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Some gamers with high-end cards are likely doing a bit of mining. If the parents or dorms are picking up the electricity bill, that makes sense. And then ther

Some gamers with high-end cards are likely doing a bit of mining. If the parents or dorms are picking up the electricity bill, that makes sense. And then there are some cards that are used for gaming and to study deep learning, I guess. It is likely a bit more of a mixed use of compute than just pure mining. To give an example, I'm not a student, but I do have a box with 2 x RTX 2080 sitting in my garage, which I use for hobbyist deep learning research. Sometimes, I also need heating in my garage, it gets cold during the winter. It was pretty easy to flash a NiceHash usb stick. So I boot it from it and it becomes a 1.5kW heater which pays for itself. Not particularly efficient or climate friendly, but oh well.

lostmsu 4y ago
Case in point: I do all of the above. These RTX cards are marvelous.
paulmd 4y ago
> Some gamers with high-end cards are likely doing a bit of mining. If the parents or dorms are picking up the electricity bill, that makes sense. Yeah, I think a good number of gamers who bought cards are mining on them in their spare time as well. I'm counting that as a gaming sale since it's primarily for gaming rather than someone who set out to buy 10 cards and build a mining rig, but I do think a lot of people did the "well, I'll mine on it when I'm not using it and it'll soften the blow a bit..." approach. And you don't even need free electricity, the cards were and are still profitable, just not profitable enough (anymore) to gamble $10-20k setting up an industrial-style mining rig with a full loadout of cards. If you have the card anyway (because you game/train AI/etc) then it's still worth mining. I question how many people cashed out regularly though, there may be a lot of people sitting with a bunch of paper profits from their gaming card... > And then there are some cards that are used for gaming and to study deep learning, I guess. It is likely a bit more of a mixed use of compute than just pure mining. I think that's a small market in general, there's not millions and millions of those people and they're not setting up hundreds of rigs with thousands of cards, but yeah definitely, that exists. I know people who bought a quad-1080 ti or quad-3090 rig and used it for gaming/DL/homelab and mined on it when they weren't using it. It was perhaps a little less appealing this gen since there was never a proper Titan - the 3090 is still locked down in certain types of operations, not just FP64 but also some data types/operations that iirc might be relevant to DL users. bfloat16, and some types of FMA operations, or something like that? But lots of people can work around it or it isn't relevant to the thing they wanted to do, there are still a decent number of DL/homelab people who will buy it. It's again, not a gigantic market, but it's there. imo with the way prices stacked up - it was $2400 for a 3080 or $3000 for a 3090 on ebay, and it was actually possible sometimes to get 3090s at decent prices ($2000) from partners (Zotac, EVGA, etc), where it wasn't really possible to ever score a 3080 from partners due to extreme levels of demand. So you could score a retail 3090 for cheaper than an ebay 3080, and actually even at ebay pricing, if you're going to spend $2.4k on a GPU anyway... just spend the last $600 and get the extra VRAM. 10GB is going to noticeably shorten the viable lifespan of the card anyway. Given the pricing, it made a lot of sense imo to aim for the 3090 over the 3080, both for homelab/DL type stuff, and honestly also because the 3080 had a very stingy amount of VRAM out of the box even for gaming. I know the technical reasons (yield, memory bus width, etc) that make this complicated, but I'd really liked to have seen 12GB on the original 3080, if not 16GB. I think GDDR6X was a mis-step in a lot of ways and they would have been better off with a conventional 512b bus with GDDR6 instead of a super-fast 384b bus with GDDR6X... but that also complicates routing and board design.

lostmsu 4y ago

Case in point: I do all of the above. These RTX cards are marvelous.

paulmd 4y ago

> Some gamers with high-end cards are likely doing a bit of mining. If the parents or dorms are picking up the electricity bill, that makes sense. Yeah, I think a good number of gamers who bought cards are mining on them in their spare time as well. I'm counting that as a gaming sale since it's primarily for gaming rather than someone who set out to buy 10 cards and build a mining rig, but I do think a lot of people did the "well, I'll mine on it when I'm not using it and it'll soften the blow a bit..." approach. And you don't even need free electricity, the cards were and are still profitable, just not profitable enough (anymore) to gamble $10-20k setting up an industrial-style mining rig with a full loadout of cards. If you have the card anyway (because you game/train AI/etc) then it's still worth mining. I question how many people cashed out regularly though, there may be a lot of people sitting with a bunch of paper profits from their gaming card... > And then there are some cards that are used for gaming and to study deep learning, I guess. It is likely a bit more of a mixed use of compute than just pure mining. I think that's a small market in general, there's not millions and millions of those people and they're not setting up hundreds of rigs with thousands of cards, but yeah definitely, that exists. I know people who bought a quad-1080 ti or quad-3090 rig and used it for gaming/DL/homelab and mined on it when they weren't using it. It was perhaps a little less appealing this gen since there was never a proper Titan - the 3090 is still locked down in certain types of operations, not just FP64 but also some data types/operations that iirc might be relevant to DL users. bfloat16, and some types of FMA operations, or something like that? But lots of people can work around it or it isn't relevant to the thing they wanted to do, there are still a decent number of DL/homelab people who will buy it. It's again, not a gigantic market, but it's there. imo with the way prices stacked up - it was $2400 for a 3080 or $3000 for a 3090 on ebay, and it was actually possible sometimes to get 3090s at decent prices ($2000) from partners (Zotac, EVGA, etc), where it wasn't really possible to ever score a 3080 from partners due to extreme levels of demand. So you could score a retail 3090 for cheaper than an ebay 3080, and actually even at ebay pricing, if you're going to spend $2.4k on a GPU anyway... just spend the last $600 and get the extra VRAM. 10GB is going to noticeably shorten the viable lifespan of the card anyway. Given the pricing, it made a lot of sense imo to aim for the 3090 over the 3080, both for homelab/DL type stuff, and honestly also because the 3080 had a very stingy amount of VRAM out of the box even for gaming. I know the technical reasons (yield, memory bus width, etc) that make this complicated, but I'd really liked to have seen 12GB on the original 3080, if not 16GB. I think GDDR6X was a mis-step in a lot of ways and they would have been better off with a conventional 512b bus with GDDR6 instead of a super-fast 384b bus with GDDR6X... but that also complicates routing and board design.