Can they tell the difference between mining and using CUDA to make my algorithms speedy? I gotta do a few trillion linear regressions, help a brother out!
That sounds great in theory, unless it leads to where we are now where itâs hurting consumers ability to buy their products for their intended use at the intended price and affecting resale market and likely warrenty returns.
Itâs much easier to just block it altogether and make it all go away.
If they have a way to achieve that without neutering any of intended features of the cards, then they should. Thereâs also then nothing stopping them from producing mining specific cards.
People will find a way around the drivers if they do choose to block. Easiest thing is to produce a card specifically for miners which may be hamstrung for games at a lower price than the gaming equivalent.
That isnât easy nor will it be effective.
If Nvidia is able to successfully block mining (or make it sufficiently difficult) then they will be placed in a perfect spot. Miners will suck up AMD cards and Nvidia will gain gamer mindshare.
Honestly, a customer is a customer. If some dude wants to pay money for that graphics card, he has exactly as much right to buy it as you do, even if heâs not using it to play games.
I guess this is part of it though⌠if NVidia actually prefers one customer over another (Iâm not sure exactly why they would) then so be it⌠itâs their right to do whatever they want in this regard.
It seems strange though. It seems like a more natural response would be for them to raise their MSRP, since the market will obviously support it, rather than intentionally make their system less capable.
Customers arenât customers if they start costing the company more in warranty returns. Then either the price has to go up or the company takes a loss.
And it seems to me that Mining is much harder on the GPU.
Sure, if the warranty is costing the company more money than theyâre making, so be it⌠although it may be that they need to adjust the warranty. Or, in this market, just raise their prices.
It seems like the big problem, from a producers perspective here, is that they are selling the product for $X, while people are immediately buying them and then flipping them on EBay for $X+Y. So NVidiaâs MSRP is below what the market will support, and they arenât getting any of that money.
If they can do it successfully and make it seem like they are in the gamerâs corner, that goes a long way towards brand loyalty when the majority of crypto currency mining goes to ASICs.
They could certainly break CUDA at the hardware level. That could happen. It would render their cards useless for anything but gaming, but many people wouldnât care about that.
My question is, you know, why? Theyâre a business, they want their product to sell. And yeah, gamers are pissed off, but they have the excuse that it isnât their fault. Because it isnât. Nvidia didnât cause the cryptocurrency bubble. The current situation where their GPUs sell instantly at inflated prices is the best case scenario for them, right?
Well no, actually. Easy to picture a scenario where they cynically use it for market segmentation. Imagine if they offered crippled gaming-only GPUs at current MSRPs, and then jacked up the prices on CUDA-enabled GPUs.
That would be great initially, because gamers could get their cards and screw miners anyway, right? But in the long-term, once the cryptocurrency bubble bursts, consumer-grade cards would no longer offer GPU offloading, period. You would need to pay an extra fee to get that. And that is very anti-consumer indeed.
So thatâs probably whatâs gonna happen.
Which is probably the closest thing to an âidealâ scenario in reality.
People who want to purchase a video card to be exactly that donât give a damn about any of the rest and shouldnât be stuck in a crazy position where an entire pre-built pc can be had for roughly the price of a single card. Itâs madness and far more anticonsumer than the alternative imo.
Actually reading between the lines, and using market logic, it seems like what Nvidia and AMD are really seeing is the opportunity to sell dedicated but unannounced mining GPUs, sort of like Quadro for shitheads. That way they can fleece the miners but also give them a product thatâs even more tailor made to their requirements while walling off their consumer facing stuff.
And more than likely, Nvidia isnât so much probably caring about getting cards on the shelves for kids as concerned with OEMs.
[edit] basically the same as stusser.
That all sounds lovely, except it means consumer-level cards wonât have CUDA anymore. So if you want to accelerate video editing/encoding, modeling, deep learning/machine intelligence, etc, youâll have to kick in a bunch of extra money. I would not call that an ideal scenario, far from it.
The best way to disincentivize miners is to include a $X steam gift code in the box thatâs tied to having that specific hardware installed when you redeem it, which increases the price for miners (and miners only) by $X. Of course theyâll still buy them, if they think theyâll make money-- but it will increase their cost of entry considerably.
The flipside: people give up doing any real gaming on PC for the next generation because affordabilityâs gone right out the window between crypto fucks jacking up prices and RAM manufacturers colluding to price increase. They just give up and buy consoles, /r/pcmasterrace closes down shop, and Steam/Valve go bankrupt. PC game is fully d0med.
NIGHTMARE SCENARIO OR JUST A FORUM POST? YOU DECIDE
Distributed computing projects like folding@home rely in large part on consumer GPUs, so Nvidia couldnât just block everything except gaming. I wonder exactly what they have in mind.
PC gaming wonât be harmed longterm, the Bitcoin bubble is already bursting and people wonât be so wildly optimistic after having experienced that sort of volatility.
Gonna be great, like the old times of having two video cards.
One for âworkâ (2D/CUDA) and one for gaming, 3dfx.
When we getting to run 3 Video cards again, cant wait, SLI + glQuakeWorld.
Well surely they wonât kill off consumer level video editing. The whole Youtube generation is basically built on the back of prosumer video editing.
There might not be a way to wall off video editing from mining; that might be what theyâre trying to do brainstorm a way to do.
OTOH, they might go the other direction; instead of fleecing miners they might look into releasing mining-only cards that are more affordable than gaming cards. But that seems a lot like stealing money from their own mouths. However itâs not clear to me other than volume that Nvidia is actually getting higher margins per SKU directly from the video card craze right now, and maybe they want in on those sweet margins that 3rd party retailers are raking in.
This is definitely about market segmentation and increasing their margins, no doubt. Iâm sure theyâre getting higher margins as they are negotiating from a position of incredible strength-- every GPU they sell can be plugged into a card that will instantly sell.
Iâm sure you could build a CUDA-specific âCompute Processing Unitâ (not a great acronym there) that doesnât do gaming acceleration. I just question whether it would be worth their while. On the other hand, crippling compute out of already existing CPUs so you can sell uncrippled chips at a higher price would certainly generate some revenue.
I could see a mining card that didnât have any video ports, which would make it useless for gaming.
But as long as the next GPU still has CUDA, the problem I keep seeing is that the miners will still suck up anything and everything available, costs be damned. Look at the current market as proof. As long as thereâs a craze about some kind of crypto coin, people will be trying to jump on that bandwagon.
Crazy factoid: Bitcoin alone uses as much electricity as Portugal.
Moreover, itâs not like those video ports are terribly expensive in the manufacturing process of the cardâelaborate vent patterns that @wumpus will cut off notwithstandingâso theyâre not exactly freeing up a lot of cost headroom for themselves. If itâs all about making a buck, just price existing cards to however high miners will pay, fuck gamers (AKA, your longtime, reliable customers)