[jayflux]

As someone who's bought and owned a Founder's Edition card (2080 TI) that's not true. They exist there's just very few of them and supply is limited. I don't think NVidia have much incentive to increase supply as most people buy the 3rd party ones instead anyway.

It's like saying the PS5 doesn't exist because you couldn't get hold of one when they first came out.

[filoleg]

The analogy to PS5 is fundamentally flawed.

As more time passed, the chances for an individual to acquire a PS5 only continuously increased (to the point of it becoming as easy as just walking into any random Target or Best Buy and buying it on the spot).

With Founder’s Edition NVDA cards, it is the exact opposite movement. If you weren’t lucky enough to grab one within the first few weeks of the release (at the very most), your chances to ever obtain one at retail price are only sharply going down. And buying it on release isn’t any easier than buying a PS5 was either (if anything, it is more difficult imo).

Sony wants to sell as many PS5s as possible, so they ramped up manufacturing bandwidth, kept restocking it as much as they could, etc. And eventually everyone who wants to get one can easily do so.

NVDA just wants to manufacture a batch or so of reference cards and call it a day. There are never plans to continue producing them or restocking them, not even talking about ramping up their manufacuring bandwidth. Once they are gone, they are gone.

Mind you, I am not trying to make some judgement against NVDA with this. There is imo nothing wrong with what they are doing. It is a little bit frustrating, purely on a personal level, only because their reference cards are actually good. NVDA not wanting to be that deeply involved in that business (beyond just a single batch of reference cards) imo makes sense to me. But the analogy with PS5 is a bit non-sensical, as it has nothing in common and follow the exact opposite trends.

[Stevvo]

Was a bit hyperbolic, but PS5 comparison doesn't work. Sony always intended to sell more PS5s, whereas FE cards have always been unavailable for 99% of their lifetimes.

[mcv]

I honestly don't quite understand why this is how the GPU business works: NVidia or AMD makes a new chip, makes a card around it, presents and sells only a few of them, and then tons of other manufacturers get the chip and they make their own cards with it, ad all of them are very similar. Why does NVidia not cut out the middle man and sell more cards directly to consumers?

[zamadatix]

Catering to RMAs, tons of distribution, and color schemes for the consumer segment isn't where Nvidia wants to spend its time. Let the AIBs compete with each other to do that kind of stuff best for peanuts in comparison to Nvidia focusing on making chips and software.

[scrlk]

They probably don't want to deal with the hassle of expanding their B2C support teams.

Having varied AIB cards is a good thing for consumers. Traditionally AIB manufacturers competed on having better coolers and power delivery vs. the AMD/Nvidia reference designs.