will be limited until the second half of 2021. We'd expect to see NVIDIA's stock levels revert to normal in that time period, too.
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