GeForce RTX 3070 Online Ordering Was Just As Miserable As NVIDIA's Previous Ampere Launches

We were monitoring both Best Buy and Newegg minutes prior to 9am, and kept hitting refresh until we saw "Add to Cart" buttons. At Newegg, we briefly saw a number of third-party GeForce RTX 3070 cards available to order, only to quickly see the "Add to Cart" button disappear, or were greeted with server error messages (see below).

Things weren't better at Best Buy, where after minutes of waiting, we finally saw an "Add to Cart" button. However, clicking the button didn't result in the satisfaction of the item appearing in our cart. Instead, the following error message showed up instead:

No matter how much we tried, we kept getting the same error message when trying to add a GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition to our cart. We decided to switch tactics and use the Best Buy mobile app, and were put into a sort of queue, after which we could finally add it to our cart. However, once getting to the final payment page, the dreaded "This item is no longer available for shipping" message was presented.

This launch was supposed to proceed a lot more smoothly than the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 launches according to NVIDIA. "Production of GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards are ramping quickly. We’ve heard from many of you that there should be more cards available on launch day. To help make that happen, we are updating the availability date to Thursday, October 29th," said NVIDIA in a blog post earlier this month.

"We know this may be disappointing to those eager to purchase a GeForce RTX 3070 as soon as possible, however this shift will help our global partners get more graphics cards into the hands of gamers on launch day."

Given that we're roughly a month removed from the initial retail availability of the GeForce RTX 3080 and still haven't seen those cards come back in stock in any meaningful numbers, we have to wonder why NVIDIA thought that an additional two weeks of production for the GeForce RTX 3070 would improve matters. Cynical folks out there would likely state that the launch delay wasn't really about having additional stock on hand, but to take some of the wind out of AMD's sails with its Radeon RX 6000 Series announcement, which occurred yesterday.

However, depending on how AMD is able to play its cards with regards to production, and how performance stacks up once we get cards in our hands for review, AMD could potentially have the last laugh. AMD is claiming that the Radeon RX 6800 offers superior performance than the GeForce RTX 3070 in both 1440p and 4K gaming while doubling the amount of onboard RAM to 16GB. All of this comes with an $80 higher price tag ($579), but that might be a small price to pay if gamers will actually be able to get their hands on the card at launch.