GPU Prices Are Falling (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you were looking for a new graphics card for your PC over the last year, your search probably ended with you giving up and slinging some cusses at cryptocurrency miners. But now the supply of video cards is on the verge of rebounding, and I don't think you should wait much longer to pull the trigger on a purchase. Earlier this week, Digitimes reported that GPU vendors like Gigabyte, MSI, and others were expecting to see their card shipments plummet 40 percent month-over-month. The market for digital currencies like Bitcoin and Etherum is losing some of its momentum, and at the same time, large mining operations are pulling back on their investment in GPUs in anticipation of dedicated mining rigs (called ASICs) that are due out before the end of the year. These factors working in conjunction seem like they are leading to more supply, which in turn is forcing retailers to cut prices. For example, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 video card is selling on Amazon right now for $700. Other retailers even have it listed at the original MSRP of $600. These are the lowest prices of 2018 so far.

Comments

Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[edxwelch]

Since the Monero branch, RX Vega cards have become the best value for mining Monero, and there's no chance of getting any of those cards at MSRP
http://www.nowinstock.net/comp...

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

That's fine. Compared to my Nvidia 1080 they're useless for gaming, so I wouldn't consider a Vega.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Tough Love]

Compared to my Nvidia 1080 they're useless for gaming

"Useless" is a wild exaggeration. More accurate: 1080 turns in 8 to 15% higher framerates at ultra-high quality. Vega overclocks better, closing the framerate gap and bumping up power consumption to considerably higher than NVidia (maybe 30% more?). Actually, since nobody really needs 100 FPS, you aren't going to notice much difference in practice. Vega handles 4K better. Vega costs twice as much because of mining, that is my only serious issue with it. Going to be hanging onto the Rx 480 for a while yet.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Xenocrates]

Maybe because gamers are budget constrained. If I have 300$, I can't buy a 500$ card that will run my games the way I want, since the original 300$ MSRP is inflated due to demand. Because I can't buy that card in the first place, I can't mine with it. Or, I happen to not live in one of the areas where the power costs make that break even. Perhaps my computer can't be left on at night because the fans/lights keep me awake.

I don't like miners because they are mostly wasting a shit-load of electricity, stealing CPU cycles, or hardware, driving up prices of anything with graphics hardware (GDDR and generic DRAM shortages), and functioning as essentially a high-tech form of scrip, or perhaps monopoly money, with little to nothing backing it (See the open question about if tether actually has the cash to back their tokens that they claim to, since they printed a few hundred million since declaring their bank transfers in and out had been blocked, or perhaps any of the other scams, like Bitconnect, or Pincoin). The vast majority of the "Value" of these currencies is in coins that have never been traded for cash, many of which are out of circulation. Thus the fantastic value numbers are more representative of the last few dozen coins trading price multiplied by the total sum of coins. Logically, because the exchanges never took in sums in the billions of dollars, they can't pay it out. So it's all an illusion of worth, even more so than fiat currency or a standard bank account, because you can't pay nearly as many vendors with it, so it's utility is less, especially since most people don't understand that they are pseudonymous systems, rather than complete anonymous setups. Even the big names in privacy, like Monero, have had it breached. Most are less private than a credit card, because those at least are bound not to release all your info to anyone who calls to ask.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Z00L00K]

I would use the cards for Seti@Home or similar instead.

Imagine how fun it would be to hijack a mining cluster to instead run Seti@home or something more useful.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[perpenso]

GPU mining is sort of a hobbyist thing, the clusters tend to be pros with ASIC hardware. Can't reprogram them.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[tonique]

Yeah, any of BOINC projects would be better. Think of the benefit to science!

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[bored_engineer]

I'm far from a serious gamer, so take my opinion with the pound of salt that it deserves. I'm playing Doom on an older monitor with 1152 vertical pixels (at 60 hz, I think,) an rx480, ryzen CPU, and am quite happy. I've played Overwatch with my oldest kid (he's in California, and I'm in Alaska) and still managed to barely keep up with him and his 980Ti and i7-something-or-other. The rx480 is worth holding on to for a bit more, in my humble opinion.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[MrL0G1C]

Not that I'm fussy about frame-rate myself having gamed through the nineties but the average FPS doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the 0.1 lows because those lows are what get noticed as 'stutter'. There are plenty of gaming purists who are the gaming equivalent of audiophiles. These gamer purists want 144+ fps all the time so their PC is in lockstep with their super-wide monitors and never drop a frame god forbid.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

Normally those people have bigger wallets than brains. Because they would know that that 144FPS they are playing at is unnoticeable to the human eye. therefor its a waste of money. The only reason to get a better GPU is to play at a solid 60FPS at a higher resolution. with better clarity settings. Anything else is wasted money and electricity, which I feel would be better used for mining.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

stealing CPU cycles

Im sorry buddy, None of my cards or miners steal anything from anybody. If you're referring to hackers, would you rather them encrypt all of your files and demand a bunch of money to un-encrypt them and hope that they arent idiots and actually permanently lose all your shit. Remember the hackers are going to hack, if it wasn't cryptocurrency mining it would be something else. Don't condemn a community because of a few bad apples. Because if that was the case we wouldn't have the internet. Also Monero hasn't been breeched. Coins and Exchanges are completely separate. Anybody dumb enough to trust others(exchanges) with large amounts of their coins deserved what they got imo. Its money, Treat it as such. Next time you're going to rant about something you know nothing about,.. Please.. Please do at least a little research.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[MrL0G1C]

That's where we differ, unless it's a cold winter then there's no good reason to mine. It's a 100% artificial requirement, the people designing the coins could simply set the difficulty rate low and mine all of the coins on day one. Setting the difficulty rate high is an affront to ecology.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[ThePyro]

He may be referring to the practice of embedding Javascript mining code in web pages in order to "steal" CPU cycles from client browsers. No hacking required.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

The difficulty changes with the network. At day 1 you are correct very low difficulty. But if the coin devs did mine all the coins on day 1 they essentially make that coin worthless. The value of the coin is in the network of miners. It's not as scammy as people that don't understand it nor the community try to make it sound. Should check it out.. I've bought 4 gpu's that have paid for their self in the last 6 months.. And I bought them at rather high prices, now it's basically all profit from here on out.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

Well most browsers have put stop to that. And if you care about your cpu cycles being stolen you use something like safescript or no script that would have blocked that initially. That's like saying facebook is stealing your identity. Once again don't punish a whole group because of one moron. Otherwise the Internet wouldn't exist. And some of the sites that are mining legitimately wth people's CPU's allow the user to mine in place of ads and also allow them to specify cpu usage while on the site.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[MrL0G1C]

And they've basically picked the worst way to create new coins - by encouraging people to buy hardware to mine the coins and by wasting extreme amounts of electricity. The fact that there's been a GPU shortage for the last year speak volumes. The question is - who is buying these coins? It seems to me like it's all one massive game of speculation and very little else.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Mashiki]

You do know that was debunked back in the 1990's. The difference between 144fps and 300fps is noticeable, if you don't think so go buddy up with someone who works at an imax theater and give it a go. The visual acuity of fighter pilots is in the 480-620fps range, just to give you an example. Conscious i.e. direct focus for most people is in the 50-90fps range, but your brain is 'discarding' unimportant information unless you train it not to.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

Exactly so you have to get it while the getting is good. Some of the coins seem promising because they have an actual use to them and they may make it, but the rest is exactly that speculation.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Gr8Apes]

You have drunk the koolaid and wish everyone else to partake. There's already a lot of you out there.

Most current mining operations/coins have absolutely 0 real value, no matter what their stated exchange rate is. Real value doesn't fluctuate by 50%+ a week at the drop of a rumor. It's even worse than gambling on penny stocks. If you think it's any different than that, you need to revisit what penny stocks and OTC trading really involves. Cryptocurrencies/exchanges are exactly like them.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[popoutman]

I could easily spot the difference between 60, 90, and 120 fps when playing Quake on a CRT (LG Flatron 795) that could do 120Hz @1024x768.

The difference is very noticeable when panning quickly. I can see each individual screen update as an image along the movement path - i.e. the opposite of a motion blur. The higher the framerate the more images populated the movement path for the same movement, and the better I felt I could see what was going on. Some people will of course settle for less and be happy with that.

I would easily say that certain people would see a benefit to consistent 144Hz refresh of both card output and screen refresh.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

Yes the kids complaining about gpu prices and teh fps's!!!! Have trained their self to see 120+ frames. Highly doubtful.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

I'm speaking partially about the compatibility issues. I don't have time to wait for AMD to fix issues after a game releases. I gave them their last chance years ago.

If you're happy with their hardware, that's great. Myself, I can just pick a top or near top tier Nvidia card when I build a system and save myself a lot of grief.

And I have a 165 Hz monitor. I'll take as high a frame rate as I can get while keeping detail high. I do notice. I didn't think I would, but I do.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Highdude702]

I think you have watched too many movies.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Tough Love]

I'm speaking partially about the compatibility issues. I don't have time to wait for AMD to fix issues after a game releases. I gave them their last chance years ago.

I think you're imagining some disparity between AMD and NVidia. As far as I can see, they have roughly equal number of issues. Try searching for "directx issues amd" vs "directx issues nvidia". Roughly equal hits, and drilling into them shows roughly similar kinds of issues.

I run Linux, so its no contest: I like the open source AMD driver, which recently is arguably better than the binary-only driver, and better than any driver for NVidia. A simpler way to put it: fuck you NVidia.

Re:Depends which GPUs you're talking about

[Mashiki]

Seriously? Is this /. or "the eye can only see 30fps" pathetic console peasantry? Go dig up a CRT or LED that can output to 120Hz, and you can see the difference.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[idontusenumbers]

But... mouse and keyboard =/

Used Cards

[Ailicec]

Better, when will the big operations start dumping cards by the thousands onto Ebay? A plentiful secondhand market + crypto not buying new cards should deepen the effect. I'm fine with used stuff, but do wonder how much life a GPU that has run flat-out 24/7 for a year or two has left.

Re:Used Cards

[Bing Tsher E]

That is called an extensive burn-in. If silicon lasts through the initial burn-in and was not operated in an abusive environment, it's better than a random new card fresh from packaging.

Re:Used Cards

[Tablizer]

and was not operated in an abusive environment

Wouldn't CC miners expecting better hardware soon stretch the limits?

Re: Used Cards

[Type44Q]

They're called hot-cold cycles for a reason, genius.

Re:Used Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I believe the trend is to underclock them for best performance / watt.

Re:Used Cards

[Xenocrates]

There is some amount of damage due to electro-migration. There is also the potential for damage due to running on a sagging supply rail due to the sheer number of cards, but that would mostly apply to the power delivery stages, which are repairable, and only be found in relatively poorly built mining rigs. There's also the potential drying of the thermal paste, or it's migration. The warmer the environment, the more liquid many become, and the cards are not always designed to run in a vertical orientation. Cleaning, and potential dust contamination of the PCB is also a concern, with any GPU, not just a mining card.

Overall, if you want something you don't have to worry about, only buy used if you can get two for the price of one new, because the new one has a proper warranty, while a used one may have the warranty canceled for you being a secondary purchaser, or because it was used commercially.

Re:Used Cards

[Mal-2]

Also some chips are notorious for breaking the BGA connections that let them talk to the circuit board under them. This is fixable, but not by your average home user. Just baking without properly resoldering might get you six months or so of service.

Re:Used Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

GPUs are no different than any other piece of silicon. As long as they were kept within manufactures specs as far as power and thermals go they aren't going to "wear out" If anything these cards used for mining are well tested cards since all the failures and DOA cards would have already been RMAed back to the manufacturer

Unless the GPU manufacturers are putting out dubious quality chips or insufficient cooling solutions on their cards to begin with there should be nothing wrong with them. If the thermal solutions on the cards are not appropriate for 24/7 operation, then how are they appropriate for hours on end gaming sessions?

Re:Used Cards

[Khyber]

"That is not how GPUs work you fucking moron."

That is pretty much how any burn-in of any piece of electronic equipment is performed, you fucking moron.

Re:Used Cards

[Khyber]

"BURNED in is the right word"

Nope, almost all of these cards had been undervolted and dropped to lower operating temps and below typical power specs.

But I guess you don't bother reading crypto mining tweak guides, let alone fucking read at all.

Re: Used Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

You're exaggerating concerns. Cards for mining are typically underclocked and undervolted. Fan wear is your primary concern and it's easy to research which cards are likelier than others to have low quality ball bearings etc. If the card has been running fine for two years it'll run fine for another five.

Re: Used Cards

[geoskd]

But in their case there is no "cycle" they get hot and stay that way.

Running electronics hot has its own host of problems. Heat softens all materials if only a little, and then you have the problem of ion migration and tin whiskers which both get much worse with high heat.

Re:Used Cards

[ceoyoyo]

As soon as ASICs become available. The big operations won't dump their GPUs while they're still profitable, but as soon as ASICs raise the competitive bar, to ebay they'll go.

Re:Used Cards

[ayesnymous]

How would a cryptocurrency miner know their graphics card had a failure? They mined a bitcoin by accident?

Re: Used Cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Rejected shares

Re:Used Cards

[The Cynical Critic]

That's assuming that they were and we are on the tail end of a rush so you can be sure that a lot of the people who are about to start their farm sell-offs will be amateurs in it as a "get rich quick" scheme. I wouldn't even be surprised if a greater share of the people selling their mining cards are people who don't know what they're doing than there was among the people who had mining operations in the first place.

So all in all it's a bit of a gamble. You can get a good card, but there's also the equal if not greater chance of getting something that won't last. Because of that I wouldn't recommend on buying a card unless the seller is ready to give the card the same warranty that it had when it was still brand new.

Re:Used Cards

[thegarbz]

but do wonder how much life a GPU that has run flat-out 24/7 for a year or two has left.

Is that from the "GPUs have a limited number of instructions they can process before they melt into a puddle" corner of the internet?

Personally I'd much rather a second hand GPU from a company that keeps them cooled racks in airconditioned rooms than some box under the desk being bumped every few days by a vacuum cleaner. Thermal effects are not going to kill a GPU in a few years unless you run them waaaay out of spec.

Re:Used Cards

[goose-incarnated]

"That is not how GPUs work you fucking moron."

That is pretty much how any burn-in of any piece of electronic equipment is performed, you fucking moron.

Regardless of whether the GP is a sexually active moron or not, there is a valid concern if a GPU was used for mining: while the piece of silicon is probably okay, the surrounding circuitry *will* *be* affected by continuous high heat.

You have no idea if the ex-mining card was used in a rig that was not properly cooled, that had multiple hot/cold cycles out of the temperature range, that ran above the recommended temperature range for more than the number of hours it was specified for, etc.

Basically, you don't know if it was abused outside the operating range or not.

Re:Used Cards

[Khyber]

Which is actually a good thing, because that means fewer thermal cycles to cause damage to the card.

Re: Used Cards

[MachineShedFred]

And if the cooling on the chip is adequate to keep the operating temperature stable and below the manufacturer's stated maximum, then there should be no problem unless the manufacturer misstated the spec AND failed to allow firmware to throttle back if temperature exceeds the spec.

It's not like these things have a duty cycle like a cheap piece of shit electric tool where you can only run it for 1 minute and then have to let it cool for 3+ or your'll cook the motor. Thermal engineers actually designed the cooler to... you know... keep it at operating temperature under load.

Re:Used Cards

[MachineShedFred]

And what does a "worn" GPU look like, exactly? You aren't buying used tires here, where there is a measurable lifetime of operation.

People have been buying second-hand server gear for as long as eBay has existed, and roughly all of it works as advertised. And no, not all of it were in perfect data centers kept at exactly 65 degrees F / 49% RH for the entire lifetime of that gear. Some of it was shoved into small closets and had shit stacked on top of it, and that stuff works just as good too.

Re: Used Cards

[Agripa]

And if the cooling on the chip is adequate to keep the operating temperature stable and below the manufacturer's stated maximum, then there should be no problem unless the manufacturer misstated the spec AND failed to allow firmware to throttle back if temperature exceeds the spec.

The manufacturers misstate the specifications insofar as GPUs are not rated for temperature and operating life in the same way that CPUs and other high performance logic is. This is easy enough to see by looking at the maximum rated junction temperature. I can expect Intel and AMD CPUs to operate for 10 to 20 years at maximum continuous load; with GPUs operating 30C higher or more, this is more like 1 or 2 years.

It's not like these things have a duty cycle like a cheap piece of shit electric tool where you can only run it for 1 minute and then have to let it cool for 3+ or your'll cook the motor. Thermal engineers actually designed the cooler to... you know... keep it at operating temperature under load.

Many GPUs cooling systems from major manufacturers, and nVidia has had a huge problem with this in the recent past which included lawsuits and product recalls, are inadequately designed making the problem mentioned above worse. One of the primary criteria I look for in GPU cards is low, 60C and lower, operating junction temperature.

Re:Used Cards

[Agripa]

GPUs are no different than any other piece of silicon. As long as they were kept within manufactures specs as far as power and thermals go they aren't going to "wear out" If anything these cards used for mining are well tested cards since all the failures and DOA cards would have already been RMAed back to the manufacturer

The manufacturer's specifications for GPUs include an operating life of an order of magnitude lower than CPUs brought on by higher operating junction temperatures so these cards really are worn out and are on or approaching the wearout part of their reliability curve. I suppose you could check for GPU card designs which operate at 60C or lower under maximum load; they should have a decade or more of operating life left.

Re:Used Cards

[toddestan]

The fan, being a moving part, will eventually wear out. Even more so if the GPU was run flat out so the fans were running at full speed. Almost all GPU's use a custom cooling solution, so it's not like you can easily just replace a bad fan either.

Of cource they fucking are!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought a new one.

Fuck you murphy.

Re:Sorry guys! I'm making too much money to stop

[Bing Tsher E]

Twenty years from now when you are at the villa reminiscing, you can divulge that you're one of the guys who knew how to hold a Phillips screwdriver and bilked thousands out of their student loan money.

No.

[Fly Swatter]

I don't think you should wait much longer to pull the trigger on a purchase

Let the prices keep falling. I think we should all just wait till it hits rock bottom, then wait some more. Seriously though I always bought the value cards at around $100. Even those appear about 50 percent over what I would care to pay today if I thought I needed anything more than integrated graphics. When I do game, its older titles anyway. For me, gaming peeked at Quake3. Get off my lawn and all that.

Re:No.

[Sir Holo]

For me, gaming peeked at Quake3. Get off my lawn and all that.

Try Far Cry 5. It has multiplayer FPS deathmatch and such, just like Quake (and Unreal Tournament, the true pinnacle, or how about Avara, the FIRST truly 3D internet-multiplayer game).

Far Cry 5 rocks. Offline or with a friend, you can play through a campaign that has a very interesting and sometimes unpredictable AI, simple random events colliding in the open world for unique situations. Puzzles. Fishing. Prince-of-Persia-like parkour and climbing puzzles. Meaningfully diverse weapons set. Player specialties. NPC specialties. Command-able AI companions.

Run it on a GTX 1080 Ti for 1080p 60 fps gorgeousness. 4k at 45 fps or so. !!! A Ryzen probably gets you the same.

Re:No.

[Lab Rat Jason]

I came here to say this... why would you buy when you are on the *cusp* of falling prices? Let them go down, and when they bottom out, then leap on it... I'm seriously hoping to pounce on a 1080ti.

Re:No.

[MachineShedFred]

While impressed with FC5, I have to say that there are some amazing oversights that rip me right out of that world and start questioning what the hell they were thinking.

Yes, they have a big open world to explore, and the thing is fairly non-linear in nature. However, it's mostly a big EMPTY open world, so in order to not feel empty, they cranked up the random spawns of shit-kicker cultists in pickup trucks to a truly absurd level. You can go back and forth between two intersections killing rednecks all day and just pile up pickup trucks and weapons, never moving more than 100 yards. Where is all of this shit coming from? Do they have a Ford factory somewhere just cranking out white trucks for these assholes? And how many of these guys do you have to kill before they start taking notice and the less devout start to decide that getting a bullet in the head like four or five thousand of their friends isn't worth the supposed gains of hanging out in the regional bunker? And where did they get all the fully automatic weapons, rocket launchers, grenades, and airplanes with machineguns / helicopters with mounted rocket pods from? Did they boost the armory of an ex-Soviet republic or something? I know that Montanans love their guns and all that shit, but come on now - this is just past the point of extreme absurdity.

And don't even get me started on the completely out-of-nowhere ending.

All that being said, if you can suspend the extreme disbelief the game will incur upon you, it's really a lot of fun to play in cooperative mode - get a few friends together, load up into an SUV, one drives while the rest lean out the window with guns, and go blow away cultist rubes until the sun comes up. Ram that vehicle through the front gates of some place crawling with extremist douchebags, power slide that thing in there and gun everyone down. Hell, hit them with the SUV and run them under both axles. Fly a helicopter into a cult controlled location and have your team drop out and take the place down while you fly overhead and strafe the inevitable incoming backup vehicles. Collect enough quad bikes and make like a gang roaming the highways taking out the trash.

Just don't be looking for anything that's actually explainable in the known universe.

Re:No.

[Sir Holo]

And don't even get me started on the completely out-of-nowhere ending.

Yeah. They could have built-up to the ending over a longer span of the game. But if you make a habit of listening to the radio, you'll get some of that build-up. Outsidee communications is cut off, but you'd think that NPCs would be talking about the latest news they heard (It's usually music).

PS –– IIRC, there are six distinct endings possible in FC6.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[war4peace]

I'm happy that works for you. It doesn't work for me.

Minor correction

[GerryGilmore]

The author says "... anticipation of dedicated mining rigs (called ASICs)." This is wrong. Dedicated mining rigs may use ASICs as the main compute engine (or GPUs, or Xeons, or Unicorn smegma, or...) but Application Specific Integrated Circuits are NOT "mining rigs".
C'mon /. you know better! (Hopefully, anyway.)

Re:Minor correction

[DRJlaw]

The author says "... anticipation of dedicated mining rigs (called ASICs)." This is wrong. Dedicated mining rigs may use ASICs as the main compute engine (or GPUs, or Xeons, or Unicorn smegma, or...) but Application Specific Integrated Circuits are NOT "mining rigs".
C'mon /. you know better! (Hopefully, anyway.)

The sentence made perfect sense in context - "large mining operations are pulling back on their investment in GPUs in anticipation of dedicated mining rigs (called ASICs) that are due out before the end of the year."

Not all ASICs are "mining rigs," but systems that replace "multi-purpose" graphic cards with "dedicated" mining equipment are indeed using ASICs. Not GPUs (from the sentence), and certainly not Xeons...

Shame on you, as well...

Re:Minor correction

[GerryGilmore]

As you said they (mining rigs) are USING ASICs - they are NOT ASICs themselves, which is what the sentence said. Not implied - said!
No shame here for knowing what sentences are supposed to fucking mean.

Re:Minor correction

[DRJlaw]

As you said they (mining rigs) are USING ASICs - they are NOT ASICs themselves, which is what the sentence said. Not implied - said!

It most certainly did not.

"large mining operations are pulling back on their investment in GPUs in anticipation of dedicated mining rigs (called ASICs) that are due out before the end of the year."

It said the dedicated rigs replacing GPUs are called ASICs.

They are called that, and more to the point your original post asserted that they called ASICs (all ASICs) dedicated mining rigs, when again they said that the non-GPU mining rigs were "ASICs.

No shame here for knowing what sentences are supposed to fucking mean.

Which you obviously don't, because you've gotten it wrong twice now in an attempt to scream "error" where the was not one. "are" != "called. Get that through your skull.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[Solandri]

A Playstation 4's GPU is roughly on par with a GTX 590 or Radeon 7970. You can find those on eBay for about $80-$150, unaffected by the cryptocurrency craze (they're so old and inefficient that any miner using them would lose money).

You get a console for the exclusive game titles. You get a gaming PC if you want graphics performance and/or resolution better than an 6 year old GPU.

700 for a gaming card??

[Billly Gates]

Jesus. I remember in the good old days when $200 was a good chunk for a great GPU and $350 was for the very fastest ones.

Wtf happened? Nvidia monopoly and gamers ready to open their wallets because of the Nvidia label seem to be destroying the market. The comments on how the 1050ti is God on YouTube when referring to AMD products and the xboxoneX verify this brainwashing and monopoly.

Hey PC masterace just don't be shocked when us regular peasants switch to consoles where you can get the same performance for cheaper.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that simple. A classic entry-level gaming GPU back in 2004 would run you about $200, which is the same as $270 today. $270 will get you a GTX 1050 TI or 1060, which both fill the same general entry-level gaming GPU slot. So there's not really much of a different from today to yesterday.

On the higher end, that same $350 in 2004 is now $472 today, which would get you about a 1070 or the TI version.

What happened between then and now (other than basic inflation that people like to forget) is that NVIDIA opened a new GPU market that largely didn't exist in 2004. This new market is where the really high end stuff like the 1080 and/or TI and Titans are aimed. It's these cards that are generally going for the $700+ range, and offer capabilities relative to the low and mid tier stuff that go way beyond what you found in, say, 2004.

Basically, you should probably have a better understanding of the market before criticizing it or trying to compare it to "the good old days." You can still get great GPU performance today for the same inflation-adjusted price as you did back in the good old days. This, of course, also assumes you're not so idiotic as to forget the effect of product shortages have on a market.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

You can't get the same performance in a console. Ever. Pull the other one. Certainly not the same performance of a 1080 or 1080ti.

Not even the same neighborhood.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[gman003]

The top-end cards became halo products. Just like few cars on the road are Mustangs, few video cards are 1080 Tis.

Checking the Steam Hardware Survey, about 60% of all cards are Nvidia GeForces in the xx50 to xx70 range - the normal, reasonably-priced cards. (AMD is only 10% of the market right now, with much of that being integrated. Their fundamental architecture was just way better-suited for mining, so their prices spiked even harder than Nvidia's did.)

Also, be aware the GF1xxx series MSRPs were already inflated by mining demand. The "normal" price for a top-end xx80 Ti is $500-$600, and the only-slightly-slower xx80 is usually $350-$400. But the 9xx series was already selling for nearly double MSRP when the 10xx series came out, they'd have been idiots to not bump up the stock prices.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[Tough Love]

AMD is only 10% of the market right now, with much of that being integrated. Their fundamental architecture was just way better-suited for mining, so their prices spiked even harder than Nvidia's did.

My concrete interpretation of that is, NVidia sunk their transistor budget into tile based rasterization while AMD went for more vector FLOPS, the former being a better tradeoff for video rendering and the latter better for general purpose computing on GPU (not just mining!). Also would explain why AMD's vega/navi roadmap focuses on GPGPU for the next year or two. I suppose AMD's next GPU arch will also join the tiler party.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[MrL0G1C]

Jesus. I remember in the good old days when $200 was a good chunk for a great GPU and $350 was for the very fastest ones.

3 things happened, Crypto currency mining, memory in high demand (partly smart phones) / a memory cartel, other new use cases including but not limited to GPUs doing AI computation and being used in self-driving vehicles.

It's about time GPUs forked between gaming and general compute, general compute is becoming big enough that it should get it's own products with different GPUs. For instance gaming GPUs have 64bit compute precision which is probably a waste of silicon, they likely don't need to be accurate for games and could be faster with 32bit - I could be wrong, any experts here?

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[thegarbz]

Jesus. I remember in the good old days when $200 was a good chunk for a great GPU and $350 was for the very fastest ones.

Wtf happened?

Nothing happened. You just moved the goalpost to an unreasonable position. You'll have no problem playing any modern computer game with a $200 GPU (MSRP that is) and a $350 one will happily get you those high frame rates with your ultra fast g syncing monitor, or whatever the hell you're doing.

If you're pushing 4k at 120Hz in 3D across 2 monitors.... well there have always been $1000 GPUs out there if you cared enough to look.

Personally I have a GTX 1060, MSRP at $249 and I have yet to find a game out there that I don't play with the settings maxed (1080p monitor). The same could NOT be said from the $200 cards back in the days of old. I do not miss running my nice 1600x1200 monitor at 800x600 to play games through a very expensive 3D accellerator.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[Wolfrider]

> Pull the other one ...it's got bells on? ;-)

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[Billly Gates]

Except a 1060 is worth $390 today. For $10 more I can get a xboxoneX which has the same GPU performance as it's an RX 580.

The 1060 is not even high end??! Something is up and I smell monopoly.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[Billly Gates]

I disagree. This used to be true but the xboxoneX uses a modified RX 580 which is on par with a 1060. A 1060 costs $380. A whole console is just $20 more with the same graphics. $2,000 to play games is stupid and soo 1999. Times changed and now are going backwards

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[ebvwfbw]

Happened to me. I bought a Nvidia card, I think it was $350. I was thinking hot damn... that'll be something. Then I found out I ONLY have a 1060. To be something it has to be at least a 1070. Well, it works for me.

Re:700 for a gaming card??

[thegarbz]

Except a 1060 is worth $390 today.

What it's worth is irrelevant. You were talking about price comparisons based on monopolies and not the temporary effect of the coin market. So only the MSRP is relevant.

The 1060 is not even high end??!

To which I again suggest you define where the goalposts should be. You use "high end" arbitrarily. The 1060 is just as high end as a $200 card from well back in the day you're comparing it to in your original post, able to edge out similar levels of performance (high to ultra high quality at native resolution of common screens) from the games of the time. Back in the day you only needed to spend $350 to play Crysis on the largest possible screen you could find. Likewise you don't need to pay more (once this coin thing is done) than $250 to play any current game at almost maxed out settings. So what's the beef?

Something is up and I smell monopoly.

Also comparing it to a device that is sold at a loss to lock users into an ecosystem is quite disingenuous. Something does smell in that comparison, but it's on the Microsoft side, rather than the NVIDIA / AMD side.

By the way it's a duopoly, not a monopoly, and they aren't inherently bad but they do need to be managed.

This is just market lag

[Lord Ender]

Ethereum and Monero are the reason GPUs are being snatched up by miners. The value of those coins crashed horribly earlier in the month... to the point where it was barely profitable to mine. But prices have rebounded recently, so you can expect GPUs to start selling out again soon.

When the blockchain "difficulty factor" for ETH and XMR solidly surpasses their record highs, then you will know these ASICs are really rolling out. From there it won't be long until these $700 cards can be found on Ebay for chump change.

You can track the difficulty here: https://www.coinwarz.com/diffi...

The price did come down but hardly enough.

[BlueCoder]

I'm interested in AMD RX 64 since I invested in a freesync monitor. The price right now is around $800. That is $300 more than the MSRP of $500 at release. This is more than 6 months later so right now the second revision and or custom vendor versions should be coming out and the original card should be going for around $450. By my calculation that is far from being on par.

calling 'bullshit'

[Anonymous Coward]

... source is 'venturebeat'.

yup. bullshit.

checked price of a 1050ti..... total bullshit.

and this isn't even a very good mining card. price of these went up because they were all that was left.... and then, these disappeared from store shelves, too, even when priced as high as two hundred fucking dollars... not the $99 or less they should be selling at eighteen months after its introduction...

if it weren't for mining, we'd have the geforce gtx 11xx series out by now, too. this mining shit isn't just affecting prices of what's on the market, it's affecting the gpu companies' ambition to release the 'next' stuff... why do that when they are at 100% manufacturing capacity anyway and making bank on the old stuff?

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[Z80a]

The biggest advantage of the PC is the absolutely huge and varied library of games. Even without counting grey areas such as emulation, you get 30+ years of games of everything, and titles that easily surpass the modern games in terms of actual gameplay.
But you don't need a top of line machine to enjoy those, just a good taste and be willing to forgive the graphics of old.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[mark-t]

Anyone using any GPU will lose money mining cryptocurrency unless one is willing to wait until the currency rises significantly in value some amount of time after mining it.

Falling...back to MSRP...

[Chas]

Yeah.

Fuck that.

Wait Until Summer

[mentil]

I don't think you should wait much longer to pull the trigger on a purchase

Actually, rumor is that Nvidia is going to release the 1100 series GPUs in June or July. They're expected to have about 40% higher performance than the 1000 series. Also, the Etherium ASICs are dropping in July; assuming there's not a hard fork that makes them useless (and even if there is), there will be a sharp price drop in Etherium at that time, leading to lower GPU demand by cryptominers.

Usually not worth it to mine in spare time ...

[perpenso]

Gamers that are angry about miners are weird. Why don't they just mine at night and make a few bucks on the side?

Because
(1) You have to buy the card in the first place and they were difficult to find and insanely expensive. Basically many were priced out of buying.
(2) You will likely never mine enough to cover the difference between suggested retail and the 50% premiums we are now seeing, let alone the 100-200% premiums of a month or two ago.

Basically its not worth it to mine in your spare time unless you bought a card last summer before the price premiums.

Thinking you can make it up by holding coins for years doesn't work. You will likely have more if you just buys the coins directly after you consider retail electrical costs and the inflated GPU price.

Now once GPU prices return to MSRP and if you are careful about your power costs then yeah, maybe you can mine in your spare time. But if over a year 25% of your GPU is subsidized consider yourself fortunate.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[perpenso]

Anyone using any GPU will lose money mining cryptocurrency unless one is willing to wait until the currency rises significantly in value some amount of time after mining it.

No, holding is an illusion. If you cannot mine economically today its better to just buy the coins directly rather than buy electricity. You'll have more coins for that significant rise (if it occurs).

Prices are still retard-grade

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 video card is selling on Amazon right now for $700.

Fuuuuck that.

$700 is stupid for a GPU.

Damage to PC Gaming long term?

[sickre]

I wonder if there has been long-term damage to PC gaming. Combined with extortionate RAM prices, I think a serious chunk of gamers will have moved to PS4 and XBOX, particularly with their attractive recent 'Pro' updates. Still there is the problem of no adaptive sync with Nvidia.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[mark-t]

My point was that with cryptocurrencies whose value might rise over time, it may eventually exceed the value of electricity usage consumed when it was initially mined. This may or may not happen, of course, and there is no guarantee that such a threshold will be eventually reached. One can only say for sure that it has happened in the past with some cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. People who were mining bitcoin in 2011, for instance, have had the value of their bitcoin *FAR* exceed the costs of electricity that was used to mine it, but at the time that they mined it, the value of bitcoin was still low enough that the electricity usage still outweighed it at the time.

GPU prices will fall...

[unique_parrot]

...because parents are realizing the power condumption of their children and forbid to mine. It's easy to mine if you don't have to pay for the power (the same thing as for indoor gras growing).

Unfortunately...

[Not-a-Neg]

GPU vendors also announced they are drastically cutting back their production to coincide with the mining reduction. They will do everything they possibly can to retain the inflated prices.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[perpenso]

My point was that with cryptocurrencies whose value might rise over time, it may eventually exceed the value of electricity usage consumed when it was initially mined.

My point is that this is a "losing" strategy. If mining is not profitable today if a person takes the money they would have spent on electricity and uses it to buy coins directly on an exchange they will have more coins. In the future, after a rise, more coins (buying) will have more value than less coins (mining at a loss). A person motivated by profit should only mine today if it is profitable today, i.e. they get more coins buying electricity today than by buying coins directly.

Yes, technically the rise can get one from the red to the black. However that is suboptimal if the person's motivation are profit related. I wanted readers considering holding to understand this.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[mark-t]

My point is that this is a "losing" strategy.

Tell that to people who have several million dollars in bitcoin because they happened to get on board early.

Re:Abandoned PC gaming long ago for this reason

[perpenso]

My point is that this is a "losing" strategy.

Tell that to people who have several million dollars in bitcoin because they happened to get on board early.

The fact remains that they would have even more by buying on an exchange rather than mining at a loss. Holding does not change this simple fact. If you want to hold and mining is unprofitable buy on the exchange and hold, only mine and hold if you will get more coins than buying.

Gaming old school

[iTrawl]

I wanted to build a gaming computer at the beginning of the year. Looked at the prices, was almost ready to take the plunge on a 1000 GBP PC (Ryzen 7, GTX 1080, plans to splash on VR), with more than half the price being the video card.

Then a friend woke me up with words to the effect of "Nvidia will launch new products soon". OK... I'm not in any hurry... My Phenom II just needed a usable video card for games instead of the GT 210 I had inside, so I bought a GTX 560 (I was too cheap to go for a 660) with plans to wait the bubble out. It turns out I'll be waiting this out for a long time, as this video card suits my occasional Steam gaming sessions just fine, and I've put my lust for VR on hold for the foreseeable future.

Miners, you can hang yourselves with the power cables of your rigs.

Game

[stooo]

That's where we differ, unless it's a cold winter then there's no good reason to game. It's a 100% artificial requirement.

depends on where you live.

[Arunex]

I get 100% markups still

Re: New stuff coming out this summer

[Arunex]

summer? the consensus is autumn

short/long run, prices/quantity

[eric_harris_76]

This comes as a surprise to some people, and no surprise to others.

In the short run, the quantity of a thing for sale is rather fixed and the price is rather variable.

In the longer run, the quantity of a thing for sale is rather variable and the price is rather fixed.