With the launch of AMD’s highly anticipated RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT today, everyone is chomping at the bit to grab one of AMD’s shiny new graphics cards. According to our Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT review, both cards provide impressive performance with speeds that often surpass those of the RTX 3070 and 3080 respectively. 

Since this morning, customers have been rushing to buy their cards before stock runs dry. And run dry it certainly did, as all RX 6000 series cards are out of stock everywhere as of this moment. All that is left are thousands of angry customers.

AMD’s subreddit has exploded with anger and disappointment at the issues pertaining to the Radeon shortage. A few people are reporting their local MicroCenters barely had ten to 12 RX 6800s and RX 6800 XT’s available for purchase, which if true, is just as bad as the RTX 3080 launch just a few months ago. Many are blaming AMD for the situation and saying it was a paper launch (which technically it wasn’t). To make matters worse, the scalpers are back as well, with RX 6800s and 6800 XTs showing up at around $1000-$1500 on eBay. 

This is very unfortunate, especially if you trusted in AMD that it would learn from Nvidia’s mistakes and provide enough volume for over 10 minutes. In a Twitter post nearly a month ago, Frank Azor, AMD’s Chief Architect, was confident at AMD’s ability to provide enough stock on launch day, making future buyers excited. Obviously, things didn’t go according to plan so far.

So what should you do as a buyer? In short, this is a bad time to build a high-end gaming PC. If you’re desperate to grab a GPU during this holiday season, whether as a present or as an upgrade for your gaming rig, there is a high chance you’ll have to settle with a previous generation card from either AMD or Nvidia. However, we’re following stock on all the new cards on our articles on how and where to buy an RTX 3080, 3070 and 3090 and how and where to buy a Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT.

Or you can buy a prebuilt already equipped with a RTX 3070, 3080 or 3090. Nvidia themselves have stated they will not have enough sustainable stock (for the DIY market) until January of 2021 at the earliest, and that is still the case today with outlets like Newegg.com being completely out of stock of 3070s, 3080s and 3090s at the time of this writing. It should be expected that AMD will have the same issues with how its RX 6000 launch has been going thus far.