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To Combat Shortage, Nvidia Asks Retailers To Limit Graphics Card Orders (pcmag.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you're a PC builder -- or your aging desktop system is in dire need of some modern upgrades -- you've probably wondered why it's impossible to get a graphics card lately. You can thank the outrageous interest in cryptocurrency for all of this. Since graphics cards mine cryptocurrency much faster than CPUs, an eager community of get-rich-quick enthusiasts are scooping up graphics cards as fast as they can get them. While there isn't much major manufacturers AMD and Nvidia can do about the overwhelming demand for GPUs, Nvidia is at least trying to let retailers know that they should be holding their stock for the company's core audience: gamers, not miners. "For NVIDIA, gamers come first. All activities related to our GeForce product line are targeted at our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers' needs as usual," reads a translated statement Nvidia's Boris Bohles. Nvidia is suggesting that retailers limit graphics card orders to just two per person, but that's just an idea -- one Nvidia can't actually enforce beyond restricting sales on its website, which it's currently doing. Further reading: It's a terrible time to buy a graphics card.
nvidia doesn't want their cards to be sold at 200$ above mspr and they get nothing rather than the usual.
They care about miners a lot, they have targeted miners previously, it's a great market for them, but it seems that they want a larger piece of that pie.
nVidia can tell the retailers what to do, when they buy back the old stock. If they don't do that, then they don't have any power over what the retailers do.
When the crypto miners disappear, there may be a glut of NVidia cards on a certain popular auction site .. or maybe they will start to think of something more useful to do with all of that compute power designed to work on massively parallel problems. They might start doing a bit of Computer Aided Detection for radiologists using AI for instance, or sell their services to hospitals and universities to do genome processing, or sell their compute cycles to companies doing research into battery technology, or finding new antibiotics; or research into using Thorium for nuclear reactors, or at the very least hand some compute power to SETI.
At least HPCs might become more accessible.
There are supply-side limitations to what they can produce. They can't just say, "We'll buy more fries" when the available worldwide potato supply is already gobbled up.
belgian here. buyers of fries with ketshit should be hanged.
Opening a brand new semiconductor fab is hideously expensive and takes years. There's a reason they haven't done this already. If it was cost or time effective, they would have done it by now.
This sounds like they have a manufacturing bottle neck in the supply chain.
They could ramp up production but they know the demand is just as much of a bubble as cryptocoins are. They don't want to be left with empty factories when it bursts.
No sig today...
It should just be a medium of exchange for people who can't use banks and get rid of the price speculation and "mining". I remember back in 2011 when the "first" bubble appeared and bitcoin went up to $30 and people were putting pens up their butt on 4chan for bitcoin. I support cryptocurrency, but not at tulip prices.
Nvidia should put buzz words like "blockchain" and "crypto" in the name/descriptions of a line of video cards they're producing with a high margin and let nature take its course.
"Introducing the NEW Ford Pinto... powered by a BLOCKCHAIN engine with Ford's new CRYPTO door opener and starter mechanism!"
you know. They can limit however they want.
Bitcoin GPU mining has been unprofitable for nearly 5 years or so.
But there are many other cryptocurrencies out there, many of which are not based on Bitcoins SHA256 proof of work that are still profitable to GPU mine and won't see ASIC support any time soon, if ever.
I believe the most common one right now is Ethereum, but there are likely others.
The chips, obviously. Don't think you're getting the "mining" for free. MTTF is still decreasing, even under volted for efficiency.
MTTF is many times longer than your lifespan, puny human, so it's really the video cards that are complaining about the short MTTF of their owners
Yes, and that.
People who got into mining in October before card prices skyrocketed again likely got their ROI 1-2 months ahead of schedule because of the bump in value across all cryptos in November/Dec.
People getting into mining now *might* have a problem hitting an ROI in 6 months due to the high cost of cards, or another spike in value could make them all profitable by March (assuming they hold a percentage of their mined coins).
Nvidia doesn't mind selling tons of GPUs to whoever has money.
But what they don't want is for all the $popular_crypto_coin to suddenly crash (and it looks like they're about to) and then flood the market with dirt cheap used GPUs and leave Nvidia in the lurch unable to sell $Gpu->filter('this_year')->get_newest()
By doing this they can continue the high demand for their products and try to smooth out the coming bumps and dips.
Belgium isn't even a country, so your opinion is invalid. Besides, basic culinary knowledge - nightshades complement each other. Tomatoes and potatoes.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The problem is that if they increased supply now then the demand for their new product later would plummet as all the crypto coin crashes and the minders try to ditch their gpus to recoup costs.
There are now algorithms that Nvidia is inherently better at (Zcash)
An Nvidia 1050 isn't spectacular, but it's efficient enough that a rig of 6 of them can still bring in $200-$300/mo.
For Bitcoin, yes. Ethereum and certain other cryptocurrencies are quite minable with a GPU.
My teenager hinted he wants a new build for his birthday next week. I spent some time spec'ing a system last night, but I couldn't find a gpu that wasn't priced about the same as all the rest of the components compbined. Cards that should be around $100 are selling in the $500 range.
As much as I hate the idea of some criptominer causing a price rise that would affect me buying my gaming card, let me just say Screw you NVIDIA. You have NO say in what we use your GPU for and neither does the shop owners who you're suggesting ... do what exactly? ... Don't sell us the card if we can't pass a multi choice quiz on gaming culture?
Supply can be an issue, but there are other factors that come into play that I've heard about. Apparently DRAM had a rather large increase in price recently which is creating an issue for board manufacturers.
Then there is the issue that AMD/Nvidia remember what happened last time there was a big increase in the price of crypto currencies and then a huge drop off. So they are rightly fearful of such a thing happening this time because they have to place orders for more GPU chips months in advance. So they would have to feel confident that the current high demand for cards will still be there six months from now in order to place a larger order for chips from TSMC/Global Foundries. I can't see any reason for them to be that confident.
I always find this kind of stuff funny.
Left hand "LET THE FREE MARKET SORT IT OUT"
Right hand "STOP THOSE DAMN MINERS FROM BUYING OUR GAMING CARDS!"
You can't have it both ways...
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
And second, gamers might have a preference for nVidia today, but they will buy AMD if they can't get nVidia cards for a reasonable price. If the gaming market suddenly gets flooded with AMD cards, game makers will stop optimizing mainly for nVidia. If there are more people playing on AMD than on nVidia, game makers will optimize for AMD.
Which brings the related question :
ever noticed the recent trend in gaming consoles ?
Microsoft :
Since the XBox 360 all the way to the current XBox One X, uses ATI/AMD GPU hardware (and since the XBox One uses AMD CPUs too).
Sony:
Since the Playstation 4, including the current Playstation 4 Pro, uses an AMD APU.
Nintendo:
With the sole exception of the current Switch (which is Nvidia Tegra based) uses graphics core by ATI/AMD, either through acquisition (ATI did buy Art-X who were doing the GameCube's Flipper and Wii's GX) or by putting their own tech (The GX2 core of Wii U's Latte is a Radeon HD derivative core).
Nearly all hardware outputing graphics from gaming console has been some way or another related to AMD.
Chances are, game developer, more precisely triple-A big studio that target multiple consoles in addition to Windows PCs, are paying attention to AMD hardware optimisation.
(Though, due to the diverse jungle of graphical APIs. it doesn't necessarily translate into things applicable directly onto PC with AMD GPUs)
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Why, the card I have now is 'out of support' as of this year, that means once I go to kernel 4.5+ their proprietary will no longer install. So I will need to use nouveau, which still has some minor issues, but I can deal with the screen 'flashs' I get.
Nvidia promised to help with nouveau development, but so far nothing 'real' was done by them.
So, no more Nvidia for me, going forward I will onoy use video vendors that support open source 100%.
if AMD suddenly ramps up production they could devour the gaming market leading to games written specifically for AMD. Right now nVidia has a big performance & stability edge because they can throw more engineers at game companies and because they just plain have more hardware.
At the moment neither nVidia or AMD wants to take the risk of ramping up production since it'll be a disaster if crypto currencies collapse. But AMD has a long history of slightly off kilter business decisions.
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When I've went there in the past, the store had tiered pricing for the graphics card I wanted. The store would charge $10,000 per card if someone came in and bought more than 4 at a time.
Have gnu, will travel.
nvidia doesn't want their cards to be sold at 200$ above mspr and they get nothing rather than the usual.
Actually, I don't think that it is because NVIDIA does have the tools to stop it and it is a tool they have already deployed with a specific exemption for miners: the driver license agreement. They recently changed the license terms to forbid usage in a "datacentre" except for "blockchain processing". If they really wanted to stop the miners they would not put in that exception and would, at least attempt, to ban all datacentre usage. This would massively drop demand and allow them to release a "miner card" which works with a driver that has a different license like their Tesla cards which, at ~10+ times the price, have a driver which is allowed to be used in a "datacentre".
Instead, they specifically exempted miners so I think that this is just an attempt by them to try and mollify gamers while, at the same time, pumping out as many cards as they can to make as much money as they can while not really caring at all about any customer so long as they keep making tons of money.
nVidia knows two things: First, gamers will need graphics cards. Now, tomorrow, forever.
It is entirely conceivable that at some point we may not need them. For example, the Intel Phi (Knights landing?) or whatever it calls itself now is an attempt by them to put several hundred low power x86 cores into chips. While this has been going on long enough that I'm not sure it is ever going to really work it is conceivable that some technology like this could result in hybrid CPU chips both high and low power cores that could be switched between processing and graphics usage depending on the needs of the machine.
This may be entirely hypothetical at this point but if it is possible to conceive of a technology which might replace the GPU "forever" becomes very unlikely especially in a fast moving area like IT.
...with Ford's new CRYPTO door opener and starter mechanism!
Given the Pinto's safety record you might want to drop the 'O'.
You have NO say in what we use your GPU for
I agree but it seems that nVidia may need some persuading.
for a very long time. There was a lot of dead cards from solder and/or traces breaking. You could toss 'em in an oven for 30 minutes and get another 6 weeks out of them; long enough to get past ebay's return policy.
It wasn't until the GTX 660/760 line that we started to see cards from Asus/Gigabyte/MSI specifically designed to fix this (Gigabyte's 'Ultra Durable' brand, MSI's 'Military Grade' and I forget what Asus' was). I ran pretty low end stuff (think GTX 240 ) and only recently got some hand me downs from my bro. That's because when he got his 1060 it was the first time in a decade he bought a new card to upgrade instead of to replace a dead board.
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The obvious free market choice here is for Nvidia to design a second series of GPUs tailor-made for cryptocurrency mining. Just drop the features mining doesn't need like texture render units, add more of the features mining does need. They already do this sort of parallel product development for gaming cards vs CAD/CAM cards. Although the gaming cards are cheaper than CAD/CAM cards, they have worse performance per dollar at CAD/CAM applications, thus keeping this product differentiation viable.
They're unwilling to do this probably because they aren't confident that cryptocurrency mining will be around that long, and any money they put into parallel development of cards specifically for mining could end up being wasted. If the market were truly free, other GPU manufacturers would step in and take the risk. That's how the market responds to uncertainty - someone willing to take the risk will either be bankrupted by it (if mining turns out to be a fad), or be catapulted to new market dominance (if mining is here for good). Unfortunately, we let Nvidia and AMD/ATI buy up all the smaller GPU manufacturers, leaving us with just two behemoths. If neither of them are willing to take the risk, then that's the end of market forces on this particular issue.
the system builders can still get cards at a reasonable price. You can get a whole new system for a few hundred over just the card right now. It's crazy.
You might also look for a used 970 GTX or even a 660/760 if it's for e-sports, just make sure it's from one of the better manufactures (Gigabyte/Asus/MSI). They tend to put some effort into making the cards more durable which reduces the odds of getting a junk board that's had the solder re-flowed in an oven.
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You can thank the outrageous interest in cryptocurrency for all of this. Since graphics cards mine cryptocurrency much faster than CPUs, an eager community of get-rich-quick enthusiasts are scooping up graphics cards as fast as they can get them.
Man what a waste of resources, time and money. Wow. Idiots and their dollars are parted. Does this mean when these people go bankrupt trying to chase cryptocurrency, there will be a glut of used GPU's hitting eBay?
I will say however, it's surprising NVIDIA is saying "Hey limit sales!" instead of saying, "JACK UP PRICES!" I'd probably gone with the latter if it was my decision. People sucking up GPU's for a worthless endeavor? Double the price. Hell, triple it. Make those GPU's really hurt.
lol Well one way to look at it is when the coins crash and they will crash, their will be a glut of video cards on ebay.
Jack of all trades,master of none
than spec? Wouldn't they be trying to maximize performance? Especially since the faster they mine the more they get; given the nature of crypto currencies it gets harder to mine as time goes on.
Also, these cards aren't _meant_ to run 24/7. They're meant to run 4-8 hours at a time tops, and those are the really nice ones. nVidia recently prohibited their consumer grade cards from being used in mining and data centers. This is obviously unenforceable, but the theory is that they're trying to get out of warranty repairs for a use case the cards aren't meant for. Meaning they're not expecting them to hold up in those use cases.
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I've been building best-bang-for-the-buck, low-electricity, low-noise gaming PCs since 2005 when I left college and became wholly responsible for my own electricity bill. I've built ~4 since then with each computer lasting ~3 years before wanting to build another. When I caught wind of the new micro towers from MSI (Trident) and ASUS (GR8 II), thought to myself, "That's what I want next! If they can sell those for $1,000, I should be able to do it for $750 or less."
Boy was I wrong. Now, I was under no illusion that I would be able to get everything into a super slim case, but I thought I could get a mini case and all the same power. I priced it all out and I couldn't get under $1,300. The problem? The nVidia GTX 1060 3GB. Now, as the linked article expresses, this isn't a powerhouse card. It's a lower-end, lower-power (thus lower electricity consumption and lower heat) option that can still run everything I want to play with ease. It should be ~$150 right now. But the cheapest one on Newegg is $400 right now. The cheapest that PCPartPicker can find is for $320 at B&H. Amazon only has used cards.
It's looking like I'll have to go OEM or just wait for crypto currency to die to build a new PC.
It's Nvidia and ATI's shortsightedness that we are in the situation we are in. They should have ramped up production to address demand 8 months ago.
AMD doesn't provide drivers for game consoles -- they just provide the hardware.
XBox One basically runs a DirectX 12 (and before that a DirectX 11.2 a.k.a. "11.X") stack, that's almost the same as what you got on your Windows PC.
What makes you think that Microsoft will rewrite an entirely different stack that clones what they already have from AMD for Windows ?
Sure, they didn't just straigh install the same software, but chances are extremely high that they'll simply customize AMD's part work.
Same is very likely to happen on PlayStation : after all, it runs a FreeBSD fork, and AMD already provides a DRM/DRI stack for BSDs and Linux. Sony use they own APIs, but GNMX has been described very DirectX-like-ish, and GNM is a DirectX-12-ish low-level wrapper.
So chances are high that the PS4 uses most of the lower stack of AMD, and maybe even some of the work that AMD has done on their high-level state tracker has found way into Sony APIs.
This seems corroborated by discussion with AMD devs on forums (see Phoronix) where they report that they share a lot more code than just between Windows and Linux (and some *BSDs which use the same stack).
Wii/Wii U's GX/GX2 APIs have strong similarities with OpenGL, chances are bits of the AMD stack (specially the R600 stack that targets the same chip as both PC hardware and Wii U) have found they way there, but that's more speculations from my part (without any sources, beyond the OpenGL-likeness of the APIs).
Anyway, my initial remarks concerning the dominance of AMD hardware in console land isn't as much regarding the software, as much as lots of game developer getting more used to how AMD hardware's special quircks handle and how to make the most out of that type of hardware.
(This is even more relevant as most current development is moving to lower level API that are basically thin wrapper around the direct hardware: Vulkan, DX12, Metal, GNM, etc.)
AMD's drivers have been a source of anguish since they were ATI -- and don't even try to use their Linux drivers.
Which Linux drivers are you speaking about ? You might have not noticed, but FGLRX has completely disappeared from the Linux market.
The opensource (available in upstream vanilla linux kernel) drivers are the official AMD drivers, in the sense that some of the devs working on those are even on AMD's payroll. As the opensource driver got better, AMD has already considered them as the official drivers for older legacy hardware, and concentrated their binary drivers only to support current then-gen hardware.
As the drivers got even better, they went even further.
A couple of years ago, AMD has completely over-hauled their approach to drivers :
they have decided to overhaul the opensource Linux lower-level DRM (radeon.ko) and use this new rewritten DRM (amdgpu.ko) as a base for all their drivers.
It's shared by both the opensource Mesa stack (which they consider the current official and they way to go in the future), and the binary proprietary GL library (which AMD considers for covering special use-case in the professional workstation and CAD world).
They are in the process of streamlining every thing around this stack.
The stack it self, during the rewrite was made to expose the same kind of low-level functionality as also used on Windows and all the other platform they target (though that part was rewritten by their usual driver crew, not the seasoned Linux devs, so it took some time until the DAL/DC bits were considered good enough quality to get upstreamed into vanilla kernels).
The stack is designed to share as much as possible : in addition the GL situation mentioned above, it's also used by the Vulkan stack, and AMD has recently opensourced their stack and added their AMDVLK library next to the independently made RADV (which is also very functional, by the way).
AMD is in the process to opening their ROCm / OpenCL stack too (currently all the bit are released in the open, curr
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