Nvidia Delays GeForce RTX 3070 Availability Date, After Bungled Launch

Nvidia (NVDA) has pushed back the availability date for its hotly-anticipated GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards from October 15 to October 29.

“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 29” the company stated.

According to Nvidia, this shift will help its global partners get more graphics cards into the hands of gamers on launch day.

At the September launch over 50 major retailers had inventory- but the extent of the traffic caused crashes, delays and other issues for customers.

“We expected the best ever demand for the RTX 30-series, but the enthusiasm was overwhelming. We were not prepared for this level, nor were our partners. We apologize for this” NVDA wrote on September 21.

Indeed, the Nvidia store was inundated with over 10 times the traffic of its previous generation launch, the chip maker revealed.

The $499 GeForce RTX 3070 delivers similar or faster performance than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (which sold for twice the price) and is on average 60% faster than the original GeForce RTX 2070, says the company.

Shares in Nvidia fell 4% on October 3, but have surged over 120% on a year-to-date basis, with analysts firmly bullish on the stock’s outlook. Twenty-five recent buy ratings, 4 hold ratings and just 1 sell rating add up to a Strong Buy Street consensus. Meanwhile the average analyst price target indicates 8% further upside lies ahead.

RBC Capital analyst Mitch Steves has a buy rating on the chip stock with a $610 price target and argues that gaming should grow mid- single digits long term.

He notes that gaming remains the largest segment for the company and writes: “Overall, we are bullish long term given multiple tailwinds including: 1) complexity of video games; 2) virtual reality; and 3) the potential for more customers to shift to NVIDIA products vs. AMD GPU gaming products.” (See NVDA stock analysis on TipRanks)