As an aside, I just have to say cryptocurrency mining is perhaps one of the stupidest things humans have ever come up with. “Let’s spend environmental resources (power generation) to create a false value equivalency while creating nothing.”
Damn shame they didn’t develop mining around something akin to Folding@Home or SETI@Home, etc, so that at least there would be value to the computation besides pretend money.
People are already coming put with mining specific cards, or already have. The problem is they can’t meet demand as long as cryptocurrency prices are crazy.
[citation needed]
Yeah, everyone nailed it already:
What Nvidia wants to you to hear: “We are sacrificing profit to keep gaming alive.”
What Nvidia is actually doing: “We’re disabling features of our GPUs so we can sell the non disabled versions at higher markups.”
I actually am not even sure this will technically work, in the long term. It’s not like GPUs just happened to fit the mining algorithms. Rather, mining algorithms for new coins (and updates to old coins) are specifically designed and targeted to be problems that generally are solved best by GPUs (usually over ASICS, the idea being GPUs are more likely to be decentralized.) So the incentives will make them want to change the coins to work around whatever restrictions Nvidia puts in.
Nvidia might be able to throw a wrench into current software, but can’t make it impossible to do any calculations on the GPU without making the card also useless for games, so whatever calculations they leave open is what the coins will eventually shift to.
It seems like if they disable stuff that miners use, isn’t it going to disable stuff that certain games use? I thought there were games that used the GPU to do things like destructible terrain physics and crap these days.
I’m not a game programmer so I may be talking out my ass here, but my understanding is GPGPU competes with graphics rendering for GPU time, and since most games are bottlenecked by the GPU not the CPU, you’re better off running stuff like physics on a likely completely unused CPU core. PhysX is an outlier and does run on the GPU as Nvidia owns it.
Kind of like the good old Tulip Mania. We’ve been here before and we will do it again.
PS: tulip not tunip. el oh el.
Yeah, but WE might get some cheap used GPU’s out of it. Also, if NVidia doesn’t play it’s cards right, we might see the price of new GPU’s also drop a bit the market crashes.
I took a peek at graphics card prices on Newegg today and they appear to have come down some. Not down to MSRP levels yet, but 20% off what they were when I looked ~three week ago. I’m sincerely hoping that with the craze passing and the growth of mining outfits tapering off we will get to a more stable market.
While I’m normally the last person to defend big companies, I honestly think Nvidia is concerned about a possible existential threat. Yeah they are wearing money hats now and lighting cigars with benjamins, but if the cryptocurrency craze collapses like the tulip craze AND all their gaming cards fan got disgruntled and went to console, they could walk out of this with a smaller overall market than they started with.
Market segmentation is a neat trick for maximizing margins but it’s also important to make sure that each market is served well enough that it doesn’t dry up.
The Buy-It-Now prices on eBay also seem to be dipping a bit. I’m looking at Vega 56 and I can buy a used one instantly for $750. They were mostly around $999 a week ago.
If you believe cryptocurrencies have real value and it will be possible to make real money buying consumer-grade GPUs and mining coins longterm, then that’s certainly worth considering.
I’m not convinced they will ultimately hold any real value without being linked to some sort of fiat currency, I doubt value will sufficiently stabilize to really be used to buy anything other than black tar heroin and other illegal shit on the darknet, and even if the first two things come to pass I would be frankly astonished if you could make money mining longterm.
Cryptocurrencies don’t need to be currencies to be valuable. Ignore all the wild eyed techno-libertarian fanatics preaching about digital currencies freeing us all from the shackles of evil fiat currency. It could end up being a trade-able commodity if everyone continues to believe it ought to have value. Same as any rock dug up from the earth that has nothing going for it but scarcity and people believing it ought to have value. Or hell, all the cryptocurrencies could just disappear in a poof of smoke for all I personally care.
Regardless there is currently a lot of money tied up in this nonsense, so miners buying up cards is going to be a thing for awhile. I sincerely hope that it’s something that stabilizes out without the big bubble/bust swings that that are going to make life hell on gamers like myself who just want a decent video card for a new rig.
Minerals always have use outside of their status as precious metals or whatever. Gold is highly conductive. Diamonds can cut shit. Cryptocurrency is assigning value to entropy. Fine, all money is an illusions, but bitcoin et all tie that fantasy directly to wasting energy with a negative environmental impact.
Triple-A 4k gaming will be relegated to the consoles. Additionally, VR adoption will be pushed out even further, if not replaced with AR or mobile, etc. This certainly could impact the future market. It’s not in their interest to have a segment of their customers push out their other customers, potentially permanently.
If I were at Nvidia my real issue would be that crypto buyers aren’t really long-term customers. That’s why I’d favor gamers over them. Get a gamer hooked on Nvidia and he’ll come back generation after generation. A crypto miner? If the market crashes he’s gone forever, and he doesn’t care at all about the brand.
Nvidia’s board has to be immensely worried about a future crypto crash flooding the market with cheap second hand GPU’s and all but destroying mid-market revenue for a good chunk of time.
Not just mid-market. A crash will result in high-end cards like 1080 and Vega 56/64 being flooded onto eBay. Those are $400-$600 cards.
The other things that gold has going for it is that it doesn’t corrode or tarnish, and that it’s quite malleable.
Gold is useful. So is copper. Copper goes for ~$3 a pound. Gold goes for over $1000 an ounce.
There’s no way to explain gold or diamond pricing based on utility for electrical or industrial purposes. I completely concede that gold or diamonds would never drop to 0 value if people stopped collectively believing they were an extra-valuable currency-like commodity tomorrow, but they’d still lose 95%+ of their value.