US electronics retailer Best Buy (opens in new tab) has apparently decided to clear out its existing Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series stock. Earlier today, it put up some actually good Ampere GPU offers in a ‘clearance’ sale, but understandably the stock flew off shelves before anyone could screengrab any crumbs of availability.

Best Buy is the exclusive brick and mortar retailer of Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series Founders Edition GPUs in the US, and in its haste to clear stock, the RTX 3080 10GB FE was probably the biggest bargain among the clearance items. This powerful Ampere architecture card was cut from $699 to $419 to free up shelf space. Curiously, the GeForce RX 3080 FE discount made it even cheaper than RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3070 cards that were not in the clearance sale. We’d like to know how many were sold at this very keen price.

Other high-end RTX 30 GPUs that were in the clearance sale at Best Buy included the RTX 3090 Ti, which was cut from $1999 to $879, RTX 3090 cut to $749, and an RTX 3080 Ti cut to $719. Lower rung RTX 30-series cards didn’t attract compelling discounts, which might mean their replacements are a bit further out. In a search of the site for availability at the time of writing, there appeared to be very few models of RTX 3070 or above now in stock, so the clearance sale seems to have been a success.

There is some implied good news behind the now evaporated RTX 30-series bargains. Nvidia has had its high-end RTX 40 series graphics cards in retail for several months now, but the traditional volume selling 70-, 60-, and 50-class desktop cards have yet to arrive — though laptop versions are set to launch with availability due soon. In brief, it looks like retailers like Best Buy are clearing stock and shelf space for a new range of GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards, as we can assume the future RTX 4070 and 4060 Ti would have made higher tier RTX 30-series stock look unattractive.

Hopefully Nvidia will launch the RTX 4070, RTX 4060/Ti, and RTX 4050/Ti desktop graphics cards sooner rather than later. There are plenty of leaks about these upcoming mainstream models, and we reported on an apparent exposé of the RTX 4060 specs only yesterday.