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Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#71

Post by icelancer »

jakebasile wrote: post #15

I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…

The 1050 and the 1060 3GB GPUs are more than good enough to run any tier one game on nearly the highest graphics on a 24" monitor. Everything above it is just ridiculousness for the sake of being absurd in the gaming industry, and for benchmarks that don't reflect real usage - unlike GPU mining, where the cards are actually pushed to their maximums.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#72

Post by icelancer »

paulmd wrote: post #19
013a wrote: post #9

Its bad. Its never been this bad before. Just go on pcpartspicker and realize that there are GTX 1080 Tis selling on third party websites for over $1500, and that's the only place you can get them beyond getting lucky. Nvidia isn't going to ramp up production significantly because crypto could crash any day, simultaneously destroying their new sales and flooding the used market with old mining hardware. Combine it wi…

ASICs aren't saving the planet either - people are incentivized to burn up to $BLOCK_REWARD of electricity per block, the number of hashes it takes to do so is irrelevant. If you come up with a better ASIC, people will buy more of them, the network difficulty increases, and you're back where you started. It's just another stage in the Red Queen's Race. The only thing ASICs do is centralize control (because economies…

A huge amount of the electricity being used was unused/not-competed-for in the first place. Miner farms are coalescing in Northern America around excess production in hydroelectric areas. This is an inconvenient fact that is ignored in the "electricity oh nooooo" debate.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#73

Post by _coldfire »

jakebasile wrote: post #15

I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…

>I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming)

The equipment required for gaming loses value very quickly. Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal.

GPU's are one of the biggest expenses for gaming, as a hobby it got far cheaper. The fear is unfounded and this is typical alarm-journalism.

Now if only CPU's held value 6 years from now.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#74

Post by chrisper »

sgtmas2006 wrote: post #52
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any non-VR games that even push the 1080ti? It seems like you'd need some giant 4k monitor to make it sweat. But also Steam doesn't seem to be releasing a ton of graphics-intensive games. It seems much more cost effective to get away with a lower price and less intensive art requirements and focus on gameplay. And less graphics puts you in a safer place as far as ports to consoles and tablets/mobile (e.g. S…

1080TI can take heavy hits at 2560x1080 even, Battlefield 1 max settings can see 90 FPS at times. 2560x1080 @ 200hz it can't even come close to consistently with high-end games and settings. PUBG? frames are meh. Even with an overclocked card it can be rough sometimes in my experience. Personally i'll be upgrading to the next card that trumps the 1080 ti and moving from 2560x1080 200hz (for all but CS, cs is 1280x960…

I just upgraded to 2560x1080 and was wondering if 3440x1440 is worth it. But just the idea of having to push that many pixel made me decide that 1080p is enough. I also have a 200Hz Monitor, but I do not mind if I do not get 200Fps.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#75

Post by icelancer »

ilitirit wrote: post #8

The shortage is not entirely because of miners. Nvidia manufacturers switched to using slower RAM in some of their cards. This was actually a very smart move (they should expand it to all their cards IMO). If you want the fast RAM, you have to buy the "mining" version of the cards. So in theory, it should have no impact on the gaming market. For some of the popular mining cards (e.g. RX 470/80), well they simply have…

AMD gambled on HBM2 and it paid off in ways they never expected. They were simply getting dominated by Nvidia and threw a hail mary pass on memory bandwidth and speed, knowing they couldn't compete on compute loads.

Enter the CryptoNight and Dagger-Hashimoto algorithms, and well, the rest is recent history for the RX architecture, primarily the Vega line.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#76

Post by icelancer »

visarga wrote: post #25
elcritch wrote: post #14

Bought some cards during the Christmas break season and prices/availability were fine. I was surprised when I went to buy some more and saw the prices! I reason that if crypto currenices crash I can re-purpose my nice new collection of GPU's to do Deep Learning training. It's got me pondering how one could do a distributed deep-learning training as the proof-of-work for a crypto-currency. Then the POW would be doing…

Yeah, heat and (80dB of noise) the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner in both power and noise. You can't have these near humans.

If you're an idiot who can't undervolt their cards properly, yeah, that's generally what happens. Otherwise fan noise is manageable.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#77

Post by icelancer »

secstate wrote: post #20

Maybe there's something I missed about GPUs and mining, but how can an amateur rig like these hope to keep up with ASIC rigs? Can you profitably mine with residential electricity and GPUs still? How long can that possibly last?

Algorithms that are memory-hard cannot be profitably mined using ASICs. For now. The problem is one endemic to computer architecture and physics, so it is unlikely to change for the major algorithms like CryptoNight and Dagger-Hashimoto.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#78

Post by icelancer »

khedoros1 wrote: post #38
secstate wrote: post #20

Maybe there's something I missed about GPUs and mining, but how can an amateur rig like these hope to keep up with ASIC rigs? Can you profitably mine with residential electricity and GPUs still? How long can that possibly last?

It's covered in the article: Different currencies use different hash algorithms. Ethereum takes a lot of memory (gigabytes apparently). No one's building ASICs with GB of memory, at least so far.

>> No one's building ASICs with GB of memory, at least so far.

It's also nearly impossible to do at any price that approaches reasonable.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#80

Post by icelancer »

knodi123 wrote: post #51
csours wrote: post #7

Sell pickaxes (during a gold rush).

Go out of business after gold rush ends, because market is flooded with barely-used pickaxes being sold at a loss by failed miners.

I'd be glad to make a bet with you that the 1080ti doesn't collapse significantly after the "gold rush ends."

Come to think of it, I'd like to hear your predictions about when the gold rush will end. Or what the gold rush even is.

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