3 ms·

I think on the whole, Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining. It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate t

by ethbr0 5y ago

I think on the whole, Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining. It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty. So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.

acchow 5y ago
Exactly. If Nvidia removed the crypto crippling, almost all of their GPUs would be bought up for crypto mining leaving their gaming market empty. A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Meanwhile, Nvidia's production (and capital expenditure with it) could ramp up dramatically to meet crypto demand, until it too collapses. Then they are left with nothing but debt.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  > A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too. I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Or they just buy PS5 or Xbox (both have AMD chip) and never go to PC gaming.
    - marderfarker2 5y ago
      Jokes on you, consoles have also been out stock since forever.
kllrnohj 5y ago
Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining because it creates too many second-hand cards, that's it. They just want to kill the second-hand market boom that happened as crypto mining has high hardware turnover, and gaming doesn't. So gamers just pick up second-hand previous generation high end cards instead of buying current gen mid-range cards. It's not a coincidence the software lockout landed right as Nvidia released an unlocked mining card without a display output ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ ). And since it doesn't have a display output, all those used mining cards become ewaste instead of something that cuts into nvidia's revenue.

by ethbr0 5y ago

acchow 5y ago

Exactly. If Nvidia removed the crypto crippling, almost all of their GPUs would be bought up for crypto mining leaving their gaming market empty. A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Meanwhile, Nvidia's production (and capital expenditure with it) could ramp up dramatically to meet crypto demand, until it too collapses. Then they are left with nothing but debt.

Eelongate 5y ago
> A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too. I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Or they just buy PS5 or Xbox (both have AMD chip) and never go to PC gaming.
  - marderfarker2 5y ago
    Jokes on you, consoles have also been out stock since forever.

kllrnohj 5y ago

Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining because it creates too many second-hand cards, that's it. They just want to kill the second-hand market boom that happened as crypto mining has high hardware turnover, and gaming doesn't. So gamers just pick up second-hand previous generation high end cards instead of buying current gen mid-range cards. It's not a coincidence the software lockout landed right as Nvidia released an unlocked mining card without a display output ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ ). And since it doesn't have a display output, all those used mining cards become ewaste instead of something that cuts into nvidia's revenue.