Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 818 posts

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#701

Post by volta83 »

pizza234 wrote: post #421
coolspot wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I have NVidia RTX 2060 in my Linux laptop (Lenovo Legion) and NVidia RTX 3070 in my Linux Ryzen desktop. Previously had 1060 in Intel Linux desktop. Zero issues.

I'm on the same boat, however, it's a bit unclear if parent is complaining [also] about their open source support. Their antagonistic position towards open source (AFAIK there's no comparison to AMD Nvidia open source drives) is a big issue for me.

> about their open source support.

Which support?

They have an official closed-source driver. That's what they support.

Parent is complaining that when they run an unsupported third-party driver, it doesn't work as well as the actually supported driver.

I think these distinctions are important, becaues NVIDIA is not telling anyone that they have (1) an open source driver, and (2) that this driver is well supported.

Their supported driver works great.

OTOH AMD does have an open-source driver that they support. In my experience, this driver works much worse than NVIDIA's proprietary driver. You can't use AMD GPUs for compute, etc.

At the end what this means is that users currently have to make a choice. Do you want a GPU driver that works well, or a GPU driver that's open source?

I don't like to have to make this choice, and every individual weight these values differently.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#702

Post by johnnyanmac »

pferde wrote: post #689
thefz wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Taking into consideration that the gamer segment is now well aware that miners and scalpers are ruining their supply, I really hope that when the flood of used cards ha…

Please take into consideration that this will be the same naive, impressionable "market segment" that repeatedly pre-orders new games, even though there is no real reason to do so, as the games are digital copies, so there is no scarcity. The same market segment also rewards shitty game companies, producing half-finished, barely working product, with their money again and again. All because of a combination of deviou…

PC's have limited/collector's editions too, despite the actual game ultimately being a digital code.

https://www.gamestop.com/video-games/pc-gaming/games/product...

It's not like pre-orders are objectively useless like some people may paint it.

> The same market segment also rewards shitty game companies, producing half-finished, barely working product, with their money again and again

Most people buying PC games aren't the ones buying top of the line dedicated GPU's for their gaming rigs. They also aren't ones who will scrutinize super technical details (nor even gameplay elements) as if they are Digital Foundry. Lotta weird generalizations here.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#703

Post by RealStickman_ »

thefz wrote: post #686
akelly wrote: post #441

This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change. The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof o…

> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Taking into consideration that the gamer segment is now well aware that miners and scalpers are ruining their supply, I really hope that when the flood of used cards ha…

Professional miners usually underclock and undervolt their cards. A constant load is also less stressful on the die and pcb than repeated heating and cooling cycles. The one thing you might have to replace on well kept GPUs are the fans.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#704

Post by robben1234 »

chme wrote: post #660
Reason077 wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market.” They do in the sense that buyers often consider future resale values when making primary purchase decisions. It’s much easier to justify purchasing a $2500 “enthusiast” graphics card if you’re confident you can get a decent chunk of that back when you sell it in 6-12 months. Similarly, car makers ar…

I would really like to see some data on how much resale value factors in for purchase decisions in regards to gaming equipment in average.

No real data, but in my decades of gaming I didn't really hear of people buying the top card in hopes to resell it later and make it affordable.

In my experience people buy what they can afford. So mostly *60/*70 (Ti) Nvidia cards. Few people who I know bought the 1080 are still using it. The second life for gaming GPUs mostly is to serve friends/relatives who ask to help building a PC for them.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#706

Post by PartiallyTyped »

RhysU wrote: post #507
actually_a_dog wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years t…

Someone learned from the Cisco hardware glut in the dot com crash!

They also learned from the previous crypto crash where they were stuck with a huge stash of 1060s.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#707

Post by johnnyanmac »

munk-a wrote: post #463
humaniania wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No money in video game piracy? What? https://jolt.richmond.edu/2019/02/09/the-unwinnable-war-on-v...

Eeeeeh, I give a lot less credence to that then I did when I was in college - back then it seemed like everyone was pirating everything (because, facts) but now a days a major consumer for video games is the millennials that have passed the cash vs. free time tipping point of piracy being attractive. Also, reasonably priced services now exist - I used pandora when I was in college and enjoyed it even with how hamstru…

>Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying.

because the console makers make little (or more often lose) profit from each system, so the draw is to make up or it by selling software. first party software or 3rd party software they get 30% of sales from.

>Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire

Tell that to the poor PSP. The reality is that 1% use it to run emulators or make homebrew and 99% use it to run free games. To the ordinary consumers, these aren't general purpose computers to tinker around with, they are toys to entertain themselves with. They have computers and phones for the former.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#708

Post by Dylan16807 »

kbenson wrote: post #650
Dylan16807 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not entirely true, and also not accepting that one person's "scalper" is another person's "bought this but decided I would rather have the money it seems to be worth now that I see how much this is". Even just dropping resales to one GPU per person per year would make an enormous difference, let alone if it was limited to people that genuinely bought the one GPU for themselves.

It doesn't work. It's unenforceable without the government to enforce it, and even then people will skirt it. Rules constraining how a market functions often don't work or have unintended consequences. The only real solution is to attack supply and/or demand. A rule limiting how many a person can buy doesn't actually affect demand, it just affects that market's ability to respond to demand. You get people that circum…

> It doesn't work. It's unenforceable without the government to enforce it, and even then people will skirt it.

Okay, but when I said "dropping" I wasn't talking about a rule, I was using that to demonstrate the problem.

> A rule limiting how many a person can buy doesn't actually affect demand, it just affects that market's ability to respond to demand.

There's a nearly fixed supply, because no amount of demand can affect the shortages.

There's a nearly fixed demand, because enough of the cards are going to be sold at MSRP to keep stoking it.

In a situation like that, someone arbitraging the prices is not helping supply and demand meet, they're just making a profit.

You want some amount of secondary market so that the people that very badly need a card can pay extra to get one now. But a tiny percent of cards going onto ebay is enough to fulfill that role. If half the cards end up massively marked up on ebay, it doesn't help allocate them more efficiently in any significant way, it just takes more money from people.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#709

Post by robben1234 »

finchisko wrote: post #663
Reason077 wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market.” They do in the sense that buyers often consider future resale values when making primary purchase decisions. It’s much easier to justify purchasing a $2500 “enthusiast” graphics card if you’re confident you can get a decent chunk of that back when you sell it in 6-12 months. Similarly, car makers ar…

In my experience base level items have much better resale value then more expensive items. It's true for notebooks, graphic cards and cars too. For example my iPhone 11 Pro has fallen to half of the price in one year, but entry level iPhone 11 probably has still 70% of its value. Same for Macbook Air, entry level with 8GB and 256 SSD will hold value better then maxed out one. Same with cars, extra premium equipment h…

>Same with cars, extra premium equipment has basically no value for people that are buying used cars.

It mostly doesn't impact price as is, but the top equipped car will get much more traffic from potential buyers and therefore can get away with setting the price a bit higher than the current market.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#710

Post by akelly »

formerly_proven wrote: post #682
akelly wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's three main ways GPUs wear out, silicon electromigration, electrolytic capacitor dryout, and fan bearing failure. And the first two happen much faster at higher temperatures. Temperatures are similar between gaming and mining, but miners run 24/7 compared to gaming 1-2 hrs/day, so the GPUs age like 10x faster. But still, GPU failures are pretty rare, I think the concern is overblown.

> electrolytic capacitor dryout Has anyone spotted electrolytics on a card in the last ten years or so?

Uhhh every single one. Here's the Nvidia 3070 for example: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-f...
Post reply on HN