No one wants NVIDIA’s $1,199 GeForce RTX 4080 US: Despite drop in shipments, retailers and stores are full of cards

It’s been a few days since NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card launched at a ridiculous price of US$1199 and it seems like consumers aren’t buying it (literally). A few days after its launch, the card is not selling well in the consumer segment and there are many reasons.

‘No,’ consumers respond to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card at US$1199, stock below 4090 and still stocked at retailers

In our own review, we found the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 to be an impressive card in terms of gen-to-gen performance and power efficiency, however, NVIDIA’s asking price is simply absurd. The 4080 launched at US$1199, making it the biggest price hike we’ve ever seen on an ’80-class GeForce graphics card.

Just to put things in perspective. the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 launched at US$699 two years ago. GeForce RTX 3080 12GB launched at US$899. Comparing them to the US price of $1999 for the 4080, we see a price increase of 71.5% and 50% from generation to generation. Previously, NVIDIA’s ’80’ class cards had been well positioned in the US$550-700 range for several years. Here is a price comparison of the different generation GeForce GPUs:

NVIDIA GeForce GPU Segment/Tier Pricing

If we take crypto out of the equation for a second (which has helped artificially inflate card prices), users who actually paid $700 or $800 for an RTX 3080 just aren’t ready to spend over US$1000 for an ’80s class graphics card despite all the performance and all the fancy features it has to offer. And that brings us to today.

NVIDIA 4080 Shipping Units:

🟢30,000

NVIDIA 4090 Shipping Units:

🟢130,000

Total RTX 40 shipping units:

🟢160,000

NVIDIA’s 4090 was pretty much sold out at launch.

Retailers still have 4080 in stock. 😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️

—Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) November 19, 2022

8:30,000
9: +30% from current shipping

— chi11eddog (@g01d3nm4ng0) November 19, 2022

Retailers in almost all regions are equipped with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. It’s not a sight that was seen after the RTX 4090 launched and it’s certainly not due to the massive inventory NVIDIA has for the RTX 4080. In fact, based on the numbers we have, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 shipments are close to 30,000 units.

This is 70% less than RTX 4090 shipments which were at 100,000 units a few weeks ago (we reported here exclusively) and are currently nearing 130,000 units. Thus, the entire RTX 40 series cards have shipped around 160,000 units. That’s 30,000 RTX 4080 and 130,000 RTX 4090 units. So despite lower shipments, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 is still struggling to sell and consumers are just waiting for a cheaper solution under the $1000 bracket. US or get an RTX 4090.

Here are some examples of various stores in the US sitting with piles of RTX 4080 graphics cards that no one is interested in buying:

Another Nvidia RTX 4080 inventory stack pic.twitter.com/ITEzCkZ96o

— tae kim 🐀 (@firstadoption) November 17, 2022

Here’s the situation with most retailers and although Newegg has all of its cards sold out it looks like eBay resellers may have a big part in causing these shortages as the site is loaded with higher priced cards at US$1600 and even some priced above US$2000 (we don’t recommend buying any of these scalped cards):

This brings us to the third part of the story and that is the individual pricing of the AIB model. Most NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 cards are neck and neck in price with an RTX 4090 Founders Edition or AIB models with a benchmark price. For example, the ASUS RTX 4080 ROG STRIX and TUF Gaming are currently $1500 and $1549 USD, respectively. We also recently covered an anime-themed model that is priced higher than an RTX 4090. The RTX 4090 offers a 30-40% performance boost over the RTX 4080, so users would rather pay for that extra performance and massive VRAM pool for 10-15% more than get an overpriced 4080.

The last and most crucial thing stopping consumers from buying an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card is the impending launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards which the red team is marketing directly against the RTX 4080, throwing banging on the 16-pin connectors (now confirmed to be user error), its extremely oversized reference models, and betting on its all-new feature set. Pricing is very attractive at US$899 and US$999, but despite this, we recommend our readers to wait for the final reviews. Either way, that doesn’t change the fact that the GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card offers the worst performance at the $ value yet.