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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

NVidia has announced they don't want to chase the mining market. They're worried that they'd build up capacity and the mining market would go bust.[1] But they may have to. High-end NVidia cards have doubled in price. The gaming industry is unhappy. Gamers are unhappy. NVidia is looking at a "mining version" of their next card so they can still sell to graphics users.[2]

[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cryptocurrency-minin... [2] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60839/nvidia-unveil-mining-sp...

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NVIDIA may be publicly saying that, but I am sure they are absolutely thrilled with the way sales (and margins) have been growing. And it wasn't gaming, AI, or autonomous cars - it's mining.

The gamer problem is exaggerated. While GPUs are definitely hard to buy in quantities > 1, and the prices are definitely much higher than 6 months ago - pre-built gaming machines (Alienware, Lenovo Cube, iBuyPower, etc) are still affordable. It's almost absurd seeing how these computers are now sold for less than the sum of the parts (especially the RAM and the GPU).

So, one thing has definitely changed for gamers - it's actually much cheaper now to buy a whole gaming PC than to build one. So much so that "crypto enthusiasts" now buy these machines, swap out the GPUs for low-end versions, then put them on eBay.

That's because system vendors have fixed-price contracts. Their prices just have time lag.

Mining isn't the only issue although it's the one that gets all the attention it seems. From what I've heard RAM prices are high and this is a large contributing factor to the price rises - Gamers Nexus[1] on YouTube mentioned that the _bill of materials cost_ for building a graphics card had gone up by something like $20-$30 because of RAM and board partners are actually having to raise their official MSRP.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neNHVosINro

NVidia's sales and margins haven't really been growing. They buy fab time way in advance and sell to third-party vendors at a fixed price. They aren't selling more units, and the third-party vendors are netting all the profits.

Worse yet, if nv does invest in more card production they run the risk of bringing that online just at the crypto market crashes, when there will be much less demand for cards and a flood of old mining cards on the used market.

Worse yet, if gamers can't buy your cards you lose loyalty (can't build it with newbies and old hands slowly forget). If you don't believe that gamers are unhappy then you simply haven't been paying attention.

This is an appalling situation for Nvidia (and AMD - all the same reasons apply to them too).

> if nv does invest in more card production they run the risk of bringing that online just at the crypto market crashes, when there will be much less demand for cards and a flood of old mining cards on the used market

Are you saying they shouldn’t manufacture & sell more card now because that this will cost them future sales? Can’t they just put that extra income in a bank and earn nice interests on the profits that are shifted from future to present due to that crypto craziness?

Chip fab has high fixed costs that take time to recoup. If they build more capacity now for demand that evaporates by the time it comes online, they are out a huge amount of $$.

> Chip fab has high fixed costs

How’s that relevant? nVidia has no chip fabs.

They use third party services. Currently TSMC but if TSMC is overbooked there’re others, e.g. for the current-gen GPUs nVidia also considered Samsung but apparently got better deal from TSMC.

The gamer problem is not being exaggerated. Price per $ has literally decreased over the last 3 years.

I'm not being hyperbolic, $300 in 2015 buys you a better graphics card than $300 in 2018.

In normal times, a $300 card in 2015 costs $150-180 in 2018. It's easy to then see that the 2018 $300 card much be generations further.

However, today, a nVidia GTX 1060 will run you around $350 if you can find one in stock, and its performance per dollar is literally inferior to say an AMD R9 390 from 2015, which could be found under $300.

Very rarely in tech do we exist in a market where 3 years ago performance costs more today than it did then.

Would you be okay paying $600 or $700 for an iPhone6 or LG G3? It's shocking to us when years and years go by and your dollar doesn't change what you get.

I've been looking to upgrade my six-year old graphics card for almost two years now, but the pricing has been consistently bad and even worsened over that time span —— I simply can't justify buying new card:

- If I spend the same amount of money I have roughly spend before for my graphics cards (~200 €), I can't, because that price point does not exist. I could drop 100-150 € on something that's pretty much the same (+-10 %) as my current card, though.

- If I want a significant upgrade, I'd have to at least spend twice as much as I want to, likely more (400-500 € range).

The price range that most gamers (at least those I know) buy their cards at simply does not exist for the time being.

That's true regardless of vendor. Even if I wanted to buy nVidia, the exact same thing applies to their lineup. There are cards <150 €, and then there are cards >>300 €.

I used to joke a few years back why there were so many models of everything; why would they need a dozen or more models to cover the price range from 50-xxxx € in 30 € steps? That "complaint" seems ironic in retrospect...

You might want to proofread your writing a bit.

I read it over once before I submitted. I re-read it and give myself an A. Are we pedantically arguing over a comma splice here, or do you have constructive criticism for my writing?

It really feels like computer advancement has stalled out when you bought a 290 in 2014 for $250 and a 580 in 2017 for $200. There is about a 10% performance difference there. I remember going from a 2007 8800 GT to a 2009 GTX 285 and quadrupling performance at the same price point.

Its like the trends flipped themselves on their head. CPUs were barely improving from 2011 to 2016 but now Ryzen has forced Intels hand and suddenly in a year the jump is substantial (20% per thread, with 50-100% more cores). That being said, now that we have the "new normal" besides the 7nm jump in late 2019 - 2020 I don't anticipate substantial gains in CPUs going forward. 6-8 core should become the average high end but business as usual continues, hopefully with Spectre and Meltdown mitigation.

Likewise, GPUs had explosive performance gains from 2012 to 2015, but now the 1000 series from Nvidia has been out for almost 3 years with no new high end GPUs, and AMDs last full suite of GPUs was the 300 series 3 years ago as well. My understanding is the Vega cards are barely a sidegrade to Fiji, which were the last substantial improvement over the previous 290x series (and those were a substantial improvement over the 7900 series).

As a gamer, my issue is that the same graphics cards are much more expensive than just a couple of months ago, if you even find them.

I live in Japan, and last year I bought a GTX 1060 (6GB) for around 32000 Yen (a little under $300). This past weekend I was browsing around some computer shops and I found one shop with the same card I bought less than 12 months ago for 55000 Yen (~$510). They also had a GTX 1070 Ti for 77000 Yen (~$710), which is significantly above MSRP.

Every other shop I visited were sold out of everything above the GTX 1050. Those cards haven't had their prices affected by much during the last few months. There's also no AMD cards in sight besides the super low-end cards.

But this is just a blip. When Pascal GPUs first showed up gtx 980ti where going on ebay for <300.

Markets are markets.

Many gamers are also PC enthusiasts and buying prebuilt (and less upgrade-able) is not an attractive option.

As someone who’s trying to upgrade my gpu in the context of video editing, this situation sucks.

Yeah... gamers as a rule don't want pre-built machines because the builds usually skimp out on cheap/poor quality parts

That’s just because of pricing contracts. The OEM is taking a bath.

My SSD and memory intensive workload infrastructure increased 60% in cost after our deal dissolved.

Well even if they say it's their EULA, won't stop the pro miners one bit. The effort is not work it.

Besides; some people who develop would probably use a 'scaled down' system to test it anyway.

Maybe NVIDIA will launch a gamer registration system, that would help the gamers actually get their hands on some hardware.

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