A combination of factors has made high-power GPUs like the Nvidia RTX 3090 incredibly hard to find, unless you're willing to spend well above MSRP. And Nvidia seems to expect little to change for most of this year.

On Monday, the GPU maker reported to investors that its first fiscal quarter earnings beat expectations across the board and predicted that demand for its products will exceed supply for most of the year. The company told investors that high-end GPU inventory will remain scarce for some time. [Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in a message to investors that "overall demand remains very strong and continues to outpace supply, while our channel inventory is quite scarce. We expect demand to continue to outpace supply for most of the year." We believe there is sufficient supply to support sequential growth in the first quarter and beyond."

In other words, while Nvidia expects to release enough GPUs to the market to continue revenue growth, do not expect high-end Nvidia cards like the GeForce RTX 30 series to be readily available for the foreseeable future.

This is consistent with reports we heard a few months ago that online retailers like Alternate are expecting the GeForce RTX 30 series inventory woes to worsen before improving. This is largely due to material shortages and temporary factory closures due to Chinese New Year.

Both Nvidia and rival AMD have reported increased demand for high-end graphics cards during the ongoing global pandemic, a recipe for slim pickings on the GPU front in the coming months.

That said, there are still ways to get your hands on a powerful new graphics card if you are willing to jump into the inventory dumping storm at online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores. We've done our best to put together a regularly updated guide on where to buy the Nvidia RTX 3090, where to buy the Nvidia RTX 3080, and how to get the Nvidia RTX 3070 If you're interested in AMD cards, check out our latest AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Buying Guide.