The last few months of 2020 are set to see the releases of numerous cutting-edge gaming products, and one thing that has unified them all has been a rough preorder period. The PS5’s preorders went live with no notice, while preorders for the likes of the Xbox Series X and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card were marked by low supply and fast sellouts.

Now, Nvidia is getting ahead of the chaos and has preemptively apologized for any difficulties fans may have with purchasing for the GeForce RTX 3090, the company’s high-end option in its 30 Series of PC gaming graphic cards. The product went live for purchase on Thursday morning.

“Since we built GeForce RTX 3090 for a unique group of users, like the TITAN RTX before it, we want to apologize upfront that this will be in limited supply on launch day,” the company said in a statement. “We know this is frustrating, and we’re working with our partners to increase the supply in the weeks to come.”

Nvidia emphasized that the $1,500 GPU was designed and produced with “extreme gamers” in mind, meaning that supply was kept small for a small audience of dedicated enthusiasts. Whether this enthusiast audience is as small as Nvidia planned for remains to be seen.

The 3090 features 10,496 cores and an astronomical 24gb of video RAM. For comparison, the mid-range 3080 card sports only 10gb of VRAM, while most modern games won’t require more than 8gb to run at peak performance. As such, the 3090 is targeted at gamers looking for 8K capabilities and to future proof their systems, as well as at content creators handling state-of-the-art special effects rendering software.

Nvidia
Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia will acquire Israeli chipmaker Mellanox Technologies. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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