For those who followed the 3080 "launch" this morning, this will come as no surprise, but for everyone else: no, I was not able to get one this morning; I had multiple store fronts open across several different tabs, all ready to go, and even after just a single page refresh, they would all simultaneously go from "coming soon" or "alert me", to "sold out". I've never seen anything like it.

Minutes later, they all showed up on eBay for $1100+: the bots essentially got the entire stock.

I think that's a blessing in disguise though, because throughout the rest of the day, I've been reading persistent, plausible rumors that Nvidia is timing a 20 gig. 3080 for very soon after the release of RDNA2. Both wifey and I suspect that 10 gig. is not going to future proof the 3080 throughout this incoming console generation.

In short, I think I'm just going to sit on my current 2080 for now. Besides all of that, with DLSS 2.0 it already runs non-ray traced games at a locked 60 fps, reconstructed to 4K-- and ray tracing-heavy games like "Control" between 40 and 50 fps, again reconstructed to 4K.

The Series X pre-orders start next Tuesday at 10:00 CDT. I'm going to have a difficult time not clicking on those, even though there is little practical reason why I'd want one.

The interesting part of all this is that everyone is very much spoiled for choices at the moment: I found even the now-lowly PlayStation 4 Pro to be incredible, with its HDR and checkerboarded 1800 and 2160p's, and it's nothing compared to the "slow" PlayStation 5. From the Series S up through the PlayStation 5 all the way to Nvidia's juggernauts, I think people are going to be absolutely gobsmacked no matter which one they pick-- they are all good choices.

In other gaming news, I've got a physical copy of "3D All-Stars" showing up tomorrow at some point-- I'll undoubtedly be playing a lot of that over the weekend. John Linneman found it to be good-not-great-- which totally works for me.