A rumor has emerged suggesting Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series, some of which are the best graphics cards, will reportedly face brief supply constraints beginning next month. According to a report from ChannelGate—sourced from Harukaze5719—a failed batch of GDDR6X memory modules will temporarily constrain the RTX 4070 and RTX 4090 starting in August.
A batch of Micron GDDR6X memory modules has purportedly failed quality control, forcing it to be replaced. The batch could affect all graphics cards that utilize GDDR6X memory modules. This temporary hiccup is only expected to reduce the supply of affected GPUs briefly and is “not expected to last too long.”
To combat this hiccup, Nvidia is reportedly “adopting a supply and demand balance strategy” for its RTX 40-series graphics cards in China.
The only consumer-based graphics cards that use GDDR6X memory are Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPUs, from the RTX 4070 to the RTX 4090. AMD’s current RX Radeon 7000 series doesn’t use GDDR6X, so the Red Team isn’t affected by the alleged bad batch of Micron GDDR6X chips.
Nvidia’s mobile Ada Lovelace lineup doesn’t entirely use GDDR6X, either. Models such as the RTX 4050 (mobile), RTX 4060, and RTX 4060 Ti are the only RTX 40 series GPUs unaffected by the GDDR6X shortage. All three GPUs use slower GDDR6 memory.
Take this information with a pinch of salt; it comes from a rumor, so it could be false. Either way, the good news is that this incident is expected to only briefly affect mid-range and high-end RTX 40 series supply. By the looks of it, China will be the most heavily impacted market. Nvidia purportedly only applied a supply chain strategy in China to combat Micron’s quality control failure.
