We’re hearing more rumors about Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and 5060 GPUs being delayed and encountering hiccups with production, as well as suffering from possibly low stock levels at launch (once again).
Apparently, the Blackwell chips used in the RTX 5060 and 5070 (known as GB205 in the latter case, and rumor has it, GB206 for the former) were suffering from performance issues which required last-minute addressing. And the need for that additional honing late in the day has “delayed the mass production schedule” (bear in mind that this is an article translated from Chinese).
Commercial Times further points out that the “Tainan earthquake disrupted TSMC’s wafer production” which is what Nvidia’s Blackwell chips are fashioned from, so this has compounded supply issues, we’re told.
The report asserts that the end result of all this is that the mass production of both the incoming RTX 5070 and 5060 (remember, the latter GPU isn’t officially confirmed by Nvidia yet) has been delayed by around four weeks.
The theory presented is that Nvidia previously had targets of mid-February for the RTX 5070 production lines to be running full tilt and mid-March for the RTX 5060, but that schedule has now been pushed back to mid-March and mid-April respectively.
(Image credit: ShutterStock)
Analysis: A theoretical but depressingly believable scenario
What does all this mean in practice? Well, maybe nothing – it’s just a bunch of rumors after all – but the fact is that it does marry up with other speculation suggesting pretty much the same thing: a delay from February/March to March/April. (That came from one of the more reliable sources out there for hardware-related gossip, too).
On top of that, do know for sure that the RTX 5070 has been delayed – Nvidia originally announced that this GPU, and its Ti partner, would both go on sale in February. And while the RTX 5070 Ti is now out as planned, the RTX 5070 vanilla version has indeed been put back to an on-sale date of March 5. (It’s worth noting that the Ti uses a different Blackwell chip, GB203, as opposed to GB205 in the plain 5070 – and so the mentioned chip performance issues wouldn’t apply to the former, as that chip has already been put out there in the RTX 5080).
Furthermore, as you may have noticed, the RTX 5070 Ti has gone on sale today, but stock has vanished pretty much instantly. If you got a GPU, congrats, you were lucky (and if you’re still hunting, check out our guide on where to buy the 5070 Ti).
If production of the RTX 5070 is indeed running behind schedule as rumored – and Nvidia having pushed the GPU back does make things look shaky here – then we can fully expect a lean level of supply, and the same blink-and-it’s-gone stock scenario with the RTX 5070.
It’s all depressingly believable, too. Let me put it this way: do you think when the RTX 5070 becomes available to buy in early March, there’ll be plenty of stock kicking around? No, me neither, although I could, of course, be very wrong (and nothing would please me more, frankly, as I might want to buy one of these graphics cards).
As for the RTX 5060, we don’t know if this GPU is coming soon, as Nvidia hasn’t said anything officially, but the rumor mill reckons it’s due in the near future. If this speculation is correct, though, we’re now looking at mid-April, so the graphics card is still a couple of months away (in theory).
The more positive news brought forth with this report from the Commercial Times is that Nvidia is apparently ‘making every effort’ to speed up production for Blackwell GPUs and get everything back on track, and analysts believe that the lackluster supply will gradually improve going forward.
So hopefully, this won’t turn into a longer-term tale of skewed supply and demand, with seriously hiked pricing, as we’ve seen in the past.
You might also like… 
Leave a comment