Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 availability delayed until 29th Oct

Nvidia has announced that it has updated the availability date of the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards. The new date is two weeks later than previously signalled - Thursday, 29th October. To be clear this new date indicates that the GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition and custom designs should be in stock at retailers and etailers, available for purchase on the day. Incidentally the chosen date is the day after the AMD RDNA 2 GPU keynote event.

Why has Nvidia delayed the availability of the GeForce RTX 3070? "We've heard from many of you that there should be more cards available on launch day," mused the graphics chip designer. "To help make that happen, we are updating the availability date to Thursday, October 29th."

Indeed it is true that people would have preferred more RTX 3080 stock to be available at launch. Nvidia has publically apologised for its poor planning and promised to increase production capacity on one side of the issue, and swat bots run by scalpers at the other side of the demand equation. However, is this fortnight availability delay for the GeForce RTX 3070 cards the best response - that means everyone will have to wait but doesn't mean there will be enough stock to fully meet what could be heavy demand at the $499 (£469) price level.

With the GeForce RTX 3070, Nvidia asserts that production is "ramping quickly" and global partners are working hard to be able to get more product available on (the new) launch day. While you wait Nvidia assures that the RTX 3070 will deliver incredible performance and features for the price.

Click to zoom chart image

To remind those who are looking for a new GPU, it shared the chart above, comparing the performance of an RTX 2070, RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070 in several games at 1440p with RTX and DLSS on, where available. The bright green bar on the chart above shows that the new graphics card is nearly 60 per cent faster than the previous gen RTX 2070 and delivers similar or faster performance than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (which sold for twice the price).

At the time of writing Nvidia hasn't indicated whether the fortnight availability postponement will mean that reviews will have to be be similarly delayed. According to its reasoning, that shouldn't be the case.