NVIDIA pretends to care about gamers.

[porina]

9 minutes ago, seee the state im in nooow said:

actually that begs the question: do the theoretical 3060 gamer-only cards get nerfed for things like F@H? o_o

They say they're targeting something in the ethash algorithm so it remains to be seen if it may be triggered by unrelated compute use cases. My current understanding would be that something like folding shouldn't trigger it, but we wont know for sure until someone tries it and reports on it. 

[Poinkachu]

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.

 

[Doug_Dangger]

Nvidia doesn't GAF about gamers because they know miners will buy their products AND they know you will buy them when crypto bursts.

[Kroon]

7 minutes ago, Poinkachu said:

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.

 

 

I think all this accusations about greed are quite strange.   Lets say you own a piece of granit (regular stone) and you have two bid on that stone: one for $80 and one for $100 witch bit would you accept?

 

Companies mission are to make money for the owners nothing else.  This is true for nVidia, AMD, Intel etc etc... Yes even LTT!  Unless you want to change the whole the capitalist system that is what you get.  Whats the alternative?

[AnonymousGuy]

I watched this video with my 3090 and 1080Ti mining.  But I actually use them to game and pause mining when I'm playing.

 

This video is spot on though.  No company gives a fuuuuck about the environment or diversity inclusion whatever the fuck.  If there's no profit in sales or PR they don't do it.

[Kilrah]

Is that specifically for the 3060 or would the 3060Ti also be included?

 

I'm contemplating getting the single fan 3060Ti that was announced to upgrade my SFF build's 1070, but while I'd do so mainly for gaming... I don't game 24/7, so the card would be mining and paying for itself in some of the downtime. If it's crippled as well Nvidia wouldn't get my money for one.

[tarfeef101]

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:

1. 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 
2. 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. 
3. 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. 
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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. 

[SansVarnic]

@tarfeef101 your topic has been merged with the official video topic. We prefer that members make their responses and replies to the topic in question rather than creating a topic about another. Please keep this in mind in the future. Thank you.

[tarfeef101]

8 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

@tarfeef101 your topic has been merged with the official video topic. We prefer that members make their responses and replies to the topic in question rather than creating a topic about another. Please keep this in mind in the future. Thank you.

thanks, i couldn't remember where the video topics were posted, got too used to FP being where I found videos when they used to be on the forums. I originally intended for it to be here

[porina]

44 minutes ago, Kroon said:

Lets say you own a piece of granit (regular stone) and you have two bid on that stone: one for $80 and one for $100 witch bit would you accept?

Things are often not as simple as reducing it to a single decision point. Let's further say the $80 buyer is likely to come back again for another piece in future if they are kept happy. The $100 buyer just buys what they can and don't care who they get it from. Which would you rather sell to then?

[Poinkachu]

42 minutes ago, Kroon said:

 

 

I think all this accusations about greed are quite strange.   Lets say you own a piece of granit (regular stone) and you have two bid on that stone: one for $80 and one for $100 witch bit would you accept?

 

Companies mission are to make money for the owners nothing else.  This is true for nVidia, AMD, Intel etc etc... Yes even LTT!  Unless you want to change the whole the capitalist system that is what you get.  Whats the alternative?

Well, yeah. The whole idea of a business is to make as much money. I do know that.

But there's also this thing called principle, taking a stand, cammaradierie, or whatever (pardon me, it's 4AM at my place & english is not even official 2nd language in my country).
Let's say I wanna sell something, which my good friend needs and he's willing to pay for it eventhough a bit, I'd make profit either way., and I opted to sell it to other people knowing full well my friend will suffer because of it. For me, that's my greed getting the better of me. Especially if the friend is the one who helped me went big.
Probably should've typed "arrogant and/or greedy" instead of "arrogant and greedy", but I think you can now see why I said greedy.
As for nvidia case, my history is a bit rusty, but pretty sure it wasn't crypto that helped them expand. (Yes, I know that this is my silly hopeful mind talking, in the hope that they'd try to prioritize peoples that doesn't use tens if not unlimited GPUs as a single person)

But yea like Linus said, "Nvidia is not your friend".
Or as I liked to say it : "Companies is not your friend"

All in all, I'm just wishing there's a strong enough rival for NVIDIA so that at the very least they're more more hesitant to pull off their usual kind of iffy stunts.

[Kroon]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Things are often not as simple as reducing it to a single decision point. Let's further say the $80 buyer is likely to come back again for another piece in future if they are kept happy. The $100 buyer just buys what they can and don't care who they get it from. Which would you rather sell to then?

 

To the buyer that gives the company the most money (long or short time depending on what the owner wants)  Again the whole idea of a company is to make as much money as possible, this is nothing strange as  its what capitalist is all about. 

 

Again I are so confused why so many react on this behaviour, its not unique to nVidia since every company are doping the exact same thing.  Only difference is that nVidia is quite open about it while others are trying to be more stealthy about it. 

[OriAr]

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.

[tikker]

22 minutes ago, tarfeef101 said:

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

I feel like this fallacy is at or near the root of all discourse. The vocal population we hear complain think that gamers should for some reason have first pick, while the GPU market extends beyond gaming and  is just anothe market at the end of the day. All this "don't sell to miners" will bite them in the arse when e.g. AMD by the same analogy decides threadrippers aren't for gamers and only people with proof that their work needs it can buy them.

 

25 minutes ago, tarfeef101 said:

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.

The mining power will for sure aim its hunger at some other PoW coin once ETH goes PoS. I don't think acceptance by the community will be a big deal though. While probably a large fraction of the recent flock to mining are people just wanting to make a dime with the insane prices BTC, ETH and others are reaching, there is a significant amount of people that is genuinely interested in the projects behind the coin. There is a reason after all why shitcoins and aribtrary copies mostly just fade out of existence and innovative ones that do something or aim to solve a problem/do something unique fare better.

[atxcyclist]

29 minutes ago, tikker said:

I feel like this fallacy is at or near the root of all discourse. The vocal population we hear complain think that gamers should for some reason have first pick, while the GPU market extends beyond gaming and  is just anothe market at the end of the day. All this "don't sell to miners" will bite them in the arse when e.g. AMD by the same analogy decides threadrippers aren't for gamers and only people with proof that their work needs it can buy them.

 

The mining power will for sure aim its hunger at some other PoW coin once ETH goes PoS. I don't think acceptance by the community will be a big deal though. While probably a large fraction of the recent flock to mining are people just wanting to make a dime with the insane prices BTC, ETH and others are reaching, there is a significant amount of people that is genuinely interested in the projects behind the coin. There is a reason after all why shitcoins and aribtrary copies mostly just fade out of existence and innovative ones that do something or aim to solve a problem/do something unique fare better.

As a gamer I just want one single new card every 5-6 years, that's it. I'm not greedy and many others that game have an upgrade cycle similar to my own. If nothing is done, miners being able to justify paying more for cards than gamers will because they're profiting, is eventually going to kill PC gaming. Why would game studios bother making newer and better games when the general gamer cannot get or afford a graphics card?

 

The only real solution is regulation, and my hope is that large governments make the crypto exchanges illegal and crash the whole system. It's essentially a huge tax evasion and money-laundering scheme anyway, they have justification.

[tikker]

26 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

Why would game studios bother making newer and better games when the general gamer cannot get or afford a graphics card?

Same reason expensive car manufacturers make cars that the vast majority will never be able to afford I guess.

26 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

As a gamer I just want one single new card every 5-6 years, that's it. I'm not greedy and many others that game have an upgrade cycle similar to my own. If nothing is done, miners being able to justify paying more for cards than gamers will because they're profiting is eventually going to kill PC gaming

I'm not saying I agree with the situation by the way. I'd love me a 3080 at a normal price as well. I meant it more as a be careful what you  wish for and it is truly not just the miners causing it this time.

26 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

The only real solution is regulation, and my hope is that large governments make the crypto exchanges illegal and crash the whole system. It's essentially a huge tax evasion and money-laundering scheme anyway, they have justification.

Tax evasion and money laundering already exits with whatever valuable you can have, banning crypto won't solve that problem and every centralised exchange that I know of takes you through a KYC process if you want to get fiat out. Not all crypto aims to be money either. The only reasonable candidate for money laundering I know is Monero, which is anonymous. Bitcoin etc. transactions are all public, can be traced, can be slow and will get attention in some shape or form if you buy/sell a large sum no matter which coin you pick. Added current benefit is that BTC and ETH transfers are expensive now, so they'll lose a ton of money to transaction fees in the current climate if they split it up

[Nystemy]

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...)

[Loki0111]

Just a heads up for the Linus and the folks who made this one. This does not appear to just be a simple artificial driver limitation.

 

The encrypted BIOS chip appears to be a second layer which is going to cripple the cards mining capabilities. I couldn't find the link but someone tested the card in Linux without the Nvidia drivers and the card still detected it was mining after a few minutes and dropped it mining performance by almost half.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-vbios-lock-hashing-rate-rtx3060

 

Simply posting an FYI given the content in the video.

[atxcyclist]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Same reason expensive car manufacturers make cars that the vast majority will never be able to afford I guess.

I'm not saying I agree with the situation by the way. I'd love me a 3080 at a normal price as well. I meant it more as a be careful what you  wish for and it is truly not just the miners causing it this time.

Tax evasion and money laundering already exits with whatever valuable you can have, banning crypto won't solve that problem and every centralised exchange that I know of takes you through a KYC process if you want to get fiat out. Not all crypto aims to be money either. The only reasonable candidate for money laundering I know is Monero, which is anonymous. Bitcoin etc. transactions are all public, can be traced, can be slow and will get attention in some shape or form if you buy/sell a large sum no matter which coin you pick. Added current benefit is that BTC and ETH transfers are expensive now, so they'll lose a ton of money to transaction fees in the current climate if they split it up

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. 

[tikker]

10 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

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.

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.

13 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

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.

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.

18 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

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.

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.

 

25 minutes ago, Nystemy said:

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.

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.

[atxcyclist]

30 minutes ago, tikker said:

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.

 

 

Nobody that considers themselves a PC gamer cares if a GT 1030 can play Half-Life 2 maxed-out, there's an issue of relevancy. It's not even possible to buy a few-generations-old decent cards for reasonable prices now. You have to go back into the Radeon 7000 HD series or Nvidia GTX 600 series cards to not overpay, because those cards are shit, and they still don't play even remotely new-ish games above potato settings. I guess if PC gaming only means playing Quake 3 Arena in 2021, then yeah we're all set...

[Nystemy]

27 minutes ago, tikker said:

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.

Yes, if it is just chips that have manufacturing defects making them unsuitable for their RTX cards, then more power to them. (Would though still like to see at least one display port on it...)
If they make a new chip for it, then they are just screwing over people for the sake of money. _{(Not weird for companies to do to be fair...)}

A teardown of these "mining" cards would though fairly quickly state the case. (If the die has the same base part number, then it is fairly certain to be the same chip, if it has different dimensions, it certainly is something new. Though, who knows, I haven't torn one down...)

[Nystemy]

3 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

You have to go back into the Radeon 7000 HD series or Nvidia GTX 600 series cards to not overpay, because those cards are shit, and they still don't play even remotely new-ish games above potato settings.

Having a GTX660 myself, it is still fairly decent.
Yes, some more graphically intensive modern games is mostly out of the question. But everyone doesn't play the latest or most graphically intensive games out there. A fair few people can make due with even a 460 to be fair. But there is also the 680 with far more performance. (There is also the 690, it is though a collectors item due to it being one of the last dual GPU "gaming" cards from nVidia.)

For a while one could however buy a 1650(non-TI) for next to nothing on the second hand market (like 15$ including shipping), that were a fairly good deal.

[atxcyclist]

7 minutes ago, Nystemy said:

Having a GTX660 myself, it is still fairly decent.
Yes, some more graphically intensive modern games is mostly out of the question. But everyone doesn't play the latest or most graphically intensive games out there. A fair few people can make due with even a 460 to be fair. But there is also the 680 with far more performance. (There is also the 690, it is though a collectors item due to it being one of the last dual GPU "gaming" cards from nVidia.)

For a while one could however buy a 1650(non-TI) for next to nothing on the second hand market (like 15$ including shipping), that were a fairly good deal.

Kudos to you for sticking that out, but I had to ditch my 750 Ti in 2016 because the performance was sub-par for games like Fallout 4. I don't believe a 750 Ti is very different than a 660 from a performance standpoint.

 

Even if 900 series cards were affordable, people would have an option for DX12/Vulcan-capable cards with decent amounts of VRAM and GPU performance. I'm seeing plenty of 980s for $250+ on eBay, which is absurd considering they are now 4 generations old and were not even the highest-tier.

[Moonzy]

28 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

 

Nobody that considers themselves a PC gamer cares if a GT 1030 can play Half-Life 2 maxed-out, there's an issue of relevancy. It's not even possible to buy a few-generations-old decent cards for reasonable prices now. You have to go back into the Radeon 7000 HD series or Nvidia GTX 600 series cards to not overpay, because those cards are shit, and they still don't play even remotely new-ish games above potato settings. I guess if PC gaming only means playing Quake 3 Arena in 2021, then yeah we're all set...

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.