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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.
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.. =)
Hasn't everyone switched to ASICs?
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
Games is something you enjoy, and virtual hash numbers is a sick gambling.
I sense there's a connection, in both cases Nvidia turns you into a vegetable.
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?
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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.
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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.
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However any sufficiently popular cryptocurrency moves towards ASICS, rendering GPUs useless for mining.
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... 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?
How about us who like Seti@Home?
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I bought a couple of (at the time) highend gpus in the early days of bitcoin, i only have time to play games for a few hours a day at most so the rest of the time i let them mine bitcoins just out of curiosity as the gpus would otherwise sit idle or rendering a stupid screensaver.
Turns out those bitcoins paid for both the power used and the cost of the GPUs.
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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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Might I recommend the Trident TVGA 8900C?
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Nvidia don't care about Nouveau drivers for Linux. In fact they probably see it as being a long term threat to them because an open source driver might reveal that their hardware violates patents.
They care about gaming on Windows, scientific computing on Linux and having decent Android performance. And all of those use the closed source drivers.
Actually they do have an open source driver they support, NVGPU. But that's probably only ever be intended to be just enough to get a GUI working on Linux. So if you download an purist open source Linux, your card will work.
What they don't want is a third party, full featured, accelerated open source driver which they don't have any control over.
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When these cards don't end up in hands of gamers, and empty shelves drive the prices up in retail sector, it's a disaster for two gaming GPU companies.
Nvidia especially has invested a lot into getting PC gaming market to grow from a small actor well behind consoles in importance to the primary gaming platform in the world. And maintaining this status requires gaming PCs to remain price competitive and available to gamers.
Losing this means that gamers will just move away from gaming on PCs and use a much cheaper and much more available console for their gaming needs, and companies like Nvidia will once again be stuck as just OEMs for giants like Microsoft, working on razor thin margins.
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)
Gamers don't care at all about them, because they're useless for gaming.
There already are GPU boards on the market that have no video out port.
They're not very popular, because miners prefer hardware they can sell when mining boom becomes another hard crash and they have to care about efficiency.
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.
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Because of negotiated pricing, it is cheaper to buy a prebuilt gaming computer then to build one right now. some people are buying them for the graphics cards and then selling the striped computer.
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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If you care more about the source code then performance, you are probably using Intel HDGraphics (or AMD equivlant) anyway. If performance comes first, you are running nVidia on closed source binary blobs.
It would seem cryptos do just fine when people are dismissive towards them.
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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 bought an HP Omen with a GTX 1080 Ti already installed, which seems like the best way for the manufacturer to ensure the card will be used for gaming instead of mining. The problem with "just make more!" is that historically, every time a tech firm massively scales up production, quality goes way down, sometimes to the point where it actually causes the company to go out of business.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Do you know what "lead time" is? Why should they spend a year gearing up for increased production, when they literally have no evidence that the demand will still be there a year from now?
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
There already are GPU boards on the market that have no video out port.
These boards come at a considerable cost premium versus the GeForce/Titan ones, and require the chassis to provide cooling, they have no onboard fan. A Titan XP is ~$1500 vs the P100 at ~$4600, a Titan V is ~$3000 vs the V100 at $8400. If you compare the non-Titan GeForce cards your money goes even farther. There are some more advanced features on the Tesla cards (memory, bandwidth, etc), and for the Pascal ones, the P100 does doubles math really well, the Titan V is nearly the same. As I understand it, these extra features don't matter to crypto miners. Why buy one card for $$$$ that can do X amount of processing when you can spend $ for one card end up with 3-4X the processing power for the same money?
It's a volatile market though. So Nvidia likes it when they sell more, but they don't like it when sales suddenly plummet and the new manufacturing plants they invested in are idle.
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.
Or, somebody will decide that ATI and NVidia aren't satisifying the market, and we'll be back to the old days when you had to choose between S3, Matrox, ATI, NVidia, 3dfx, PowerVR, Intel, Rendition, Trident....
NVidia really doesn't want somebody else deciding that this might be an opportunity to upset the apple cart and jump into the home 3d graphics card market.
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Most people read a guide and in those guides they're told to undervolt their GPU, thus letting it run cooler. But I see you don't bother reading the manuals, so hey.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Or that high end gamers who can't get the $1000+ cards realize that they can stay with their current cards, or go with cheaper cards.
Game studios will also start to optimize their graphics more and not rely on Nvidia and AMD to save their asses for having a poorly optimized game. This will lower demand for the high end cards, because they aren't needed to get stunning graphics.
Nvidia probably realizes this and don't want to start back at square one with their marketing program, to convince gamers they need $1000+ cards, and to convince game studios that there will be enough cards out there to be lazy with their optimizations.
And once game studios learn to optimize their graphics, they'll realize that there is a much broader market out there they can service, and this will lower demand for those super high end cards, and maybe even for the $300+ cards too.
When the cryptocurrency bubble pops, they want the demand for the high and higher end cards to still be there, and it might not be if the bubble lasts too long because gamers have learned to settle, and game companies have learned to optimize better.
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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).
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Or, somebody will decide that ATI and NVidia aren't satisifying the market, and we'll be back to the old days when you had to choose between S3, Matrox, ATI, NVidia, 3dfx, PowerVR, Intel, Rendition, Trident....
Please no. I don't want to go back to a "Works best with Voodoo 3dfx!" world. At least with only two big graphics companies things are usually compatible and interoperate pretty well.
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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.
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You're talking about compute cards. I'm talking actual GPU cards without video out.
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!
AMD sucks though; the Radeon windows drivers are bug riddled crap. I think the complexity is getting so high (22 billion transistors in Volta) that there will be only 1 player that can afford the R&D.
The are popular for scientific computing. I have 4x K40 in my workstation.
That would be the best outcome, a competitive market is better for the customers. The question is, aside from intel, who has the infrastructure and R&D to even compete in the GPU market at this point?
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.
There was a recent tweet from nvidia exec that in fact stated the exact opposite. Gist was that "we're big enough to get priority on memory, unlike some of our much smaller competitors".
You're talking about compute cards. I'm talking about cards like nvidia's GP (instead of GTX) branded cards. i.e. GP106 being the GTX 1060 without display out ports.