The Nvidia RTX 3080 launched today and has been quite well received. Well, the card is popular, not the actual retail launch; Nvidia had an "error" in its own store at launch and is now apologizing to customers "for their experience this morning."

The Green Team is also working hard to keep the cards out of the filthy hands of bot digital hands and Ebay resellers. However, that may take some time.

The impressive new Ampere-based GPUs outperform the RTX 2080 Ti, once the "world's fastest graphics card," by a considerable margin, and at a much lower price. through traditional retailers. Unfortunately, as soon as the traditional inventory runs out, the cards are popping up on eBay, fetching $80,000 or more. However, these bids may not be legitimate.

Demand was so great that both Nvidia's own RTX 3080 Founders Edition and third-party cards from over 50 different retailers worldwide were bought up almost immediately. Social media reports of discouraged prospective buyers provide anecdotal evidence of the problem.

Our Phil sat on Nvidia's site at 6 a.m. PT, trying to get his hands on an RTX 3080 FE.

We spoke with an Nvidia rep today and they told us about the first error they encountered.

"This morning we saw unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 at retailers worldwide, including the Nvidia online store. At 6 a.m. PT we attempted to push the Nvidia store live. Despite our preparations, the Nvidia store was flooded with traffic and errors occurred. We were able to resolve the issue and sales began to register successfully.

We know some real people who have managed to buy the cards, so they are not all going to imposters, but Nvidia is aware that it is a problem.

"To discourage bots and duffers in the Nvidia store," they continued, "we are doing everything humanly possible, including manually verifying orders, to ensure that these cards are in the hands of legitimate customers."

"As of 6 a.m. PT, we had over 50 major retailers worldwide in stock. Our Nvidia team and partners are shipping more RTX 3080 cards to retailers every day.

"We apologize to our customers for their experience this morning."

We continue to monitor the situation surrounding RTX 3080 availability and have a complete system that you can order today. However, please do not touch any of the listings you see on eBay. Sure it's a great card, but it's not worth spending $1,000+ on. And definitely not $80,000. With the RTX 3090 coming out next week.