Chip Shortage Strains Product Availability
(Image credit: Nvidia)
Are you itching to get one of the latest gaming gadgets or struggling to secure a new graphics card? Unfortunately, the wait may get longer, especially when so many new products are coming to market. AMD and Nvidia have released products that strain supply chains this year while offering a slight quality increase. Even the Nintendo Switch OLED Model falls into this category, and all require chips that are in low supply. Worse than that, entire factories are shuttering while some manufacturers are substituting parts. The Load Screen covers the delicate balance between product diversity for equitable gaming and its impact on availability.
The chip shortage is not going away anytime soon, according to the Reuters article: No end to global chip shortage before H1 2023 by Mathieu Rosemain. He quotes the STMicro CEO that the situation is not getting back to a standard production level until 2023. Other markets have closed entire plants because of the current slow release of chips. In another Reuters article: GM to shut truck assembly plants again, General Motors directly cites the chip shortage as the reason for the closure. Yet this year, there are new models of graphics cards and gaming devices coming out.
The video game and PC product makers want equitable gaming for all customer budgets. Equipment that fills out product lines or new handheld devices are their leading solutions for this issue. Nvidia released both a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti, as seen in this GeForce It’s time for Ti article. While neither model sets higher overall graphics standards, Nvidia is not the only manufacturer with alternates for existing products. According to the AMD Radeon RX 6600 page, the new 6600 model drops this year but only boasts “Epic 1080p Gaming,” which is far from pushing the limits of the current industry and the bottom of AMD’s new RDNA 2 graphics card. Do these new graphics cards bring enough value to justify going against the overall chip shortage?
The graphics card makers are far from the only companies straining the chip supply with new products that are not significantly better than those already on the market. These products bring some value and gameplay to the user, but there is a limit on chips for making any electronic device, including video game accessories. The Nintendo Switch OLED model page shows that the new Switch releases in October, but it does not improve graphics from the 2017 original version. Then there are products like the Valve Steam Deck that come out in December 2021. As listed on the Steam Deck page, it pushes Steam store accessibility to the handheld market with little advancement in gameplay or graphics.
Even systems that focus on innovation at the cost of graphics advancement still eat away at the shrinking chip market. Playdate by Panic Inc is one such device that debuts in 2022. The Playdate website shows that the revolution is in the subscription model for the games and seasons since the unit provides a glorious monochrome picture. The target audience is anyone who enjoyed the original Gameboy, but that niche fulfillment costs materials that are in short supply.
Making matters worse are the PC part manufacturers who had to use other suppliers of varying quality. According to the Not-So-Solid State article by Sean Webster, Tom’s Hardware uncovered the issue back in December of 2020. It lists many manufacturers swapping SSD parts for older ones that do not perform as desired. The problem persists well into this year since many hardware companies have responded to questions on quality consistency. The April 2021 article from PC World titled Why you may not be getting the SSD you paid for shows that the issue is prevalent, and some will change product SKUs to reflect the difference.
When any component badly strains the market, forcing entire factories to suspend operations and others to use inferior quality material, it seems reckless for companies to dilute the market with products that are not innovative. Under normal conditions, the open market is the only element for which a product lives or dies, but these irregular supply chain issues should factor significantly. Supplies should eventually stabilize, but product diversity is taxing the system for now. Companies want access for customers on any budget, but that may risk straining the system further. Unless the new product brings significant customer value, companies should postpone it until after the chip shortage ends.
