I'm probably going to be downvoted into oblivion but I'm genuinely curious: Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument is a bit weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocu…
I would assume miners keep these cards pegged at 100% 24/7. By comparison very few games actually push graphics cards to 100% utilization, especially when you're talking about top of the line cards like the nVidia 3000 series, and on top of that very few people play games for more than a couple hours per day. A card in the hands of a gamer probably consumes only a small fraction of the power that same card would in the hands of miners.