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Jean-Nicholas

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  1. Informative
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Nystemy in Your Gaming PC Has A Bottleneck!   
    Bottlenecks in computing systems are a fairly nuanced topic.
     
    In a typical "gaming" PC, we are though mostly concerned about CPU and GPU performance, and memory bandwidth comes in as a close second, followed quickly by storage bandwidth/latency and overall network latency if one plays online. Though, to be fair here, there is a lot of stuff happening in the background that effects performance by a lot that is outside of the scope of the hardware itself.
     
    One of the bigger things to consider for parallel workloads is Inter Process Communication (IPC, not to be confused with Instruction Per Clock that also is IPC...), since communication between our different nodes in our system tends to be a major limit in regards to how well we can scale our parallel workloads across multiple resources. In short, inter process communication is a large part of how well we can scale in accordance to Amdalh's law. (Our IPC practically allows us to scale down towards smaller parallel workloads as inter node latency decreases, as long as we have sufficient bandwidth to handle our workload. And funnily enough, the other IPC that is our out of order execution works its way up from our smallest parallel code segments towards larger ones. And idealistically these two could meet in the middle to reach perfect scaling in accordance to Amdalh's law. But there is practical limits to how easily one can implement such.)
     
    Then there is also a question of how various process calls are made, what queuing system the OS/Kernel uses, and how many IPC related background tasks one can keep around in core resources. Leaving an IPC related thread in a core despite it stalling the majority of the time is actually something that can improve overall system performance fairly noticeably through an increase in responsiveness, all though mostly applicable to more HPC related applications, or other situations where tight IPC is required, like large NVMe based storage servers. It is similar to the difference between a buffered and an unbuffered switch. (Here CPU vendors could just implement a higher degree of SMT, as to keep more IPC related threads in our cores while not having to worry about missing out on performance due to them stalling.)
     
    This is though just me talking straight from the top of my head, there is potential that one might see this as gibberish...
  2. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to linuxChips2600 in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    The planet is screaming for help; why aren't people listening?

    Answer - sociopathic behavior?????????????

    I hope this is not the beginning of the end...


    Edit - actually, why not use our broken electronics to start a personal museum of personal electronics? that may not be a bad idea...
  3. Funny
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to tutacat in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    So it's actually beneficial for us to reverse engineer the crypto blocker driver

  4. Like
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to sub68 in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    Yeah I might do this once these cards are obsolete and actually do it for a good cause.
    A asus b450 miner 
    A Celeron 
    Some ram 
    A decent psu
    A couple of risers 
    And a case made from 2x4.
    Baam a f@h that might be crazy.
    Also might be a good render farm......(for video)
  5. Funny
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to ahuckphin in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    The title reminds me of 2kliksphilip's video titled "Nvidia, stop being a DICK"
  6. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to D13H4RD in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    So it's just the miners that's causing this whole mess, eh? We're just going to ignore;
    Heightened demand overall that's started since 2020 due to pandemic-induced stay-at-home orders A severe shortage of raw materials that is affecting the production of the actual card such as VRAM dies. Manufacturing scaling issues at chip foundries that's reducing output considerably Freight companies prioritizing vaccine and PPE distribution rather than a graphics card Limited wafer allocation due to several products being made on the same node and companies prioritizing higher-margin products like data-center chips. I'm not at all saying miners aren't contributing because they very much are, in a significant manner. But it's tone-deaf to say they are the literal problem when there are many, many, many contributing factors to why the GPU market right now is a right mess. Especially the first one, as it seems people have forgotten the time where it was a right impossibility to find a Turing GPU that also isn't jacked up in price due to shortages. This was before the late-2020 mining boom, by the way.
     
    And it still floors me to see you claim a GTX 1060 is unable to play a modern game well...
  7. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to SteelSkin667 in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    I'm as frustrated as you about the current pricing, and I really think no one should give in to the current scalper prices as it only encourages them, but the solution to me is definitely to wait it out. I was planning on an upgrade, but scalpers can FOAD so I'll just wait as long as it'll take.
    However, when you say that "t nothing new runs well on a 1060" that is blatantly false, it is still perfectly fine and will run everything decently well. You can and should wait it out with the rest of us.
  8. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Blademaster91 in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    It seems like miners don't realize the normal consumer doesn't want to pay $2000 for a single graphics card, or don't have the means to spend as much as what a whole system cost when prices were normal.
    I don't want to pay $1000 for a 3060Ti, and it doesn't really seem worth it to mine with a single card after power cost, and crypto could crash any time. But i'm not even mad miners are buying up all the GPUs, what annoys me is the miners buying up to the point its ruining the market and I wouldn't be surprised the next series of cards cost even more because people are willing to pay the scalper prices.
  9. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Moonzy in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    you said there are no cards, i said there are, just overpriced
    you said you arent willing to pay those prices, i suggested you wait for it to come down
     
    you want your cake and eat it too? good luck
     
    you're there trying to scream about your mental health during covid being an issue while not willing to pay $1000 to solve it, shows how little of a problem it actually is, or how little you value your mental health
     
    [edit] I could give less fucks about your mental health if im being brutally honest [/edit]
     
    blame me all you want, but you ain't getting your gpu at MSRP anytime soon, while im happily paying a premium to enjoy them the way i want to
  10. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Moonzy in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    then wait for the price to come down
     
    exactly, have YOU heard of covid and the impact it had on the manufacturing side?
     
    stop pretending it only affects you
    plenty of people that arent gamers get by just fine
  11. Funny
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to atxcyclist in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    I'm not paying $2000 for a GPU. My target is a 3060 ti or a 3070, and I'd pay actual retail for one but not 200% or 300% of MSRP.
     
    Have you heard of covid? We're in lockdown here. So I have no other options but to find entertainment in my home, and that would be playing games except nothing new runs well on a 1060, so I'm not buying the games until I upgrade. And to somewhat add to my first point, I'm not going to hang out at a brick and mortar retailer to buy a card either because of the covid risk.
  12. Like
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Luscious in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    This is going to be a long rant. I'm gonna take a different approach on this as someone who does F@H as well as gaming. I got involved with the project maybe 5-6 years ago after following it for over a decade earlier and have a rig running 24/7 with four GPU's.
     
    The cards I have are water-cooled 980Ti's. These were priced at $800/each back when I bought them with the air-cooled variants $200-300 less. So when most users dropped $500-600 on a top-of-the-line GPU for their gaming rig I was spending $3200 - that's quite a sizeable investment.
     
    Of course the other reason I justified my purchase was 4-way SLI (still a thing at the time) and 4K performance. Driver choice was critical here, but the version I stuck with showed almost linear performance scaling across 1-2-3-4 cards in more than one game. So the argument for having multiple GPU's in a box had more than one use case.
     
    I should mention that I don't do and have never done mining. All my non-gaming GPU activity goes towards F@H. I should also mention as well that electricity/heating for me is paid for and does not factor into anything.
     
    Here's were things began to get "sour" for me. I can remember almost to the day when the same water-cooled 1080TI variant of the card I had was selling for the same $800... only to spike in price to $1600 just a few months later. That's what the 2018 crypto boom/bust achieved.
     
    Come the 2000 series and the prices for the 2080TI stayed at the $1600 price point. Sure, I could have bought four but my outlay would have been over $6000 - a crazy amount to spend on GPU's. Worse, the Titan V that came out after had a sticker price of $2500... each!!!
     
    The Titan V wasn't a mining or folding card - yet it could do both alongside gaming. The irony is that for a gaming card it was absurdly overpriced, meaning if you bought one, you absolutely raped the thing for whatever it could do.
     
    Now look at the price of a water-cooled 3090 - $1730 for EVGA's XC3 Ultra Hydro copper card. Four of them would set me back almost $7000... and yet I cannot even purchase ONE!!! It has been out of stock since it's announcement and since it's launch and is still out of stock to this day. It is, by the definition of the word, a paper product.
     
    How could a "mining card" possibly help me??? Well I could have just a single 3090 installed for gaming/4K and have three dedicated mining cards doing F@H. That would leave three 3090's on the table for others to enjoy. Similarly if I had a dedicated 4U box set up for F@H I could slap mining cards in those, since that's all they would do, rather than hog a bunch of "gaming" cards.
     
    If nVidia is trying to help the situation, they are THREE YEARS TOO LATE. If something like this would have been done in 2018 we could have seen three important things happen: (1) GPU prices remain at more acceptable prices, (2) a viable new alternative for those passionate about F@H/mining, and (3) more stock left available for gamers. What you see today is what happens when big corporations sit on their asses and let problems like this snowball until they become next to impossible to remedy.
     
    Now I really am concerned how I will upgrade my system if one (or more) of my cards bites the dust, since they are getting close to the end of their lifetime. I cannot get a new card, there;s no way I'll find four identical used ones, and who's to say the 3000 series successor won't suffer a similar fate. AMD and nVidia are in a world of hurt if today's shortages continue.
  13. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Loki0111 in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    If you are buying something for a fixed MSRP amount and marking it up 200% or more with no value added because there are extreme supply constraints and you know you can exploit the situation due to demand then however you dress that up its scalping.
     
    This is not new. During WW2 and most recent disasters people often try to scalp or exploit people for food, clean water and fuel. A mother will pay whatever she has to in order to get food for her children to survive and the individuals who exploited those situations knew that. Its one of the reasons government have stepped in during those kinds of situations to establish rationing and pricing controls.
     
    While GPU's are not food or fuel the same principal and tactics are being applied by some individuals and businesses. In that context I will never financially support this kind of thing.
  14. Informative
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Nystemy in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    The 700 series were about as impressive compared to the 600 series, as the 20 series is compared to the 10. (it is a bit of an improvement, but not much...)
    I have been looking a bit in the 900 series for an upgrade myself. Like a 950Ti, but everything with a "Ti" on the end is more expensive than it should be, regardless of how many generations old said card is.
    And the ones ending with 80 are usually rarely dropping bellow 50% of the price when they were brand new. (unless it is caked with dust, or have been driven over by a car...)
    The 1650(non-TI) were however selling for next to nix. Mainly due to the fact that everyone on the internet calling owners of that card for idiots for just owning it.... But for having roughly 670-680 performance, it is a decent upgrade in my case. (Mainly due to its much lower power consumption. electricity isn't free.)

    I personally follow the idea that a second hand card should practically always be less than 80% the price of a new card with the same theoretical performance. And then another price drop for every year or so on top of that. Ie, I wouldn't even ask 50 bucks for selling one of my GTX660 cards. (With exception for more "collectors item's", but "x80" cards aren't collector ones, nor are "Ti" ones either, since there is literally tens of thousands of them from each brand.)
     
    Miners though cares about 1 thing, and that is power efficiency.
    And ASIC mining is much more power efficient, but a lot of such devices are creating even more eWaste than what even "mining GPUs" creates, since ASIC mining chips literally can't do anything else than mine crypto... And sometimes only 1 specific type of crypto currency as well. (ASIC mining is also a bit expensive on the upfront side, and they too are a bit in a shortage due to supply issues. That nVidia's GPUs can keep up with the ASIC miners is honestly impressive. But also shows how the ASIC miners aren't really having all that good designs either, and they at times are stuck to using older manufacturing nodes in most cases as well.)

    Having a few crypto miners in my "friend circle", I have heard that older cards aren't actually profitable, even the 900 series is largely useless for mining since electricity costs outweigh the income from mining in a lot of cases.
  15. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Moonzy in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    Meanwhile you own a 1060, which is what a lot of people still uses and are happy using it
     
    I myself still game on a 970 as I've mentioned, despite having all these GPU that I can hand pick from
     
    Not everyone needs the latest and greatest GPU to play games
     
    My friend played cyberpunk on his 1050ti at 20fps, I even offered him a rig to borrow (with a 3070 in it) for a week to enjoy the game fully, he refused and said he's fine with playing it at those conditions.
  16. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Moonzy in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    then pay up, a 3090 is made for people like you i reckon
     
    and is that anyone else's fault or?
     
    thing is, miners are probably wiping out everything up to pascal, so you're technically right
    they're using rx400 series, as well as everything newer
  17. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to tikker in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    The cheapest GPUs that are still for gaming (i.e. not just display adapters) can still game. Just like the cheap car may not look the best and not go the fastest, the cheapest GPU won't play all games or at the highest settings, but it will play games.
    I agree that mining hasn't improved the market. 2000 series were extremely expensive. Just saying that it's not the sole and maybe not even the biggest reason for current shortages. Even without miners it would probably still be a shit show. Everything has ground to an almost halt, which I do think has strongly amplified the impact miners have had besides its own effect. I'm not happy either. I was millimetres away from getting a 3080 FE on launch, but sadly the shopping cart page crashed when I was checking out and it was gone.
    I stand by my earlier point. See it as "defending miners" if you want to, but I as a gamer don't have any more right to buy a GPU now than a miner. I want (not need) one for gaming, they want one to make money. I do think they could have taken better measures. Captcha's or some sort of 1 per customer policy to give us at least a small chance against the bots, for example.
     
    Don't know the indepth details, but "optimized for mining" sounds like nice marketing speak for "didn't make the cut for gaming" to me. If they genuinely are just chips that don't meet the full RTX lineup requirements more power to them really. Should cut down on some waste I hope.
  18. Funny
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to atxcyclist in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    If there were only two car manufacturers on the planet, and a handful of rich people bought all of them and then drove the value up to beyond the reach of normal people, then your comparison would be valid. There are dozens of car manufacturers, and the other difference is that a new $15k car and a new $1.5 million car both have utility of driving down the road, one is just fancier. GPUs don't work that way. The cheapest GPU, something like a GT 1030, doesn't have the utility of actually working for new games, so there's a minimal level of acceptance and mining has made anything worthwhile too expensive and unavailable to gamers.
     
    Miners screwed me out of a 1070 back in 2016, so regardless of what other players are there my ire is directed almost solely at them. This is the second time I haven't been able to get a GPU because of mining, so I am wishing for government intervention into crypto, as it doesn't benefit me one bit to have miners buying all the cards up.
     
    Crypto exists solely to get around government requirements for reporting income and taxes. Someone can buy anything they want outside of common banking systems and avoid taxes, and that money moves from country to country freely to avoid those regulations. That was the purpose of an unregulated currency as it was touted for so long. Even if more measure have been taped-on to curb it, that is the motivation of people that mine and always has been, and miners and traders will find new ways around the system.
     
     
    I like many others have been locked in a house for almost a year because of covid, and we've been trying to get a new GPU for months. People making money on GPUs just yuk it up and come up with a bunch of BS comparisons and excuses to throw at gamers just looking for one card, like I'm seeing all over this thread. 
  19. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Nystemy in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    The "optimized for crypto currency mining" makes it seem like it is a new chip, not a chip that frankly had too many defects to be used by their GTX/RTX cards.

    I personally wouldn't mind if nVidia, AMD, or even Intel had a "bottom of the barrel" skew, literally chips that "work" but have defects that makes them unsuitable for any other product skew.
     
    Such a skew would both provide better overall yield, since even a really broken chip would still be able to be sold and used.
    But it would also offer more products to their customers. Downside is that customers won't go and buy the higher skews if all they need is a minimum viable product able to do the job. (Like a GPU for display output on a server, or a cheap one for some mining or other GPU accelerated workloads.)
     
    If I were in nVidia's seat, I would take the bottom of the barrel chips, slap 2-4 of them onto a PCB, screw on a cheap long water cooling block. (extruded aluminium box section with welded on end caps with some barbs, doesn't get much cheaper than this) Then it could potentially fit in a single slot. Going to 4 GPUs on one card could probably work, since the chips are the bottom of the barrel stuff, ie having a lot of fused off broken sections that doesn't consume much power. Effectively turning chips that have really low performance into something that can be a viable product to the crypto market. (Another big reason for stuffing 4 GPUs onto one card is that it greatly lowers inventory costs, and also speeds up production. And the lower performance of the GPUs means that we likely can skip a ton of the bypass caps on the back since it won't be able to generate the same transients, saving in on manufacturing time and cost as well.) A card like this could though technically also be useful for other GPU accelerated work loads outside of crypto mining, even if it lacks display output.
     
    I also partly doubt that nVidia has chips with a smattering of broken features that would be able to be used for the above.
    Even if production yields of 80% in the semiconductor industry is considered "fairly good", I would still not be surprised if most of the bad chips are junk, since a lot of manufacturing defects makes chips totally unusable. (for an example a critical feature not working where the chip can't work without it. Or a power plain short, or just large misalignments between layers. There is also wafer crashes, (this is really not fun to clean up...) delamination during various production steps (chips go through a lot of thermal cycling during production), or a slew of other problems. Sometimes it can also just be contaminated production materials having slipped in...)

    But in the end.
    I wouldn't praise nVidia for their current actions.
    If all they are doing is taking the bottom of the barrel parts and making that a new skew, then I can be fine with it. But at least give it a single display port for some second hand market use.... (Even if a GPU without display outputs can still be used for GPU computing outside of graphics. One could technically also use it for GPU accelerated rendering in for example Blender or the like...)
  20. Funny
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to OriAr in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    The thing Linus has it wrong that this is not just a driver limitation.... This is a vBIOS and straight up silicon limitation too, and with those 2 things quite frankly, you ain't hacking it. Definitely not on day 1.
    The thing is... if the GPU market doesn't stabilize,  the PC gaming market is in deep trouble, because quite frankly the availability of graphics cards is astonishingly bad, and at some point a lot of gamers would rather pull the trigger on consoles rather than wait the market to somewhat stabilize (Which might not happen for a while). Availability is so bad that RTX 3080 costs about the median salary where I live, and this has been going on since its launch, it didn't even get this bad during the last crypto boom, so I am not surprised Nvidia resorted to drastic measures. It's very nice telling people there will be nice deals in the used market in a year, but also in a year the pandemic will probably end and demand will probably scale down a bit > Cards ending up being E waste anyway. And quite frankly, all the supposed E waste is nothing compared to the damage mining itself does to the environment, with the unthinkable amounts of electricity it consumes, and you can bet most of it is not from renewable sources. 
     
    You can be cynical about Nvidia's motives as much as you want, but the truth is that even if they supposedly don't care that much (And they absolutely do for reasons I will explain later), AIB partners sure as hell do, because they make their money not from the cards themselves (The profit margin for cards is virtually 0), but from all the surrounding peripherals, where the profit margins are far higher, and obviously miners don't buy those. (And gamers do, and sometimes for more money than they spend on their graphic cards), so for them miners are very bad news as far as profits are concerned, and they have every motive to make sure those cards end up with gamers and not miners.

    Also, Nvidia DOES care about gamers, Gamers are a major part of Nvidia's core consumers. They are loyal, they come back time and time again, they have predictable upgrade cycles, Nvidia can plan their long term product and business cycles with them in mind and don't get surprised by their spending habits. Miners directly disrupt Nvidia's core revenue streams for a short term gain by causing shortages and Nvidia try to avoid it at all costs for the sake of their long term business health. Regarding the second hand market, Nvidia aren't the only ones getting screwed by the 2nd hand market being distorted by miners, normal people who want to sell their cards get screwed too by ending up having to sell their cards at rates far below "normal" 2nd hand market rates. (AKA slightly below MSRP of performance equivalent new gen card). With this move by Nvidia, the 2nd hand market will hopefully go back to what it was before the crypto boom, and not be the place where miners dump their thermally abused cards after they pumped them. Also, Lovelace is looking like it will be Nvidia's biggest generation uplift in years, in which case the 2nd hand market being distorted will screw over gamers that want to sell their cards more than Nvidia itself. By using tactics of pump and dump and artificially crashing the 2nd hand market, miners screw over Nvidia 2nd time and Nvidia have every right to protect their long term interests from that.
  21. Informative
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to tarfeef101 in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    This is gonna be a long one, so I figured I'd put it here where it's more digestible vs the FP comments where stuff gets buried, and it's tedious to read a longer post. Let's start out with some quick descriptors of what sort of position I'm in so my comments have the right context:
    I am a gamer, when I'm healthy, at least, I game almost daily. On PC.  I am a computer scientist, I do not work in crypto, but I am interested and have a deeper understanding than the avg person as a result of some research I've done academically and for my own interest I do not hold crpyto assets of any meaningful value (I once had a coworker pay be back in ETH for lunch, but that's about it) In 2017-2018, I was in school, and as part of my attempt to earn an income while I was studying, I had a mini mining farm which was about 10 GPUs at its largest. It was half liquidated, half turned into other systems for random things once the crash happened Currently, I have 0 dedicated mining systems. However, when my main gaming rig is not gaming, I let it mine. My LAN rig is mining, since I cannot go to any LANs during covid. My server also mines when other CUDA tasks aren't active. I live in Canada, and I have electric heating, so why not use GPUs instead of baseboard heaters which will cost the same and not make money. Unlike when I was in school, though, I've not taken advantage of the opportunities I've had to scale up because I don't want to be uncomfortable in my own house anymore. I have a real job, and that's enough. Crypto is mostly a "well, why not" and a "I get to write fun scripts and dockerize miners and stuff" endeavour for me now.  If the last couple points confuse you w/ respect to my "i do not hold crpyto assets" statement, I liquidate instantly. I have no intention of participating in price speculation, so I sell as soon as possible to avoid that risk. If crypto falls in price and mining is not profitable, I will simply go back to folding instead of mining to generate heat as I need it.  
    With that out of the way, let's talk about some of the stuff brought up or talked about in the video. I am writing this while working on a DB upgrade/migration for work so it will be kinda just disjointed bullet points written when I am waiting for stuff to run, sry:
    What is going on in the market right now? Right now, cryptocurrencies are at an all-time high. This includes BTC and ETH, but also many others. This means miners have a lot of incentive to mine, since it will be profitable vs when you'd pay the same for electricity, but get much less for the "work" being done. This has resulted in high demand on top of the already high demand from lots of ppl wanting PCs during the pandemic, so GPUs are overpriced and out of stock.  Lots of gamers feel that they are entitled to GPUs or at least first crack at them, and are mad that they cannot buy them, at least in part because miners are taking some of the available stock Miners want GPUs that are efficient, so mostly the newest generation from nvidia/amd, though at least as far back as pascal is still profitable, so they're willing to go as far back as that depending on how long they expect profits to remain high  What is Nvidia proposing here? Nvidia is saying "well we have some GPUs that might've worked as GPUs, except some stuff that impacts gaming like the ability to display a video signal or RT cores are not working, so we're gonna make those special mining cards instead". They are also saying "since we know gamers are mad that miners are cutting into the gaming card supply, we will limit hashrates on the gaming cards going forwards so miners won't want to use those" No, I'm not here to debate if they are lying or not, that's not really something I'm interested in Diving into that last point a bit more, they are specifically saying they will limit the hashrate performance by half for the algorithm used for mining ETH. They claim they can detect it because the operations the algorithm does are predictable and unique.  Will this work? Short answer (like Linus said), no. But you're here for the long answer if you're still here, so let's do that First, there are blockchains and currencies that use other algorithms that are still profitable, and thus limiting only ETH mining will not make the "problem" go away. Nicehash users (like myself), for example, will simply mine until no algorithm is profitable any longer, and ETH is one of many. In fact, while my 3090 does mine ETH basically all the time, my 2070 does not, even without a limit applied to its ETH performance.  Second, yeah, people will probably find a workaround. Even if you change the implementation of your mining program to be less efficient, but be different enough to avoid detection, given the profit levels we are at, you can probably do so and make it still worth mining. This assumes more "complete" workarounds that don't compromise performance won't exist, which they probably will tbh.  We have seen supply issues are VERY present. I doubt the amount of extra cards this new segment will bring from the heap of otherwise useless silicon will be enough to calm demand even from just miners, so they will still want higher-end cards, and if the previous points are considered, then the lower-end ones w/ the limit applied as well.  What does that mean for the market? This means gamers are unlikely to see a notable change in availability or pricing for the cards they want, sadly This means miners will get a few more options, IF AND ONLY IF they are willing to bet that they can pay off the cost before the next crash, since as mentioned in the video, these mining cards won't have resale value like a full gaming card will. Personally, when I was a student and ran my mini-farm, I intentionally avoided mining models and ASICs because I wasn't willing to make that bet. I am sure I'm not the only one thinking that way. So some miners will benefit, others will not The used market will not be smaller as a result if you assume that Nvidia is telling the truth and they're only selling GPUs that otherwise would've been scraps. If you think they're lying, or at least will overpromise supply and have to sacrifice "good" chips later to meet those promises, then yes, that will result in less gaming cards, and less on the used market when they get resold. I got my 1080tis for cheap off of a miner when the 20 series got announced and was revealed to be poor value. I would have missed out on a couple years of much better gaming performance than my previous 980s if they were mining-editions and weren't able to play warframe. What does that mean for the environment? I don't have much more insight to provide than Linus did on recycling and waste, what he said is right, and that's about it, really. Regarding electricity, current popular currencies/blockchains use "proof of work" algorithms to verify transactions, which is what sucks back all that power. Some, like ETH, are working to move to new ideas like "proof of stake" that can all but eliminate the power consumption of mining as a meaningful problem. However, that has been delayed before, and isn't guaranteed to be accepted by the community per se anyways, so I can't say this is a problem that will definitely go away anytime soon. The crypto community is definitely researching and trying new stuff to solve it, and won't stop til they do, for sure. But I can't say it is going to be so soon that the concern about power consumption can be ignored. Especially because mining isn't always done in places like where I am where electricity is hydro-electric or otherwise "more environmentally friendly" than other sources like coal. How you feel about that is up to you, but there's some info to base your opinions on. Was this the "right thing to do" for Nvidia? IMO, yes. If they are able to make more GPU dies usable, that is a good thing. If you are a gamer, the worst case is you can't buy them, but miner demand is slightly satiated by these extra cards, so maybe you find a "real" card a little bit sooner. If you are a miner, the best case is you get more grofit (shoutout to my fellow Tenno) since there's more cards out there, and as we discussed, the limits in place on the newer gaming cards aren't really going to be a problem anyway. Does this help gamers? Meaningfully, no. But I think that is okay. My controversial opinion is that gamers are in no way entitled to cards more so than anyone else, so I don't really care that it doesn't. If you do, though, you shouldn't be mad at Nvidia for making it worse, but you also should be mad that this isn't really helping you in a meaningful way either. Selling more cards to people directly on the nvidia store, where they can check your geforce account and see that you use geforce experience, and that you play games for 20 hours a week would be more effective at getting cards to "real gamers". But, as Linus said, they don't really care about that, because what else are you gonna do, buy AMD? They have even less cards. Intel? DG1 is like, a 1050ti and not sold to consumers directly. Play consoles? Pls [insert console joke here], but also they aren't in abundant supply either. If they know they can get more $$ out of their existing supply, and not lose gamers' business, they're gonna do what'll get them that extra $$. Well that was fun. Back to DB migrations. 
  22. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to Poinkachu in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    First of all, hats off to you Linus for saying it blatantly, there's a lot of tech-tubers that can and should learn from you. It's good to know that there's someone who cares about gamers enough to the point that they make such an honest blatant video, even when there's a chance it might anger the dragon and it's cult.

    Nvidia doing what nvidia usually do. Hence why we really need a good competitor for GPU so that at the very least they (NVIDIA) should feel wary before deciding to be as arrogant and greedy as they usually are. Yeah I know, there's AMD, but AMD still a bit behind IMHO, not to mention their GPU stock seems worse. That's why when the fiasco with HWU happened I was like : "Oh wow, they want their 2 new features to be the next normal that much huh". If DLSS & RT becomes the new normal then AMD gotta catch up again (if at all possible), since I don't know wether DLSS & RT can be copyrighted or not.
     
    As for e-waste, I keep my old PC until it's totally dead (I consider each of my PC as a lifelong partner, since I'm weird like that), or I give it to someone less fortunate. CMP lines sure kinda makes my personal effort to reduce e-waste from my own hobby & guilty pleasure seems obsolete and kinda like a "Why bother?". I try to hold on to 1 gpu as long as possible, while later unused CMPs will be thrown away by bulks, by 1 person.
     
    And what I found it a bit silly and/or astonishing regarding late few weeks tech news, to think that car industries still need that much chips in the current era. Peoples buy / use cars that much in 2020 and 2021?. Heck... I even rarely use my own car lately, and I live in a country where public transportation isn't that good, and walking / cycling around will either make you drenched in sweat so much like you just took a bath, or a lung infection from all the dust.

     
  23. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to TheBahrbarian in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    I agree that there is a lot of work to be done in tackling the e-waste issue. And while the upgrade mentality definitely doesn't help, I don't think the desktop PC parts is the worst offender. Yes, there are a lot of people that purchase the newest GPUs right when the come out. But for everyone of those people there are people buying used cards on eBay, I have on several occasions. At the end of the day lots of people just can't afford to buy new. I think the "upgrade" culture is worse in industries such as smartphones, where they have a significantly more limited secondhand lifespan (if one at all).
     
    Pushing companies to not use single use plastics is just helping the overall cultural shift, it's still a good thing even if its actual effect is small at the time.
  24. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to starry in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    Agreed. A lot of the culture in the tech community really bothers me because people froth at the mouth over new upgrades when what they have is already overkill for what they do, but they have cognitive dissonance about how that effects e-waste. An increasing number of influencers have been bringing up ewaste lately, which is definitely a good move, but in the long run I dont think influencers or voting with our wallets is going to do anything, because at the end of the day only a small number of people are going to make purchasing decisions based on that. I think what we really need in our society is to figure out robust regulations on right to repair and business practices that produce e-waste. If AMD were in a more leading position, they likely would have done very similar things, and had similar anti-consumer practices, because at the end of the day, they are a publicly traded corporation. Voting with our wallets and pressure from influencers only does so much when a company's profit numbers tell such a different story.
  25. Agree
    Jean-Nicholas reacted to APileofRocks in NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.   
    Did tech culture just begin to care about e-waste? Last time I tuned in, it was all about "UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE" every 6 months.
     
    I do agree with the philosophy of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle and I practice it - but it seems that this kind of criticism comes from one side of the mouth, while careless consumerism comes out the other, least until the issue has gotten bad enough.
     
    I know Linus is being genuine, but the pedantic nit-picking of companies for using single-use plastic bags for zip ties isn't going to get much done. People need to vote with their wallet and, - as in Linus' case - their influence. Good video overall, it's just frustrating to see this make headway into the culture and no-one actually act on it.
     
    I would 100% agree more people need to actually practice the 3 R's. If done at a large enough scale, we could see this affect e-waste in a positive manner. Idealistic, sure - but that's the way this gets done.
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