> And your theory doesn’t explain two things: - how this hurts gamers now, and - why if Nvidia just wanted profit and the chips are useful for games, why wouldn’t Nvidia simply do nothing and let the miners buy all the 3060s. Wouldn’t that be the most profitable thing here?
No it is not. If they mis-predict when the mining craze ends, they will be stuck with a huge inventory and no way to deal with it. The reason they will be stuck with the inventory is because the miners will be able to sell the second hand cards at a rate that NVDA simply can't compete with, so they end up as the bag holders just like it happened with the 1xxx series.
Infact, I'd wager that DLSS and RTX were used as a hacky solution to drive people away from the 1xxx series because the 1xxx series was more than sufficient for 1080p gaming - which is the most common resolution. The 3xxx series, even the 3060 is an overkill even for 1440p let alone 1080p.
This, to me, suggests that had NVDA not gimped the hashrate of the 3060, once the craze was over and the market was flooded with 2nd hand 3060, people would not be incentivised to buy anything above a used 3060 because it is a) an overkill for 1440p@120hz and b) it has much higher perf/$ than anything NVDA could offer with the 3xxx or 4xxx series and it wouldn't make any sense to go with anything higher anyways because 4k gaming doesn't seem worth it unless you are playing on a TV.