AMD Radeon RX Vega GPUs Could Be Hard To Find For A While Yet

There's been a good amount of excitement surrounding AMD's new Radeon RX Vega line of graphics cards, which started shipping out just 10 days ago. Out of the gate, though, AMD is having problems keeping up with demand, resulting in customers being forced to search high and low for them. Today we're finding out why this shortage is occurring and how long it may last.

According to a new report from DigiTimes, some sources claim that the Radeon RX Vega shortage can be blamed on low product packaging yield rates. Those low yields are, in turn, thanks to the fact that Vega cards integrate high bandwidth memory into the hardware of the GPU. Other sources say that it may not have anything to do with the presence of hig -bandwidth memory, but rather simply with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering's packaging technology.

Whatever the reason, AMD has confirmed that demand is outpacing supply, and that it will work to ramp up Radeon RX Vega64 production. Those of you who are still looking for one can expect new cards to become available over the next few days and weeks, both as a standalone product and in gaming bundles.

That's the good news. The bad news is that these shortages may not be fully solved until sometime in October, meaning that they could last as long as another two months. That, obviously, is not a desirable outcome for AMD, so we can expect it to try to solve the problem well before then. If the problem can be blamed on packaging as some of these sources suggest, however, when this supply problem gets solved could be out of AMD's hands.

DigiTimes also points out that NVIDIA has chosen not to rush its upcoming Volta-based GPU to market, at least in part because the competition from these RX Vega GPUs is "not as big as expected." We'll see if AMD can turn around its Vega supply issues before October actually arrives, but in the meantime, you might want to jump on these cards if you're lucky enough to find one available.