Has anyone tried to buy a new graphics card lately?

[Bad Jim]

Does everyone who mines (even the little guys) end up benefiting though? In the economist link above it sounds like more of a "whoever crosses the finish line first" takes all, which is why there are people with room fulls of daisy-chained GPU's at twice or more than the cost they're worth and the smaller guys are giving up.

Everyone who mines gets money, but everyone is also paying for electricity, and not everyone has a profit after paying the electric bill. You can be more efficient with two cards in one PC, because the PC itself draws power not just the graphics cards. You can also undervolt, which also reduces power consumption. As a gamer you might not want a second card and you might not want to mess around with undervolting, which also implies lowering clock frequency. You'll want a recent graphics card, as newer generations are more energy efficient.

But the other side of the equation is that we gamers do not have to recoup the cost of the GPU in order to justify buying it. For the cryptominers, buying cards is a risk, as they may not make a profit if prices fall.

Of course for Bitcoin and some others there is special purpose hardware that is far more energy efficient than a GPU could ever be and much faster so the little guy doesn't stand much chance. The flipside in this case is that the miners for these currencies aren't driving up GPU prices.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Does everyone who mines (even the little guys) end up benefiting though? In the economist link above it sounds like more of a "whoever crosses the finish line first" takes all, which is why there are people with room fulls of daisy-chained GPU's at twice or more than the cost they're worth and the smaller guys are giving up.

Everyone who mines gets money, but everyone is also paying for electricity, and not everyone has a profit after paying the electric bill. You can be more efficient with two cards in one PC, because the PC itself draws power not just the graphics cards. You can also undervolt, which also reduces power consumption. As a gamer you might not want a second card and you might not want to mess around with undervolting, which also implies lowering clock frequency. You'll want a recent graphics card, as newer generations are more energy efficient.

But the other side of the equation is that we gamers do not have to recoup the cost of the GPU in order to justify buying it. For the cryptominers, buying cards is a risk, as they may not make a profit if prices fall.

Of course for Bitcoin and some others there is special purpose hardware that is far more energy efficient than a GPU could ever be and much faster so the little guy doesn't stand much chance. The flipside in this case is that the miners for these currencies aren't driving up GPU prices.

So it would stand to reason that GPU prices should stabilize if this keeps up...I hope.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Is The Witcher 3 one of those games with an Nvidia logo splashed on the intro? If so I might just do something like that, because that game is the golden ticket I've been waiting for.

It's an Nvidia GameWorks title. It uses Nvidia Hairworks for realistic hair physics simulation and Nvidia's HBAO+ for better ambient occlusion. Older AMD cards before the RX 400 series are not very efficient at tessellation, so you wouldn't be able to use Hairworks without a massive fps drop. HBAO+ works the same on both brands. Personally, I don't use Hairworks even though I have a GTX 970 currently, because I just don't think that it looks good enough. But that's entirely subjective.

 

[Bad Jim]

Of course for Bitcoin and some others there is special purpose hardware that is far more energy efficient than a GPU could ever be and much faster so the little guy doesn't stand much chance. The flipside in this case is that the miners for these currencies aren't driving up GPU prices.

So it would stand to reason that GPU prices should stabilize if this keeps up...I hope.

Unfortunately Ethereum is designed so that ASICs aren't really feasible. And for every cryptocurrency with specialized hardware, there will always be dozens of smaller currencies that just aren't big enough for someone to profitably design an ASIC.

However I do think the recent price spike is a bubble, investors will give up, miners will bring prices down, will have to stop buying GPUs, and we may see millions of 1080s on Ebay going for bargain prices. Actually it looks like the price of Bitcoin peaked a couple of weeks ago. Ethereum, sadly, has plateaued rather than tumbled, but it may fall yet:

https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

 

[ziyekik444]

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[NiGHTSJOD]

Bitcoin isn't really the problem as much anymore. But Etherium mining is as this is still quite easy to mine with GPUs. At least according to a friend of mine who has greater knowledge than I on such things (I tend to just glaze over once he gets going on the subject). I was hoping that with the "bitcoin split" earlier this year, coupled with the more difficulty to earn coin outside of some Chinese server farm, those with home made mining rigs would sell off their GPUs and drop out of the game. But nope, value has gone up so much it's negated the higher difficulty/more electricity costs. Probably just as well - said GPUs will have led a pretty hard life. I got lucky with an RX580 Pulse 8GB recently (AU$170 thanks to a very mispriced shelf edge label )

 

[-Dragmire-]

Yeah, I'm waiting for a price drop or my GPU breaks completely.

Someone's trying to get $4000 for a GTX 980ti on Amazon(Canada)...

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Well, after much deliberation I decided to get the Evga GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX 3.0 [http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/evga-geforce-gtx-1070-sc-superclocked-gaming-review,1.html]

A bit steep yet at $470 on Newegg, but I figured I've gotten over six years out of my beloved 6870 now, and I plan on keeping this one for a while as well. It seemed like one of the best valued cards around now with minimal price inflation over initial release ($440). I suppose I'll have to run a driver cleaner switching from AMD to Nvidia. Funny seeing as I went from Nvidia originally to (several) AMD cards on my last build.

 

[Jeroenr]

Ok, wait, what the hell does bitcoin have to do with graphics cards? How do you "Mine" cryptocurrency?! 0_o I gotta google this shit.

(one google later)

...What the actual hell, we live in a weirdass world.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-11

So, people are buying tons of graphics cards to create computers that can verify the legitimacy of cryptocurrency units and transfers, because if your rig somehow solves it first you get some free bitcoin?

That is just WEIRD on so many levels. Technology is amazing.

That's just half of it, they also do complex mathematical calculations to create (Mine) new coins and as it turns out some GPUs are very good at doing those type of calculations.

They usually go for the best cost to performance ratio, witch turns out to be the midrange gamers cards.