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> Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production. I don't see too much of that in gaming circles. It's understood that it would be
by jakebasile 9y ago
> Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production.
I don't see too much of that in gaming circles. It's understood that it would be risky as crypto will crash sooner than later. The anger in the PC community is almost exclusively directed at miners. Threads about it pop up on the daily, but what can we do? We could lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs can be used for as they do with the Quadro/FirePro workstation cards, but it's unclear if that would work let alone if it's technically/legally possible.
It's a bad time to be a PC gamer, and just months ago it was a great time to be a PC gamer.
- wmf 9y agoI wonder if they could cripple integer performance; this would prevent mining while probably not hurting gaming performance.
- acoye 9y agoThat may not impact the mining speeds that much as most integer operations would then be done using floats. Also mining speeds are way more bottlenecked by memory speeds than GPU speeds these days.
- aianus 9y agoI wonder if Nvidia et al could short Ethereum as a hedge while expanding production.
- jnordwick 9y agoThis is why futures exist. They would sell the futures to hedge their crypto exposure.
- behringer 9y agoYou'd trust your business to a bitcoin exchange?
- igotthegift 9y agoI don't think that taking out naked short positions on the cryptocurrency market, or a coin that's had 15,000% run-up over the last year, is anything that a publicly traded company, that isn't in finance, would do.
- chillydawg 9y agoThe markets are not liquid enough for a hedge of that scale (eg to cover a factory investment of 8, 9 or 10 figures USD).
- sundvor 9y agoIf the mining was to crash hard, it'd be a fantastic time to be a gamer with 2nd market GPU offerings. ;) Also, I bought my own 1080TI last May and have had it mining when PC not in use. It's already earned itself back, potentially speaking (haven't actually sold anything yet for real dollars). A single card isn't enough to bring anything solid in, but it's at least a foot in the door kind of thing, especially for the fun factor.
- goda90 9y agoA card used for mining will have worn out fans and potentially damage from heat on it. You'll have to hope for really cheap used cards to make up for that.
- sundvor 9y agoI'm running my GPU in mid 50s Celcius, with plenty of case cooling. (Lowered the power target etc.)
- smcl 9y agoI think goda90 was referring to the second hand market.You may have taken good care of yours, but I suspect that miners won't have been as careful so buying these could be a bit of a crapshoot
- jakubtomanik 9y agoWhen it comes to GPU mining (especially ETH) it is very common to undervolt / power limit a GPU as it reduces power usage greatly so the temperatures are lower than usually. Power consumption together with the price of kWh is an important factor that affects mining profitability
- dogma1138 9y agoYes but they are still stuck in open air cases in not exactly pristine environments. Getting a GPU that has been running 24/7 for 2-3 years will be the mother of all lotteries.
- gaius 9y agocould lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs Infact the opposite has happened. NVidia has restricted consumer cards from DCs with an exception for blockchains! They are very much making hay while the sun shines
- hyperpallium 9y agoI think something interesting will happen with TPU's. nvidia's titan v has a 110 TFLOPS TPU (and only 12 TF GPU iirc). Ir's $3000, but that seems not reflect costs, but avoid cannablizing their even higher-end scientific computing offerings... so price could come down (to forestall competition). Can TPUs give better ROI than GPUs? Conversely, will games end up exploiting TPUs?
- dogma1138 9y agoGoogle’s TPU is a GPU without the silicon burden of needing to render graphics so no.
- hyperpallium 9y agoI referred to nvidia's titan v, which is independent of google's tpu. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/titan/titan-v/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/titan/titan-v/ I also didn't say it would be used for rendering in games, but that it could be used by games. Games can use GPUs for compute, for physics, simulation amd even AI. Some is already happening. TPUs would be even better. to I find that interesting. The point of my comment was that TPUs providing some differentiation relevant to mining vs gaming would affect prices.
- dogma1138 9y agoWhy exactly the TPU would be better? it's not a general computation processor it only does MMA.
- JohnStrangeII 9y agoI don't understand why companies like Nvidia don't adopt to the market and offer cards that are specifically designed for miners. Wouldn't that be possible and make them potentially more useful than mere graphics cards?
- verroq 9y agoBecause when the crypto bubble pops NVIDIA will be holding the bag on a new line of unwanted products.
- xur17 9y agoThere is at least one [0], but I'm frankly not sure where you can buy it. [0] https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/MINING-P106-6G/ https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/MINING-P106-6G/
- stordoff 9y agoAs much as I think it's bad for gaming (right now at least), I think hardware manufacturers artificially limiting what it can be used for is a bad route to go down.