GPU Prices - Damn those Miners and their imaginary shekels!

[Arse Biscuit]

In communism, the GTX 1080 TI would cost only 5 dollars.

And you'd have to stand in line for a week for the rest of your life to get one.

People were saying that we would hit the point of diminishing returns on GPUs 5 years ago with the nvidia 600 series, that GPUs couldnt possibly keep getting more powerful forever. Many in the industry were CONVINCED that going below 65nm would be impossible to do on any profitable scale. Many were convinced that CPUs with more then 4 cores would never exist, or if they did, they would be too expensive to produce and buy.

I distinctly remember many in the industry clamoring that 8 GB drives were enough, that the 10GB hard drives were just toounstable, and would never reach mass production. Then how going over 80 GB was ridiculous, then how 1TB was the largest any mass production drive would hit. Now you can buy 8TB drives, 16TB are coming soon.

If there is one thing to take away from this, it is that, no, we will not hit those diminishing returns. Someone will find a way to use that extra capability and create more demand. "When a computer becomes powerful enough without having an upgrade path" has been predicted since the 90s, for both servers and home PCs, and it has never happened. It may slow down a bit, but progress wont stop. Unless video games die out as a hobby, you will always have some who want more then just baseline graphical processing power.

Never bet against technological progress, you will always lose.

The "alpha barrier" problem has been solved (the point where electronics gets so miniature that alpha particles start randomly flipping bits), so while the assumption that GPUs (alongside all other electronics) had reached their limit was correct then, it isn't correct now.

Some bright bastard figured out how to use code to correct PCB status a few times a second. Now we honestly don't know what the limit is.

 

[OwO What's This?]

fuck you got(ta) mine

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

Actually, manufacturers are very wary about this bubble, because they know that miners will ultimately dump their used cards on eBay/Craigslist, which will fuck up the market.

This is partly why they aren't going to increase shipments to retailers, because if the bubble bursts, they will be stick with a ton of product gathering dust on shelves.

The 2nd reason is that NVIDIA is winding down their Pascal shipments, because Volta is rumored to launch on March 2018, they already launched a Titan V card for $3,000, so Volta can't be too far away.

ETA: Gamers Nexus has a couple of good videos surveying manufacturers about it, watch the 2nd video if you want today's perspective:

I wonder how many of the mongs that will get them on ebay or craigslist realize that a used card from some cryptominer is going to be burnt to shit. You don’t leave multiple gpus running in rapid succession for months and months on end without a severe loss in performance.

I agree on diversification being a must for both NVIDIA & AMD, but around 60% of NVIDIA's revenue comes from consumer-grade graphics cards. So gaming is still a hugely significant market for them.

If you look at Steam Survey results, the 1060 became the most popular on Steam last year. This means that a not-insignifcant number of people are upgrading their rigs as they go.

But here there is a reason to upgrade, PC games keep getting more and more graphically intensive. This is basically planned obsolescence that is inherent in the value proposition.


I agree on this part, Creative used to be really scummy in their ways way back then, but I don't know how it figures into the GPU discussion we have now, if you have a sound card or external DAC/amp, then you're set for the next 5 years, minimum. There's no real need to upgrade it because Dolby Digital 5.1 has been the standard of choice for years now.

GTX 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 1080Ti and the AMD Vega range are all top-end cards with a price tag equivalent to an entire lower to midrange PC, I don't disagree on that.

However, the AMD 570, 580 range and the GTX 1060, 1050Ti are all midrange offerings, and a +50% hike in street prices is a big deal for people who want to build their 1st PC, which is a surprisingly high amount, I've had 5 different people of differing age groups and requirements who asked me to help them build a gaming PC in the past 2-3 months.

As you mentioned, SLI is increasingly a non factor now, NVIDIA has already removed SLI fingers from 1060 cards and below, and has effectively removed 3 and 4-way SLI from gamers by limiting it to only a few applications.

Partly answered in the above sections.

Also, this is isn't the 1st time this happened, and it won't be the last, it's just the 1st time the price surges reached cards like the 1080/1080Ti, which held their prices the last time Crypto surged, I fully expect this to happen with Volta as well, depending on hash-rate and pricing of course.

And yeah, salty gamers are this thread's fuel lol.


NVIDIA has already highlighted crypto miners as an opportunity in their earnings reports, but right now, they are limiting GPU sales to 1 GPU/customer in their stores and are instructing retailers to do the same. Which are clearly moves to prioritize gamers, not sure how much difference it makes though.

What's also interesting is that Intel has just hired Raja Koduri, who used to run AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, so they may be planning to enter the GPU arena as well.

I assume Samsung has experience making GPUs considering that they make them for their own phones, but I don't know how much overlap there is with desktop graphics, or if they will be even interested in that market.


That's a reason that totally slipped my mind. Thanks for your comment.



I think PC gaming is getting more and more prominent as time passes, you notice that Steam is now becoming a base platform in nearly all game announcements, even Microsoft has allowed all of their premium 1st party titles to appear on PC, most of them being exclusive to the Windows App Store.

Ultimately, I don't completely believe in the PCMR propaganda that PC will eventually make consoles obsolete, but their work has had its fruit in pushing PC as a worthwhile platform.


All home consoles use AMD hardware (CPU+GPU), the Nintendo Switch uses a Nvidia GM20B. I am unsure how much Nvidia controls of the mobile market, given that most phones now have Qualcomm stuff in them.

Nvidia’s main share so far as I know in he mobile market right now is their shield tablet and the Switch, which uses the same tech as the shields. That probably isn’t as good as having Nvidia chipsets in every smartphone, but providing parts for the fastest selling console at the moment has to net you a decent amount of money.

 

[AnOminous]

I wonder how many of the mongs that will get them on ebay or craigslist realize that a used card from some cryptominer is going to be burnt to shit. You don’t leave multiple gpus running in rapid succession for months and months on end without a severe loss in performance.

There are idiots who literally burned their own houses down from cryptomining. Because they were just that stupid and that ignorant of the fact that entropy=heat. (Also before anyone acksshuallys me I know that's not literally true but it's reasonably close as far as starting fires goes.)

 

[AngeloTheWizard]

There are idiots who literally burned their own houses down from cryptomining. Because they were just that stupid and that ignorant of the fact that entropy=heat. (Also before anyone acksshuallys me I know that's not literally true but it's reasonably close as far as starting fires goes.)

A mining operation in my town set a shipping container in a commercial district of town on fire because of their mining rig. Was hilarious.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

TFW you bought all your fairly modern PC shit before the mining thing became a total fad and prices went through the roof

feels_good_man.jpg

 

[Nazi vegeta]

I've sold my 570 a couple of weeks ago for 400 euros+shipping, to some thai dude.
Now i'm stuck with a shitty second hand 560, until the situation improves and prices come down.

 

[Done]

Given that this is a salt mine thread, I'm pretty sure that we could do with more salt:

LOL

More Salt:

Am I supposed to get feels because the most expensive consumer GPU got more expensive?

Fuck you Miners!!!!!!!111!!!!!

Even furries are joining in:

Not Salt, but still made me laugh, they are mocking Kacho/Commiesona from the Gamergate Hanger-ons thread:

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

the concept of 'street prices' for graphics cards is the funniest thing i've heard all week

The gamers will have the last laugh here, considering how much damage has already happened to people mining bitcoin (e.g. burning down their house), and it'll just keep happening.

 

[Done]

@neger psykolog @CrunkLord420 Thoughts? Seems like Nvidia is unbundling the miner and gamer cards.

NVIDIA Turing is a Crypto-mining Chip Jen-Hsun Huang Made to Save PC Gaming

When Reuters reported Turing as NVIDIA's next gaming graphics card, we knew something was off about it. Something like that would break many of NVIDIA's naming conventions. It now turns out that Turning, named after British scientist Alan Turing, who is credited with leading a team of mathematicians that broke the Nazi "Enigma" cryptography, is a crypto-mining and blockchain compute accelerator. It is being designed to be compact, efficient, and ready for large-scale deployment by amateur miners and crypto-mining firms alike, in a quasi-industrial scale.

NVIDIA Turing could be manufactured at a low-enough cost against GeForce-branded products, and in high-enough scales, to help bring down their prices, and save the PC gaming ecosystem. It could have an ASIC-like disruptive impact on the graphics card market, which could make mining with graphics cards less viable, in turn, lowering graphics card prices. With performance-segment and high-end graphics cards seeing 200-400% price inflation in the wake of crypto-currency mining wave, PC gaming is threatened as gamers are lured to the still-affordable new-generation console ecosystems, led by premium consoles such as the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. There's no word on which GPU architecture Turing will be based on ("Pascal" or "Volta"). NVIDIA is expected to launch its entire family of next-generation GeForce GTX 2000-series "Volta" graphics cards in 2018.

 

[CrunkLord420]

@neger psykolog @CrunkLord420 Thoughts? Seems like Nvidia is unbundling the miner and gamer cards.

Overdue and an obvious move. GPUs are no longer gaming-specific with CUDA taking dominance in the HPC marketing. I'm sure there is a bunch of small manufacturing optimizations they can make for people who don't need actual video output, and just need the CUDA cores. I thought that's what the Tesla line was all about and I'm not entirely sure how this is different.

PS. it should be noted that Tesla's are not actually cost efficient for mining, they simply cost too much.

 

[Done]

Overdue and an obvious move. GPUs are no longer gaming-specific with CUDA taking dominance in the HPC marketing. I'm sure there is a bunch of small manufacturing optimizations they can make for people who don't need actual video output, and just need the CUDA cores. I thought that's what the Tesla line was all about and I'm not entirely sure how this is different.

PS. it should be noted that Tesla's are not actually cost efficient for mining, they simply cost too much.

I'm sure you mean the upcoming Volta, Tesla was a past-gen micro-architecture. It seems that there will be 2 GPU lines, one for gaming and one specifically designed for mining. I don't know if they will be able to stop miners from flocking to the product line with cheaper street prices though.. Maybe add some sort of block?

But yeah, that is an obvious move, and it has the side effect of enabling Nvidia to further flood the market against AMD by listing more SKUs @ retailers.

 

[CrunkLord420]

I'm sure you mean the upcoming Volta, Tesla was a past-gen micro-architecture. It seems that there will be 2 GPU lines, one for gaming and one specifically designed for mining. I don't know if they will be able to stop miners from flocking to the product line with cheaper street prices though.. Maybe add some sort of block?

But yeah, that is an obvious move, and it has the side effect of enabling Nvidia to further flood the market against AMD by listing more SKUs @ retailers.

Games rely on CUDA to do physics (PhysX DAWG!) and like tessellation or whatever. They'd have to do something retarded to gimp it, also possibly anti-competitive/illegal. They just need to build more, and sell them, miners don't care, they need to know electricity cost, thermals, card cost and hashrate, that's it.

 

[WeeGee]

Glad I snagged a decent GPU before this event happened.

 

[Puppet Pal Clem]

Right as my fucking GPU fails...

 

[ConcernedAnon]

The gtx 1080ti only rose $100 on Amazon Canada, and sure that's not great, but it's nowhere near cataclysmic. I mean the damn thing's already worth $1200 in Canadian funny money, $100 isn't going to kill anyones budget.

 

[AF 802]

I need to replace my GTX 750 Ti. What do I do? I don't.

 

[Done]

The gtx 1080ti only rose $100 on Amazon Canada, and sure that's not great, but it's nowhere near cataclysmic. I mean the damn thing's already worth $1200 in Canadian funny money, $100 isn't going to kill anyones budget.

That's what I find hilarious about it all, if someone can't buy an entry or midrange card because of the miner inflation, then that's understandable, and they get all my s.

But people ranting and frothing at the mouth because the most expensive cards on the market got more expensive is just .

 

[neger psykolog]

I need to replace my GTX 750 Ti. What do I do? I don't.

Unless you're planning on getting a top of the range GPU then get something like a 980 which can be found for $5-600.

 

[Nazi vegeta]

But people ranting and frothing at the mouth because the most expensive cards on the market got more expensive is just .

I "know" a couple of people who are already bitching, because the wont be able to buy the newest nvidia gpu, becuz miners.
They have a 1080ti and they upgrade every year.
Everytime I read their rants, I want to puch their stupid corporate cocksucking faces.