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Miners make it harder to find budget video cards
It has gotten seriously annoying looking for a budget graphics card for my kids computer. I've been looking at GTX 1050 TI and 1060 cards (EVGA -PNY-MSI) and it would seem all the reasonably priced cards at the major retail sites are out of stock, back ordered ect constantly. It's been like this for a few years now from what I can see. As soon as new GPU inventory come in, they are gone.
Come to find out bitcoin miners are buying these things by the cases and burning through them in their mining arrays. Seems the manufactures can't keep up with this type of demand. I kind of wish they made cheap mining specific throwaway cards just for the miners, it would take some strain of the supply for gamers.
Come to find out bitcoin miners are buying these things by the cases and burning through them in their mining arrays. Seems the manufactures can't keep up with this type of demand. I kind of wish they made cheap mining specific throwaway cards just for the miners, it would take some strain of the supply for gamers.
SWG Bloodfin vet
Elder Jedi/Elder Bounty Hunter
Post edited by Tiller on
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Then bitcoin mining moved to FPGAs, and later to ASICs. Once you've got ASICs for bitcoin mining, no one cares about GPUs anymore, as they can't compete with ASICs. The Cayman-based GPUs being hard to find for gaming only lasted a few months.
The next round of this came in 2014, when litecoin miners bought Radeon R9 290 and 290X cards. They again ignored Nvidia, as Nvidia GPUs were still terrible at integer and logical operations of the sort used in cryptocurrency hashing functions.
Then other cryptocurrencies also moved to FPGAs and off of GPUs, and buying GPUs for it again became inefficient. Those miners buying AMD's Hawaii GPUs also only lasted a few months. In addition, AMD had ramped up production of the GPUs, leaving them too many GPUs that they intended to sell to miners and no one buying them, so gamers got good deals for quite a while.
The launch of the GeForce GTX 980 in September 2014 was important here for two reasons. First, Maxwell was the first Nvidia GPU architecture to be any good at integer and logical operations of the sort used in cryptocurrency mining. It was also the first Nvidia GPU architecture to be notably good at compute more generally, even apart from cryptocurrency mining, as it fixed a number of things that were blatantly broken in Kepler, and was the first GPU architecture from any vendor not to be finicky about weird things for no good reason.
Today, it's the ethereum miners who are bothering you. Ethereum basically decided that bitcoin being mined by ASICs so that some guy in China has half of the world's bitcoin mining capability is a bad thing, and set out to build a cryptocurrency hashing algorithm that you couldn't build an ASIC for. Rather than computations, Ethereum mining is mostly based on doing random lookups into a large table of around 3 GB or so. You're not fitting 3 GB of cache onto an ASIC.
Nvidia's GDDR5X controller chokes on random lookups into global memory, so it's not very good at ethereum mining. It doesn't take 3 GB to make this happen; even at 16 MB, a GeForce GTX 1080 is substantially slower than a Radeon RX 480. Nvidia's GPUs with GDDR5 or HBM2 memory controllers handle it fine, but AMD tends to go heavier on memory bandwidth than Nvidia, making AMD GPUs mostly superior here. The GP100 chip of a Tesla P100 or Quadro GP100 is markedly better at ethereum mining than anything AMD has, but those also cost $6000+, so miners ignore them for cost reasons.
That ethereum can't be done more efficiently on FPGAs or ASICs means that unlike the previous blips, the ethereum mining disruption has lasted much longer. The days when it was hard to find a Radeon RX 580 for double its MSRP are past us, but AMD Polaris 10 GPUs got bid up so high by ethereum miners that it was worthwhile to buy a GeForce GTX 1060 instead, even though it wasn't as good at mining, at least if you got a 6 GB version.
It's not over entirely, but prices are a lot closer to MSRP than they were six months ago. It's decently likely that eventually people will figure out that mining cryptocurrencies is a bad idea and they'll all be worthless or nearly so, but that could take quite a while.
It's also notable that the previous mining spikes targeted high end GPUs, while ethereum went after the mid-range. That was because Nvidia's high end consumer GPUs had a GDDR5X controller that was bad at ethereum mining, while AMD basically didn't have a high end at the time. So it's kind of a fluke and probably won't be repeated, but it was a nuisance for people who wanted to buy a $200 GPU.
https://www.kitguru.net/components/matthew-wilson/dram-and-nand-supply-shortage-expected-to-last-until-2018/
At least one person blames it on PUBG, and the fact that Chinese players/game cafes in particular are upgrading in droves to play it.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180103PD211.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3202193/components-graphics/nvidia-geforce-prices-skyrocket-as-cryptocurrency-miners-snap-up-supply.html
Cards are like 50$ to 100$ over the MSRP right now at least for the 1060 3gb cards, didn't really look at the 6gb version or 1070/1080 cards.
The prices seem to be going up rather than down over time.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Keep in mind not only are there only 2 GPU companies, there are also only a handful of foundaries that can make these chips, so it may not necessarily be nVidia/AMD.
Seems if the demand were there, and ~supposedly~ it has been for a good while now, that there would be no issues ramping up production if it were really just about supply versus demand. I realize fabs can't pop up over night, but with all the different fabs and processes available, you'd be able to figure something out if you were really inclined to do so.
Which is to say there doesn't necessarily have to be any collusion for your described situation to happen. You don't start a price and the accompanying production war unless you can achieve a Mike Tyson knockout.
Unfortunately for us, cryptocurrencies have been kindof elevated to "investment" status with Bitcoin getting futures.
I don't see the craze dying until we have a major worldwide market crash, which tends to weed out what has real worth and what doesn't, at least until the next bubble forms. So, when the prices of the cards get corrected, we all may have other priorities anyway.
To hope for a crash, or to not hope for a crash, that is the question.
A second is, as Ridelynn said, limited DRAM. Unlike Bitcoin or Litecoin that you could mine just fine on a dinky GPU with a single DRAM chip as its entire memory bus, you need a lot of DRAM capacity for Ethereum. I'm not sure how big of a problem that actually is, though, as it depends on whether memory fabs can readily switch production lines from DDR4 to GDDR5. I'm not saying that they can or can't; I'm saying that I don't know. If they can't, then ramping up GDDR5 on short notice would be impossible, as you have to plan fabs years ahead of time. Maybe you're willing to bet that the Ethereum craze will still be on in a few months, but it's much riskier to bet that it will still be going in a few years.
The third problem is that cryptocurrency mining can eat up almost arbitrarily large stocks of GPUs. If you know that buying a GPU for $200 and spending another $100 on electricity to run it will mine you $1000 in currency over the course of the next several months, how many of them do you want to buy? As many as you possibly can, probably. So long as mining Ethereum is profitable enough, it's possible that AMD and Nvidia did double or triple their production of the relevant GPUs, and the miners still bought them all.
Ethereum has a market capitalization of over $130 billion right now. I can't find charts that go back more than several years, but that could easily be more than the all of the revenue that AMD or Nvidia has earned in the entire history of their companies. And yes, revenue, not profit. Neither AMD nor Nvidia are large enough companies to overwhelm the market value of Ethereum simply by producing more GPUs.
Just to give you an idea of how outlandish that $130 billion figure is, Canada's M0 money supply, which includes the value of all currency in circulation, is valued at about $70 billion US. And Ethereum isn't even the most popular cryptocurrency. Either cryptocurrencies will replace traditional currencies created by governments or else people who live centuries from now will know about the our great cryptocurrency bubble as one of the most spectacular bubbles of all time, much like how a lot of people today are aware of the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. That's what you're betting on if you "invest" in Bitcoin today.
Though I doubt it will effect the GPU market by much in regards to supply shortages, it's a start. Eitherway it's kind of sad that in this day and age there are still things like production shortages to contend with over something comparable to the Tamagotchi craze. xD
https://forums.evga.com/GTX-1080TI-stock-ETA-m2748728.aspx
Good example of box store price gouging
price history for EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SSC at Bestbuy
249.99 3 days ago
269.99 2 days ago
399.99 just today
Shit just got real.
If you want to know why, here's your answer:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/
That is how you know the shit got real I suppose.
Mind you. . I wouldn't buy a card that has been running 100% 24 hours a day. But maybe they won't be buying as many for a bit. People are less likely to invest in hardware when the current price is lower. . Ethereum has mostly only gone up but is starting to sink with the rest on the South Korea news. It will go back up again as well. . they all will. . until they don't ever again
Keep you eye out for someone trying to unload a rig though and maybe grab those cards with a few other people. While they are likely to not have the same lifespan it might be a good way to get few a year or two.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
It's as I said above: investing in cryptocurrencies is betting that traditional currencies issued by governments are going to go away and be replaced by cryptocurrencies. If that's going to happen, then the collective value of cryptocurrencies should be several times what it is. But if it's not going to happen, then the value of cryptocurrencies should be a tiny fraction of what it is now, if not zero outright.
But even if it does happen, it's probably not going to be that all cryptocurrencies rise like that in value. It will probably be one or maybe a few that dominate, while the rest disappear. If you buy a ton of bitcoins or ethereum and some other cryptocurrency becomes the world standard currency, you'll still lose whatever you invested.
It's also very possible that cryptocurrencies will eventually replace national currencies, but the one that comes to dominate doesn't even exist yet. Governments aren't likely to give up seigniorage without a fight, and if cryptocurrencies issued and backed by governments become the standard, all of the ones in circulation today will be worthless.
Even if you do believe that cryptocurrencies available today are the future, I think that the future of bitcoin would still be bleak. It just can't clear transactions fast enough to be useful as even a lightly used side currency, let alone the world standard.
It's not like this is going towards a cure for cancer, or to solve global warming, or genetically modify crops to grow in arid lands, or any other good worthy cause. Or even any sort of physical, tangible cause, worthy or otherwise.
If you are able to make money now with it, good for you. I wouldn't quit my day job though.
South Park said it best I suppose:
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ??????
Phase 3: Profit
So what's the step 2 that is leading to all this profit, other than a whole lot of people collectively believing that we can just jump straight to Phase 3? Quiz believes Phase 2 is government backing, which would work, if you can convince governments other than Venezuela to do so. But most governments don't exactly appear to be on board just yet, and if/when they do, it probably won't be with any currency already in circulation.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
There are three enormous problems that cryptocurrencies need to solve before they can be used as actual currencies. One is counterparty risk. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, it's gone and you're not getting the money back. If your credit card gets stolen, your bank can reverse charges or sometimes even reject charges before they happen and you get your money back. Until cryptocurrencies can figure out how to do that, they're not going to have widespread public acceptance.
The second is clearing transactions quickly. US dollars have no problem handling tens of thousands of transactions per second, and could readily scale to far more if necessary. Bitcoin can only have something on the order of one transaction per second take place worldwide. In order to make the transaction yours when you want to buy something, it's basically a question of whoever will pay the highest fees. The fees often run into the tens of dollars, making bitcoin pretty much unusable for all but the largest purchases. Some cryptocurrencies do a much better job of solving this than bitcoin, but I'm not sure if there are any yet that could readily scale up to handle as many as they'd need to in order to be a viable currency.
The third is volatility. If a new car costs $20k today, you expect that a comparable car will still cost about $20k next year. Maybe it will cost $18k or $22k, but it's not going to cost $2k or $200k. This thread is about video cards doubling in price or so, and was made precisely because it is so rare. That sort of jump for things denominated in cryptocurrencies is very common, however. Becoming a widely used currency might solve this to some degree.
Even if a government does decide to embrace cryptocurrencies as a national currency, they're not going to adopt, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Ripple. They'll create their own and start out owning all of the currency so that they can spend it, or perhaps will exchange it for the previous national currency.