Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

I can't get a mid level graphics card either. These cards in the article are $200 and $250 cards from AMD. They are going for over $400.

I am the person that buys $200 graphic cards and high end is $500+ like a 1080ti or some sort of Titan. I always thought that $200 was the sweet spot with the best price to performance ratio. I can't buy a $200 card now.

I was lucky and got a new AMD 480 last year for $220. It sadly has an issue and needs to go in for warranty (3 years). It can only handle the simplest of graphics or it hangs and freezes the computer. No big deal, I wanted to make my kids a Minecraft and coding computer and I can't buy a decent $150 card either.

RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least 16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also due to the miners.

This impacts everything from mid-range upwards. A friend of mine, not so well versed in gaming hardware, recently asked me for advice on buying a new GPU, to replace some 3 generation old card he's using.

I recommended him something like a 1060, assuming they'd be reasonably affordable by now, just to discover that they've actually increased in price, especially considering he's on a tight budget.

In 20 years of PC gaming I can't remember a situation comparable to whats going on right now and frankly, it's quite depressing.

With this going on neither Nvidia nor AMD have much reason at all to innovate and keep increasing their performance, as most of their performant cards sell like crazy anyway, which is a horrible situation for consumers.

Keep in mind that the hardware survey may be skewed by Steam being used on machines aren't primarily for gaming, so I'd be somewhat cautious about drawing firm conclusions (e.g. I have Steam on an old Surface Pro 3 that is basically just for chat/non-real time games).

I'd also wonder if the small percentage of people on top-end gear drive the market forward (e.g. purchasing significantly more games even if the users are smaller in number).

keep in mind that the numbers have been skewed in the last few months because of an influx of pubg players from china, who probably don't have as much money to spend than western gamers.

see: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/

windows 7 having a huge uptick from aug-oct, and high end graphics cards' market shares dropping in the same time.

Are those stats normalized for game purchases?

> Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production.

I don't see too much of that in gaming circles. It's understood that it would be risky as crypto will crash sooner than later. The anger in the PC community is almost exclusively directed at miners. Threads about it pop up on the daily, but what can we do? We could lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs can be used for as they do with the Quadro/FirePro workstation cards, but it's unclear if that would work let alone if it's technically/legally possible.

It's a bad time to be a PC gamer, and just months ago it was a great time to be a PC gamer.

It is worth noting that nVidia contributed as much revenue to TSMC as Bitmain did last quarter. A key reason nVidia can't just ramp up is that other customers might be able to pay more than them for priority.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3323673-tsmc-expects-iphone-sh...

> I remember when the PS3 and Xbox360 had just come out, and everyone was screaming from the rooftops about how PC gaming will just crash and burn. Not for a week or two, but for years after those boxes had been released.

This still lead to the situation that, for years, AAA publishers wouldn't touch the PC gaming market with a ten-foot pole and focused pretty much all of their efforts on the 7. console generation, this was additionally compounded by the "piracy factor".

During that time PC gaming pretty much only had MMORPG's (which made the big bucks due to subscription-based payment), some RTS and a couple of rare exceptions in the FPS genre going for it while Steam was still busy establishing itself and the indie scene was nowhere to be found yet.

It was a rather boring time to be a PC gamer as you'd miss out on many of the interesting and unique releases due to them being only released on consoles.

> So you're saying PC gaming survived that sustained direct threat only to be wiped out by cryptocurrency mining that isn't even concerned with gaming?

Once bitten, twice shy. I remember the dark time you're referring to. I don't think they've actively contributed to it but I can't help but think that MS and Sony must be seeing this as an opportunity to "twist the knife" some, bring back the good old days of the 7th generation.

I admit that in reality my fears will probably never come to fruition but that doesn't change the way I feel about the current situation.

1080TI can take heavy hits at 2560x1080 even, Battlefield 1 max settings can see 90 FPS at times. 2560x1080 @ 200hz it can't even come close to consistently with high-end games and settings. PUBG? frames are meh. Even with an overclocked card it can be rough sometimes in my experience.

Personally i'll be upgrading to the next card that trumps the 1080 ti and moving from 2560x1080 200hz (for all but CS, cs is 1280x960 @ 144 on another monitor) and going back to 1080p @ 250hz.

ultrawide is god-tier for movies and productivity work, though.

I have a 4k monitor with two GTX 1080 in SLI and I usually don't get 60fps if I play on max settings. Annoyed by this I got another monitor at 2560x1440 @ 144hz and I can't max that out either. The games were stuff like rise of tomb raider or witcher 3.

I think 1080ti situation is similar.

It's kind of funny when 99% of the games are optimised for PS4 or maybe xbox, and both run the Jaguar cpu and 1.8 tflops cpu (xbox slightly lower)

My i7 4770k with a gtx 670 is still running all the games i throw at it, even if i might have to go down from ultra high effects in some.

However I have to admit I play mostly on PS4/switch now a days.

A lot of those people are buying cards/systems for the next 5 years, replacing their 5-year-old setups.

Depends on how quality your five-year old machine is. Graphics matter, less CPUs these days.

e.g. I found I could play high-end games (Deus Ex: MD for instance) fine on my rig with a Core i7-3770 (almost 6 years old!). However, it lagged on my original Geforce GTX 650 (~4.5 years old at that time), prompting an upgrade to a Geforce 1060 (an upper-mid end card that is now super expensive)

You should be glad those people exist, because they subsidize the R&D for people who buy older/cheaper cards.

Games I shove the most time at aren't even that intensive. Klei, and Zachtronic games.

My i7 2600k from 2011 is still doing great now, even not overclocked. Maybe not much resale, but I would guess it would play almost all games today fine (not much of a gamer myself). Actually, the upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 is probably as much of a factor.

> Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal.

RAM is much more expensive and keeps resale value well. I could sell my 16GB from 2012 now almost for twice the price (!!), which is also keeping me from upgrading to 32GB.

Monetary value, perhaps.

Gaming value? Actually the reverse is true - everything in my i5-3570K's rig is from 2012, except for the GTX 1080 and it ran everything 2017 @1440p very well.

Admittedly no BF1 or PUBG as I grew tired of the FPS genre a long time ago.

I agree with all of these. I think the biggest worry is that graphics cards manufacturers will be, justifiably, very reluctant to ramp up production due to the how volatile the crypto currency ecosystem is. If they first ramped up production to meet increased demand, your scenario 1 (crypto market crashes) would hit them double hard since not only will they not be able to sell lots of cards to miners, but the miners will be selling their used cards for cut-rate prices.

I have the 1060 6GB. It can max out any game on my 1080p 60hz 24" monitor.

However, that's table stakes these days. 1440p monitors are gaining ground as people realize the DPI difference between their PC monitor and their smartphone. Moreover, most people can also notice the difference between 60hz and 100hz monitors.

1060 3GB cards are also going through price shocks. I bought a 6GB Geforce 1060 for $250 in Oct, 2016. Even the 3GB version is going for $450+ now

AMD APUs (and Intel+AMD Graphics APUs) might be what keep PC gaming alive for the time being. If AMD can pack a chip that can match an RX 460 onto a single die for something like $200 it'd be the goto chip for an entry level system.

> revolutionizing the financial world seems a lot more "useful to humanity".

1. Citation needed.

2. Revolutions aren't always positive changes.

And yet the most efficient (hashrate/tdp) GPU for Etherum mining is GeForce 1070, not any of the Radeon models. Even Vega 64 couldn't beat it.

Is Cryptocurrency a form of entropy exchange from Energy (increasing entropy via heat) to information entropy (decreasing information entropy by hashing)?

I am thinking more broadly in terms of thermodynamics. I understand classical Thermodynanamics but I don't understand information entropy well.

From the standpoint of physics, Energy is the ultimate currency and it seems like we are trading it to decrease information entropy. Typically, entropy is the tax when performing work (for e.g in a heat engine) if that process is irreversible. I wonder if this kind of theory applies to Cryptocurrencies?

Though there is some benefit to cryptocurrencies that rely on ASICs for mining: it means that someone with a significant amount of CPUs/GPUs under their control (such as botnet operators, or government groups like the NSA) can't waltz in and trivially 51% attack the blockchain with their existing general-purpose hardware, and then go back to using it for other things. An attacker would have to commit to buying/building specialized mining hardware for the attack, and then that hardware can't be repurposed for anything else after the attack other than mining.

A huge amount of the electricity being used was unused/not-competed-for in the first place. Miner farms are coalescing in Northern America around excess production in hydroelectric areas. This is an inconvenient fact that is ignored in the "electricity oh nooooo" debate.

France famously derives >70% of it's energy from nuclear energy and has vastly lower prices than neighboring countries.

20% is because of VAT, so you have to discount that from comparisons.

I'm not saying doitLP is right, but "years" is not a long time for building extra production capacity across the manufacturing process. Hell, they probably need a couple years of sustained demand to even consider upgrading it.

That’s crazy, where are you located? My Microcenter is basically fully stocked with whatever GPU you’d want (aside from Vega)

Strange; Microcenter is blamed for not marking up the AMD Vega56/64 and selling it for MSRP, though reference cards are no longer being produced.

First, segmondy didn't attribute future low GPU prices to a cryptocurrency crash. Second, it isn't necessary for a crash to happen to collapse demand for GPUs.

Bitcoin isn't driving GPU demand; Bitcoin is mined with ASICs. Ethereum is mined with GPUs, a consequence of deliberate design. However, when `Casper' lands (Ethereum's Proof of Stake scheme) mining will end, and so will the extreme demand for GPUs. If that happens Ebay will fill up with thousands of discrete GPUs and you'll buy them with a song.

In terms of graphics cards? Well presumably if cryptos keep driving up demand for an extended period of time, then nVidia will just increase production. Right now they haven't increased production because they think it's a bubble.

New cards will come out, which will make the current cards obsolete.

I don't have a link to that deal but buying quality used hardware isn't difficult or expensive.

I built a Quanta Open Compute node with 12 physical cores (24 logical with HT) and 96GB of RAM for around $350.

There are many companies selling Sandy/Ivy Bridge-EP Xeon servers for pennies to the dollar.

For example in the UK/EU: www.bargainhardware.co.uk/e5-2600-lga2011-series-machines

Amazon, I bought a HP Z820

Yes, but it's numerics-heavy, so the workload would be very specific. Think SETI@Home on steroids. If we could solve the trust issues, pooling retired mining rigs into distributed supercomputers for rent would be viable.

To be fair, any time anyone does anything, gamers complain.

Some (like Monero) are also still able to be efficiently mined by CPUs. Mining Monero isn’t very profitable right now though. It’s probably half as good as ETH.

>> No one's building ASICs with GB of memory, at least so far.

It's also nearly impossible to do at any price that approaches reasonable.

Most people here are engineers and can see through the buzz words all these crypto tokens are throwing around to lure in naive investors. So it's assumed that it is a bubble as majority of tokens are worthless from technical perspective.

It's basically as if there were 300 new social media networks all popping up within 1 year, and 99% of them were clones of an open-source social media github, with a few minor alterations and a ton of marketing fluff, with perhaps 2-3 social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit) commanding 90% of the market.

There's just no utility behind all these coins. Hell, there aren't even any significant amount of bitcoin users, let alone Ethereum or Ripple, or any of the ridiculous coins. They're all presenting themselves as interesting for their utility, but are valued as an extremely short-term store of value play. It just can't last.

Lastly, note that there's only 3 cryptos that have a market cap of at least 10% of that of Bitcoin, and one is Bitcoin Cash so it doesn't count. The other are Ripple and Ethereum. Ripple has proof of stake (i.e., no mining is necessary) and Ethereum is expected to go proof of stake in the next hard fork, likely this year.

Just to put that into perspective. Nvidia's revenues are about $7b a year, AMD about 4 billion, let's say together 12b. They command pretty much 100% of the discrete GPU market, with Intel being the major integrated market player that is irrelevant in this context. Then look at https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption for an idea about mining revenues. It's about $14b a year, and electricity costs estimate the after-electricity profits at about $12b a year. Now you'd expect that a miner who can make $12 by turning on a device (with its electricity already paid for), is willing to pay anywhere between $0 and $12, and that with enough competition, they'll spend close to $12.

That gives you a rough idea about how significant Ethereum is as a player, with Bitcoin running on Asics and Ripple already at Proof of Stake, and most other coins being quite insignificant (and also a combination of Proof of Stake or Asics based like Litecoin, anyway).

So in short: I think cryptos will crash and even if a lot of them remain, I argue a lot of this price pressure is due to the few big coins of which only ethereum has viable GPU mining and that'll end in 2018.

It doesn't have to crash. It just has to be uneconomic to mine on GPU's. For example by becoming too hard, or by switching to proof-of-stake. The question is rather whether there is another coin that will take over the workload of the rigs (I know too little about cryptocurrencies to know whether another coin will have the same properties as ether, i.e. be economic to mine on GPUs).

In the short term I think we may see Bitfinex/Tether blow up pretty soon. Just this last week they printed around $500M in fake money to keep bitcoin prices from falling.

Depends how far they crash. If it's cheap enough, it might be a worthwhile trade-off.

On the other hand, you can be sure these cards have made it well past the "infant mortality" part of the bathtub curve.

In fact, military and other high-reliability applications specify "burn-in" periods where components are operated at elevated temperatures for several hundred hours --- they are effectively "used":

http://reliabilityanalytics.com/reliability_engineering_libr...

I recently learned a really fascinating stuff about semiconductors: as they heat up, the doping atoms tend to move, by diffusion. Heat = more diffusion.

I've read that thermal cycles do more damage than constant running.

If I can buy a 1080 for $100 when they flood ebay, I'm willing to take my chances.

I'd be glad to make a bet with you that the 1080ti doesn't collapse significantly after the "gold rush ends."

Come to think of it, I'd like to hear your predictions about when the gold rush will end. Or what the gold rush even is.

About two years ago, I bought significant amounts (for me) of stock in both AMD and Nvidia on the selling pickaxes theory. I'm quite happy with my choice.