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Nvidia Will Focus on Gaming Because Cryptocurrencies Are 'Volatile' (vice.com)
Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia made almost $10 billion dollars in the last fiscal year, that's up 41 percent from the previous period. The GPU company broke the news to its investors in a conference call on Thursday, and said that video games such as Star Wars: Battlefront II and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds as well as the unprecedented success of the Nintendo Switch led to the record profits. That and cryptocurrency. From a report: Graphics cards are the preferred engine of today's cryptocurrency miners. It's led to a shortage of the GPUs, a spike in their prices, and record profits for the company that manufactures them. "Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations," Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress told investors during its earnings call yesterday. "We met some of this demand with a dedicated board in our OEM business and some was met with our gaming GPUs." But Nvidia is having trouble keeping up with the demand and it's recommended retailers put gamers ahead of cryptocurrency miners while supply is limited. Kress acknowledged the shortage on the call and reaffirmed Nvidia's commitment to gamers. "While the overall contribution of cryptocurrency to our business remains hard to quantify, we believe it was a higher percentage of revenue than the prior quarter," she said. "That said, our main focus remains on our core gaming market as cryptocurrency trends will likely remain volatile." When Kress finished her statement and opened up the line to questions, the first question was about cryptocurrency. "Is crypto being modeled more conservatively?" An investor from Evercore asked. "We model crypto approximately flat," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive officer.
NVIDIA likes it when they sell out of graphics cards.
Fuck them.
As a gamer I afforded quite a lot of great cards just because they were paying for themselves when I wasn't gaming. I now have enough good computers that my friends don't need to bring theirs when we have a lan.. =)
I went to put together a new system for gaming and when I saw the price of a good graphics card, I put it off thinking that prices would drop. I went back a year or so later...same deal. So I've kinda moved on from gaming. I've found other things to do with my time.
Hasn't everyone switched to ASICs?
To expand on the subject, Nvidia and ATI outlasted other GPU manufacturers because they handled games better. That's it. ATI has become a subsidiary of AMD, and their quality has dropped accordingly, but both companies still owe over a decade of their existences to gamers.
On the other side, any devout BitMiner will tell you that GPU mining is not cost-effective anymore, so there is no good reason for Nvidia to waste their time advertising to a small and fanatical market that has already moved on to more specialized hardware.
except everything points to big budget gaming is rising and fake money is falling
might want to get more up to date than 2 years ago
That's an efficient way to write "about to be squished like a bug by regulations, due to massive criminal finance capability that has amazingly been overlooked so far."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Let's be honest here, crypto-mining seems to be on the way out now that the bubble has deflated. But even if it was still soaring, it's nothing to bet your company's future on.
nVidia has a competitor. AMD/Radeon. Right now, nVidia is what game makers optimize and tweak their engines for, so nVidia can sell their cards at a premium to gamers, knowing that gamers want their cards rather than buying from the competition, because, well, let's face it, the compatibility is simply higher. Since nVidia cannot deliver enough units to satisfy both demands, miners and gamers alike, one of them will have to look for alternatives.
If they go for the low hanging fruit and simply crank out mining rigs that will probably still sell like hotcakes (and you can make a pretty penny with it right now because miners can easily afford turning the profits they make back into mining systems, that system keeps itself running), gamers will not be able to buy an nVidia card, even though they would want one, and will look for alternatives. And at some point, it will actually make sense for studios to stop optimizing for nVidia and start looking at how to tweak their games for AMD because now suddenly the majority of their customers, i.e. gamers, is using AMD hardware.
This would be devastating for nVidia. And pretty much the very LAST thing they could possibly want.
Because at some point, mining is saturated. We probably have already reached that point, but I don't want to discuss whether BTC will rise again or whether it's plummeting back to penny stock quality, because it does not matter. What matters is that it's a risk. It may work out, it may not.
Gamers have been here, are here and will be here. And they needed, need and will need fast GPUs. Yes, they need fewer GPUs than the miners do. But if you can't satisfy the market demand anyway, why risk anything?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Innovating is hard, paying studios to cripple the competition is easy.
Don't most of the major players in Web Services have Nvidia GPU farms for processing? I'd think they would be putting most of their focus there.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
41% increase, and they're telling them no, keep your money? Seems like a bad idea. If I was a nvidia investor I would want to hear nvidia kissing miner butt for making nvidia so rich because surprise, mining isn't disappearing overnight. It might decrease, but cryptocurrancy is here to stay.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
However any sufficiently popular cryptocurrency moves towards ASICS, rendering GPUs useless for mining.
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Make one GPU that's absolutely shit for everything but mining Shitcoins, and the other that's great at rendering graphics? Then people using the hardware for its intended purposes won't get bent over by the morons rushing to collect as much pretend money as they can before the whole thing caves in.
Now only if they would work on their Linux driver so that using a notebook with their Optimus GPUs wasn't an awful experience.
... surprise, mining isn't disappearing overnight. It might decrease, but cryptocurrancy is here to stay.
Do we have any reason to think this? Right now, cryptocurrency isn't really currency-- most cryptocurrency use is done an investment, which is to say, a gamble that the price is going up.
Will it ever become a currency (which would require stable value. Rising prices for a currency would be deflation, which is bad for currency.)? The answer to this is very unclear.
If nVidia really wanted to do something about this, couldn't they just release a line of gaming cards that only supports the popular gaming API's (OpenGL, Direc3D, Vulkan) and not CUDA and OpenCL, or do games make use of CUDA and OpenCL nowadays for other things like physics processing offloading?
What, are they going to ask a buyer if they intend using their recently basket-added GPU for gaming and not mining?
Ah yes, the honour system. That's totally worked.
This is just public speaking to make them look good. In reality, they don't care who is buying their products as long as they get sold. In fact i would say they like crypto miners even more since they will tend to fry their hardware from extended use and they get an additional sale.
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PC gamers are history - games are moving onto cell phones and becoming less graphically complex.
Hi John Romero! Tell Stevie Case I said hello!
The death of PC gaming was first declared before you were born, before Nvidia was created, before smart phones and tablets and just after the discovery of fire.
If you weren't a smart ass know it millennial you'd actually know something that's true instead of made up in your little Ritalin soaked brain.
Hmm let's see...
Here's a list of all mineable coins: https://coinmarketcap.com/coin...
I'll let you figure out how many of those are ASIC-mineable. Answer: not many.
This doesn't mean ASICs can't be built for them, after all you can build an ASIC for anything. The issue is some of the algorithms make building and using ASICs prohibitively expensive.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
However any sufficiently popular cryptocurrency moves towards ASICS, rendering GPUs useless for mining.
That's not the case. Both Blockstream Core (the fork that goes against the Satoshi model) and the Cash chain still use the same old hashing algorithm and there's not a movement to move those to an ASIC-hard algorithm. Same with Ethereum which loves to eat 8GB GPU cards.
Those represent the top three mined cryptocurrencies of the past six months, so they're "suffciently popular".
By all means, more CryptoNote PoW, please, but that's a separate issue.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Glad to hear they are not wasting resources on cryptocurrency garbage.
Day Traders are called fools because they buy/sell stocks for short term gain and don't really know what they are doing. They want to get rich quick. Crypto traders make day traders look like geniuses.
When the hype fades, I'll buy 2 GTX 1080s for $150. I hope the hype punches all these bandwagon luddites in their faces and they lose the shirts off their backs.
right now neither AMD or nVidia want to ramp up production to meet demand because they don't think demand will last. Worse, they're getting ready for a huge drop in demand when the bottom drops out of the crypto currency market and those miners dump their cards on eBay. Current gen graphics cards are much, much better built so a lot of those cards will hold up fine, making a card from an old mining rig practical in ways it wasn't 5 years ago.
The question is are Crypto-currencies here to stay? If either side takes that bet and wins they become the dominant graphics card manufacture for the foreseeable future. But if they lose they over extend themselves and go bankrupt. So far both sides are sitting put.
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It would seem cryptos do just fine when people are dismissive towards them.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Because the price of Bitcoin proved to be extremely unstable to use as a currency?
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Aren't all work the same way?
Or, they are not actually virtual currency but virtual investment?
But, if they are actually investment, why we need/want them?
What would happen to world economy, if people invested in virtual investments, instead of real investments?
Or, all so-called cryptocurrencies are actually just a modified (made decentralized and paying variable interest) Ponzi Schemes?
(Price of cryptocurrencies would keep increasing in the long term (by their design), so it is equivalent of paying variable interest to all long term investors.)
As more and more people invest in cryptocurrencies, it will become harder and harder to ban their trading everywhere!
All cryptocurrencies need to be banned globally before it is too late!
Cryptocurrency collapse means market flooded with used video cards, alleviating demand, but hurting ability to selling new cards, both Nvidia and AMD.
it's real simple. if you stay sold out of all the fucking 1060's, 1070's and 1080's then you need to pull your braindamaged head out of your cavernous ass and make more fucking GPUs! i won't buy any of your shit, cause "fuck you nvidia"(linus) but these windows using drones will. save your pandering propaganda for your mirror.
Can they design a card that's good for 3D graphics, but sucks for mining, so that people will be able to buy cards for gaming again? Stupid miners are running up the cost of GPUs because they haven't done the math that says it will take over a year to amortize the cost of the hardware, even if your electricity is free.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The irony here is that even the black market is moving away from bitcoin. In other words, even criminals are now saying, "Oh no, we can't use that, it's too unstable!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I considered building a VR rig but no way in hell when GTX1080s are over $1200. Makes me wish I had snatched a bunch late last year when I could get them on sale for $400
Black markets aren't moving away from Bitcoin because it's "too unstable". They are moving away from it because it's not private/anonymous. Which is kind of important when buying illegal goods. Now that true privacy coins like Monero are available there is little reason to accept Bitcoin.
They are also moving away from it because of the ridiculous transaction fees and times.
Why are people that use cryptocurrencies such terrible people?
Has anyone here ever met a crypto-enthusiast that wasn't a complete douche?
A good chunk of nVidia hardware is used in machine learning and computer vision.
Guess who has cornered the markets for self-driving car computing, image classification algorithm hardware, or GPGPU?
It's the company with a stable and high--performance Linux driver (and it's been that way for over a decade).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Not Steve Case
I think you meant Steve Perlman
Onlive
AMD cards initially were more efficient at Cryptocurrencies because they're more general purpose in that you can do more things with them. Eventually when the AMD cards ran out, they went after the next most efficient to use use cards which are the Nvidia cards. It would be silly for either AMD or Nvidia to dedicate resources to making cards more attractive because let's face it, they both sold out of everything they have. Why make your product more attractive when you can't even keep it in stock? AMD revealed too that they would make more video cards but the rapid sell-off of graphics cards has caused a memory shortage from their provider Samsung. Considering the size of Samsung, this means Nvidia is likely facing similar shortages too.
Eventually popular CryptoCurrencies either move on to dedicated hardware or they wane in popularity and vanish for the market so they're not a good way to bet your future on. The whole put in roadblocks to stop users from using GPUs for anything other than gaming is silly. Why would anyone realistically want a limited product? Who care what people do with their expensive graphics cards when you have people on youtube breaking Iphones for fun. Just be patient, the market will eventually swing back to normal.
4K, 5K and 8K games will need a gpu. Intel is not ready with that kind of cpu just yet.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I walked by a vacant lot the other day where somebody had done an illegal dump. I've found burner phones and stuff on the street here, and small appliances. This time I saw what looked like a busted-open rack server. My first thought was: "I wonder if that was a Bitcoin mining rig?".
If they are going to dedicate themselves to gaming then bring the price of the video cards back down to the prices in 2016 before all this started. I bought a high-end video card for my machine in late 2016 for $375 US and that was outrageous, that same card is now $1295 OMG!!! I need to buy another card for my other gaming computer but there is NO WAY I am paying $1295 and lesser cards are $800. There are some deals on older cards for $650. If they are not "catering to mining" they sure are making the money!! I call BS!
I soon will need an upgraded videocard for ML. In fact, I would like two or three really good ones. The timing is about perfect as in the coming months cryptominers are going to be flooding the market with them as they try to pay their rent.
Ethereum is the main coin that people still mine using GPU's, because BTC is only really effective with ASIC's these days.
During 2018, Ethereum will be moving to a Proof of Stake model instead of Proof of Work.
i.e. No more mining.
I expect NVidia knows this.