When was it ever this bad? I’ve never experienced anything like this, and I built my first PC around 2002. Perhaps my upgrade cycles have been fortuitously timed?
P.S.: For anyone who would know, my first question above was not rhetorical. There’s a thread on Reddit discussing this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/7qfe44/cryptomining_is_doing_more_harm_to_pc_gaming_than/?utm_source=reddit-android
Guess I’ll just be sticking with 1080p and my venerable OC’d 970 for awhile still. Serves me good enough for now.
As posted awhile ago upthread, I eventually gave up on purchasing a 1060/1070 model for anything near reasonable price and went with a 1050Ti 4GB instead for around $140 on sale after rebate in one of the Newegg pre-Christmas sales. I’m only gaming at 1080p anyway, so as a stopgap to upgrade my old Radeon 7770 it made sense. At least I can play Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 at decent resolutions and framerates for a year until hopefully the mining craze dies down. I’ve been impressed with the 1050Ti thus far, so I highly recommend it to anyone in desperate need of a replacement GPU until the price gouging ends.
I’m also surprised that AMD and Nvidia have not been more proactive in developing and releasing cards built specifically for mining. I mean, I know they HAVE such cards in development or in the release cycle, but they don’t seem to be widely available yet, and you would think both companies would have rushed to take advantage of such a new market. Consider that it’s the retailers/resellers making all the money here, Nvidia and AMD are manufacturing cards and selling them to the retailers for only marginally more than they were previously (still under MSRP), whereas retailers then take a $399 MSRP card and mark it up to $700+.
Sort of a boost for the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. You can’t build a gaming PC with that performance/price so long as the miners are hogging the GPU market.
I’d also be wary of any used GPUs after any inevitable crash. We’re talking about GPUs that have been pushed to the max, nonstop, for months.
That’s only going to help if
- The mining cards are significantly better hash rate per $ than gaming GPUs
- Creating mining cards does not cause a drop in production capacity for gaming GPUs (not true as supposedly HBM is supposedly the supply constraint on AMD cards right now)
- mining cards have to be stocked well enough that there is never a shortage (otherwise they will just go back to gaming GPUs that are good enough when mining cards are out of stock).
For those reasons I don’t see any way that the GPU market is going to pull itself out of it’s current hole. Good thing I upgraded to my Fury when I did.
Also the mining cards have to be careful if they apply arbitrary limitations to their functionality to make them not-viable for gaming to ensure market segmentation, since the next Big New *Coin may well rely on Feature X as part of its hash function or whatever.
Based on my “couldn’t possibly spend time to give a full shit” understanding of mining, anyway.
stusser
1671
It would be pretty easy to make these cards less attractive for miners.
What you do is this.
- Charge $100 over the MSRP
- Bundle a $100 Steam gift certificate that can only be applied to Steam when the Nvidia Geforce Experience or AMD Crymson account that registered the card’s unique serial number is linked to your Steam account.
In effect, this would charge miners an extra hundred bucks on every purchase. It would be annoying to resell as you can only gift steam cash to specific accounts, and they would obviously have to sell under face value.
vyshka
1672
I don’t know about others, but the ASUS card doesn’t even have display interface support from the looks of it.
The problem with the Steam redemption or any other similar idea is that miners are already paying way over MSRP, so they would just build that $100 loss (or $1000 loss since they’re probably buying 10 cards) into their model, making it back with the first coin they mine.
The only workable solution involves the “Made for Mining” GPUs with no actual display outputs. If they could make those either cheaper than their display-enabled counterparts or faster than a similarly priced display-enabled GPU (or even BOTH), then miners would switch to those cards and gamers could go back to buying gaming cards.
On the other hand, odds are good that a shortage in mining-only cards would drive prices up there, making gaming cards more attractive again, and thereby repeating the cycle. We’re probably Domed until BitCoin and other crypto currency crashes hard.
I say we get George Soros involved and crash the crypto market to a bloody pulp. I hear he’s good at this sort of thing.
stusser
1675
Well yes, it makes it less profitable for them. That’s the point.
Removing display outputs from the rear of the card just means it can’t be resold to gamers. This probably reduces their BOM by a couple cents, but not such that you’d notice.
Menzo
1676
Why would these manufacturers make cheaper cards for miners? They’re selling all they can at these high prices now. This is not bad for card makers, this is great.
Therein lies the problem with the “mining only GPU” idea. If someone is selling such a card used, she cannot plausibly claim that she’s only used it hard a few hours per week for gaming, and the buyer knows that the thing has been in 24/7 use almost from the moment of unboxing. Also, the seller would only be motivated to sell by 1) dire financial emergency or 2) lack of efficiency of the card for mining, at which point, where’s the market for it if it can’t at least be used to play games?
stusser
1678
Right, there’s no reason a miner would prefer a mining-only card unless it was cheaper or faster. Otherwise, why not just buy the gamer version and have the option of reselling it later on?
We know it won’t be cheaper because the displayport jacks are a couple pennies, and it won’t be faster as the cards are not deliberately crippled out of the box.
The $100 steam giftcard allows you to differentiate between SKUs. Perhaps you reserve half your inventory to bundle with the giftcard, to give gamers a chance to buy a card bear MSRP and build some goodwill.
stusser
1680
OMG, you mean it was a bubble? NOBODY COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMMING!!!1!
Nesrie
1681
I know a few who purchased around Christmas for 700, not 1300.
$100 is nowhere near enough of a disincentive when miners are already paying $500 above MSRP for cards and buying up all available inventory. And the market is too volatile for hardware makers to risk fortunes massively upping production when the bottom could drop out of the market at literally any second.
If it’s any comfort, the collapse in crypto prices and the Chinese crackdown on cheap electricity probably means the miners are all going to lose a ton of money if they paid over the odds.
That’s what pissss me off. What little gains we’re making in reducing electricity use (and greenhouse gasses) is being offset by crypto currency assholes.
