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This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be
by akelly 5y ago
This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change.
The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold.
People think Nvidia is doing this to try to help them get better prices now, but really Nvidia is trying to extract more money from gamers in the long term.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards I thought the non-LHR cards are fully featured?
- riknos314 5y agoThey have a SKU specifically targeting miners https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
- mikepurvis 5y agoThere is some precedent for hacking ex-miner cards to route the video signal back to a motherboard output over the PCI bus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 With so many more of them out there, it'll be interesting to see if this becomes more of a thing. Alternatively, it's easy to imagine that depending on just how constrained these are, they might eventually find homes doing non-crypto headless DC workloads, such as deep learning stuff.
- akelly 5y agoThey're not producing fully featured cards anymore. They're separating the market into RTX-LHR for gamers and CMP for miners.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold. Great commentary on the unsustainability of it all. Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market. Thus, they have every incentive to cut the legs out from under resellers. It would also be anywhere from hard to nearly impossible to give them an incentive to allow the secondary market to operate in such a way as to increase the sustainability of their product. Edit: Aren't we a bit touchy today? (Turn showdead on and look a little down thread.)
- RhysU 5y agoSomeone learned from the Cisco hardware glut in the dot com crash!
- actually_a_dog 5y agoLearned what? How to create a bunch of junk that will be unusable in a few years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
- delfinom 5y agoJust don't give them ideas about Cisco's current solution of moving to subscription based licensing network switches
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- berdario 5y agoThat's basically GeForce Now, in this context... So, I'm afraid that they already got (and applied) the idea :p
- 22c 5y agoI don't think this will help pricing or availability much either. LTT did a video on this topic somewhat recently and it turns out a lot of the reasons that you can't get a card right now is related to chip shortages and people (yes, regular gaming enthusiasts) buying any card they can find. Even cards that already have terrible mining efficiency are scarce.
- Phlarp 5y agoUnless the miners are cutting off the supply at the silicon production level. What's to stop Antminer (or any other mining asic company) from paying 10x as much for a majority of TSMC capacity, RTX and Ryzen supply be damned.
- akelly 5y agoMost of TSMC's capacity is allocated years ahead of time. They're contractually obligated to supply AMD wafers at a predetermined price and volume. Also, GPUs are pretty good at mining Ethereum. ASICs are only about 2x as efficient, many miners would rather have the security of knowing they can always sell their GPUs to gamers if it all comes crashing down.
- creato 5y agoOne of the issues people have mentioned in this thread is that cards sold by miners are often burnt out or nearly burnt out. In that case, it seems like cutting off miners from the secondary market would be an improvement for the secondary market.
- cle 5y agoI don't know much about GPUs and am curious how this "burn out" happens, do you have a link for those of us who'd like to read more about this?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoIf your GPUs run too long hot, the board literally starts to melt (the plastics, solder, etc).
- princeb 5y agoon contrary, miners tend to run gpus undervolted and underclocked for efficiency. gamers tend to run gpus overclocked (and sometimes overvolted) for performance.
- Dylan16807 5y agoMiners care enough about power efficiency and longevity; they don't run cards super hot.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TrainedMonkey 5y agoMost scale oriented mining rigs I've seen pack cards super close together, even if you run them at reduced frequencies thermal environment is not great. See https://us.v-cdn.net/5021640/uploads/editor/do/j86gsm9cxvl2.jpg https://us.v-cdn.net/5021640/uploads/editor/do/j86gsm9cxvl2.... for example. Aside from a few top end models modern desktop GPUs are not designed for continuous operation at max load. When you combine than with higher temperature the lifespan of the cards is indeed reduced. The real question is how much this matters.
- lvl100 5y agoThis is what they said in 2018. Turned out miners WERE primary driver of growth not gamers.
- jyrkesh 5y ago2000 series was expensive and underwhelming, and raytracing wasn't really viable in real-time with other graphical settings cranked up. 3000 series is a huge performance boost, reasonably priced (at least at MSRP), and gives comfortable buffer on lots of scenarios like high-end VR, 1440p at very high FPS, and comfy 4K with all the good stuff turned up. Meanwhile, the GTX 1080 was cheap and could basically play everything at 1080p. I think gamers just skipped over the 2000 because it was lame. But hell, I hope you're right. I'm still rocking a 980, and I've not had any success trying to grab a 3070 to upgrade. Maybe these LHRs will actually free stuff up. (But to be honest, the 980 is still doing fine with most of what I play at 1080p.)
- michaelbuddy 5y ago18 months ago I could get a 2070 Super for $550 and the 1080 Titan cards were $799 - 900 at launch and long after. The 2000 series was a lot of bang for the buck.
- addicted 5y agoEdited to remove incorrect info.
- throayobviousl 5y agoNvidia literally sells mining cards that do not have outputs https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ This is all a scheme to stop the used market from ruining their MSRP pricing.
- paulmd 5y agomeanwhile, at AMD headquarters... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-cards https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-c... AMD isn't even going to limit performance on gaming cards, nor are they using a different node for their mining cards like NVIDIA. They are straight-up just going to shunt wafers over to mining cards, while letting miners have both the mining cards and the gaming cards.
- kodt 5y agoDon’t gamers usually frown upon buying cards previously used for mining? It’s like buying a used car that used to be part of a rental fleet. I suppose demand is high enough that people will buy whatever they can get though.
- akelly 5y agoHard to tell from an ebay listing whether it was used for mining or not.
- hyperbovine 5y agoYes, in the same way that “audiophiles” frown on playing a CD before running it through the demagnetizer.
- minikites 5y ago>They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold. After being used for mining, it's e-waste whether or not it has video out. This helps prevent some poor sucker from buying e-waste.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- breakyerself 5y agoWhy would a gamer not buy a second hand card from a miner?
- detaro 5y agothe mining-only cards don't have video outputs
- dreen 5y agotbf I wouldn't buy a cheaper used gaming card from a miner, because of potential ware. Electronics ware off, and a mining card would have been taxed much more than any card used for gaming.
- celticninja 5y agoprobably not, read this thread for details, but miners underclock and undervolt for efficiency. Gamers overclock for performance.
- dreen 5y agoI have and the truth seems to be that if the miner took good care of the card it will probably be fine. Thats why I said "potential". This is not an acceptable risk when Im spending big on gaming hardware. edit: just to be clear, I dont have the expertise to check the wear, so it just seems like a bad gamble to me
- jhanschoo 5y agoSounds like a win-win Gamers (generally very price-conscious) get a more stable close-to-msrp price now and in the future, nvidia secures their supply You're right with respect to e-waste, but I wonder if they may end up really subsidizing hobbyist data analysis.
- the_cat_kittles 5y agomy 1080 ti sells for 30% more than i paid for it 3? 4? years ago. its price has fluctuated in mostly perfect tandem with crypto. just based on first hand experience, your claim (if its what you are actually claiming) that miners arent influencing the price is pretty wrong.
- akelly 5y agoMy point was more nuanced than that. Of course miners are influencing GPU prices. If miners stopped buying all GPUs, prices would probably go back to MSRP pretty quickly. But stopping miners from buying one GPU model won't make it sell at MSRP. Miners switch to buying other cards, driving the price of those even higher, but the LHR cards are still going to be out of stock everywhere and scalped for 2x MSRP, because there are so many gamers buying GPUs.
- gayfox 5y agoGamers won't be buying used 30xx cards from miners because by then nvidia will have released 40xx cards. Gamers are mostly kids running after shiny things.
- baybal2 5y ago> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold. On other note, the "cloud" Vega that AMD sold to the very few cloud videogaming companies comes with exact same limitations, and a clause of non-resale, and non-refurbishment. This way buyers, can't simply solder display connector to those cards, and sell them on open market. Imagine Intel would've sold their Xeons with the same limitations... but wait, they actually did this for "custom fused" Xeons they sell to big dotcoms. Now, who said that silicon vendors can't "vendor lock" their dotcom clients? By buying direct, all those dotcoms have exposed themselves to an even bigger supplier risk of this type, and not reduced it.
- thefz 5y ago> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Taking into consideration that the gamer segment is now well aware that miners and scalpers are ruining their supply, I really hope that when the flood of used cards happen, nobody with a grain of salt will buy devices that have run at 98% their thermal limit for years. I really hope that market-ruining miners will find themselves with a ton of hardware nobody wants anymore.
- pferde 5y agoPlease take into consideration that this will be the same naive, impressionable "market segment" that repeatedly pre-orders new games, even though there is no real reason to do so, as the games are digital copies, so there is no scarcity. The same market segment also rewards shitty game companies, producing half-finished, barely working product, with their money again and again. All because of a combination of deviously good marketing and FOMO. So yes, I fully expect those soon-to-break GPUs to sell like hotcakes, and a lot of crying soon thereafter.
- johnnyanmac 5y agoPC's have limited/collector's editions too, despite the actual game ultimately being a digital code. https://www.gamestop.com/video-games/pc-gaming/games/products/cyberpunk-2077-collectors-edition/11094745.html https://www.gamestop.com/video-games/pc-gaming/games/product... It's not like pre-orders are objectively useless like some people may paint it. > The same market segment also rewards shitty game companies, producing half-finished, barely working product, with their money again and again Most people buying PC games aren't the ones buying top of the line dedicated GPU's for their gaming rigs. They also aren't ones who will scrutinize super technical details (nor even gameplay elements) as if they are Digital Foundry. Lotta weird generalizations here.
- RealStickman_ 5y agoProfessional miners usually underclock and undervolt their cards. A constant load is also less stressful on the die and pcb than repeated heating and cooling cycles. The one thing you might have to replace on well kept GPUs are the fans.
- Tepix 5y agoI think it will help quite a bit. I've sold two graphics cards in the last year, both of them went to miners.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 908B64B197 5y ago> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold. What they could have done is instead sell the video-capable cards in a way that discourages bulk buying (limits per customer, maybe a little bit bulkier and harder to correctly cool if several are in a rack) and then release a more bare-bone (no bulk, just a heatsink and optional fan) mining version that can be bulk-ordered and performs well in a rack mount.
- Scramblejams 5y agoIs it unsophisticated of me to assume that an ETH crash will just cause everyone with GPUs to switch to a different cryptocurrency? I'd expect miner demand to remain firm unless there's a broad crash.
- cinntaile 5y agoAt the start I thought that miners weren't really a force to reckon with but when I saw that the scalpers are selling their received cards on the same day to miners I changed my opinion. I think people severely underestimate the proportion of miners at this point, overall they aren't a majority but during Q1 2021 they probably were. I'm part of a few botting groups, although I don't take part. The current price difference between the cards can also be partially explained by how much hashpower they have for mining ethereum. Some back of the envelope math. The current hashrate is about 650000 Gh/s, which is almost 4x as much as at the start of the year. So an increase of about 50000000 Mh/s. A 3060 Ti produces around 60 Mh/s, that's about 8.3 million 3060 Ti's. Of course not all of the added hashpower comes from new cards so the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt.