Upcoming Nvidia RTX 50 Series graphics cards are rumoured to face delays due to bugs and performance woes. Coupled with the recent Taiwan earthquake, which is said to have caused production shutdown, the brand’s much-awaited mid-range RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 could slip to mid-March.
According to Chinese media outlet CT, sources in the supply chain have informed that Nvidia RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 GPU production has been delayed by approximately four weeks, pushing availability to mid-March at the earliest. Worst yet, RTX 5060 could be deferred until mid-April. The delay is reportedly caused by performance issues, requiring further analysis and debugging.
Though serious enough, this is not the only setback Nvidia is facing. Apparently, the recent January 26 quake has disturbed TSMC’s wafers and chip production lines. These lines that are already in high demand for AI chips. Thankfully, the manufacturer is doing its best to address these challenges and bring production back up to speed.
Production deferrals add to the ongoing RTX 50 shortages, leaving PC gamers and enthusiasts to fight over leftovers. An unsurprising turn of events with the ongoing AI hype. RTX 50 Series features new Blackwell architecture, which offers great AI performance, capable of running some small LLMs (Large Language Models) locally without the Internet. And for the couple of cards that end up reaching retail, the buying frenzy makes them vanish before you finish refreshing the webpage.
Chinese media notes that these complications have forced some to fill their needs using RTX 40 Series cards, causing strong desire for last-gen chips too. Part of this demand seems targeted to run the new DeepSeek R1 language model, which can run on Nvidia’s RTX 4090D GPUs. Considering most are now end-of-life and stock is dwindling, it’s created a perfect storm to jack prices up.
AMD could benefit from these delays to fill the gap with its Radeon RX 9070 series, but nothing is concrete. For now, Nvidia has set its RTX 5070 to launch on March 5, likely followed by RTX 5060/Ti. We will see if these dates end up bearing fruit and if availability reaches adequate levels.
