So AMD's new graphics cards came out this week and I did not get one, and I've decided the correct response to failure is to write eight hundred words about it instead of just quietly moving on with my life.
Quick recap for anyone who wasn't refreshing a checkout page at 8am on Wednesday like I was: AMD launched the Radeon RX 6800 ($579) and RX 6800 XT ($649) on the 18th, their answer to Nvidia's RTX 3000 cards from a couple months back, and the pitch is basically "console-generation performance, minus the part where you also need a new console." Big Navi, they were calling it before launch, RDNA 2 architecture, first real competition AMD's put up against Nvidia's high end in years. On paper it's a genuinely good product. I say "on paper" because paper is the only place I've actually seen one.
I want to be clear this isn't a review, because I don't have the thing to review. This is a complaint dressed up as a blog post, which, if you've read this site for any length of time since 2011, you already know is basically my house style.
Here's how the morning went. Alarm at 7:45, which is early for me on a work-from-home Wednesday, comedically early. AMD.com queue already showing a wait by 7:58. Newegg tab open in parallel because I'm not an idiot, I know how this goes now, you don't put all your eggs in one queue. 8:02, RX 6800 XT actually shows as available on Newegg, I click add to cart with the kind of adrenaline I have not felt since a Ticketmaster presale in college. 8:03, in the cart. Filling out the address. 8:05, "this item is no longer available." Gone. The whole thing lasted about ninety seconds from appearing to vanishing, and I genuinely don't know how many of those units went to actual humans who wanted to play games versus bots that exist purely to flip inventory on eBay for 40% over MSRP by lunchtime.
That's the part that actually annoys me, more than missing out itself. I can handle missing out on a thing. What I can't stand is the strong suspicion that the stock didn't sell out to gamers so much as it sold out to scripts, and now there's a listing on eBay for an RX 6800 XT at $950 that I refuse to even look at again because it makes my blood pressure do something unpleasant. If you want my actual specific opinion: retailers need real queue systems with account verification and purchase limits enforced server-side, not a "click add to cart faster than the bot" arms race, because the humans lose that race every single time and everyone in the industry knows it and nobody's fixed it yet, not for the PS5 launch last week, not for Xbox the week before that, not for this.
And yeah, it's worth saying out loud that this is the third hardware launch in ten days to go this way. Xbox Series X and S on the 10th, PS5 on the 12th, now this. Which either means demand for anything computer-shaped right now is completely unhinged (working from home, kids doing remote school, everyone stuck inside since March, take your pick of reasons) or supply chains are still messed up in ways that predate any of this, or, most likely, both at once and there's no clean way to pull them apart.
Small tangent because I can't resist it: two days before all this, SpaceX put four actual human beings on top of a rocket and sent them to the space station, and it worked, first fully operational crewed flight for Crew Dragon, no drama, they docked and everybody's fine. I keep thinking about the contrast. We can reliably launch people into orbit now, that's a solved problem apparently, but reliably selling a $579 video card to the person who wants to buy it at 8am on a Wednesday remains, evidently, beyond us.
I'll try again for the 6800 XT next restock, whenever that is. Nobody's said. In the meantime my three-year-old GPU keeps chugging along, my games keep running at settings that are fine, not great, fine, and I keep this tab open just in case. That's the whole update. No neat ending here, just a guy still refreshing a page.