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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? I find this hard to believe - prices of GPUs have been ridiculously high (much higher than at launch) for so long precisely because the supply was so short.

Pretty much every supplier I've seen would either sell out any high-end Nvidia GPUs almost as soon as they got them or would ramp up the price more and more.

This is either an incorrect rumour or some very weird shitty strategy by Nvidia that backfired hard (I lean towards the former).

Even now OEMs should have very little problems selling cards at (above) MSRP so there must be something more going on.

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NVidia probably liked the high prices (because of miner demand), produced accordingly and kept the price stable. These high prices probably ensure a nice profit margin for a longer time then normal during this stage of the product's life cycle. However a side effect might be somewhat slower sales then they planned (for example because miners will buy anyway but gamers are waiting for the nextgen cards). That means they're left with a lot of stock, which sells, but not at their normal rate. NVidia normally has a very predictable product life cycle but I think they are now in something that is (to them) uncharted territory.

This could lead to stuff like their accountants saying: "You've got an awful lot of stock which isn't selling as fast as you thought. We think that's a risk". Which might compel them to set money aside for stock risks.

The majority of the price hike happened in the supply chain and didn't flow through to nvidia. The demand itself was a benefit, of course (simply selling more), but nvidia's source pricing didn't change.

nvidia spoke out against mining because their concern was that gamers would move to the PS4 Pro, XboxX, etc, due to the shortage, which could hurt them in the long term.

And I think it was a very valid concern. I put off upgrading my gaming tower to 4K for another 2-3 years last year when prices were insane, and instead got an xbox one x. I know that all the games would run better on my pc but when the marginal cost is so much higher to upgrade my GPU that it’s frankly more than good enough.

Miner demand was about 50% of sales. Admittedly this is because a lot of gamers were turned off by high prices.

That demand has evaporated since the price of Bitcoin alternatives (eg. Ethereum) has plummeted, and the difficulty of mining is still very high since now ASICs can mine many coins more efficiently than consumers GPUs.

Plus it seems like Nvidia are stuck with a lot of low-end chips. Many miners were buying things like the 1060.

However, Nvidia have no direct competition in the GPU space anymore. They can hold off their next product launch for months and wait for their inventory to clear.

>Nvidia have no direct competition in the GPU space anymore

At what level? AMD does the same thing in GPU they do in CPU: They might not hold the overall performance crown, but their value is often better at several tiers than their competition. I really want an RX 580.

The 580s, AFAICT, are only really competitive with nVidia's mid range and have been priced higher for some time due to mining.

The Vegas have not been price competitive with nVidia's higher end offerings, have been very power hungry and very hot.

AMD needs to pull something out of the bag, it's being left behind.

The Vega cards (56 and 64) were definitely priced competitively as NVidia felt the need to release the 1070 Ti out of nowhere. It sits in a weird price / performance area smack dab between the 1070 and 1080 cards. In addition, the Vega architecture is pretty efficient and your statement about being power hungry and very hot is false.

Perhaps they were when on their discounted launch price, but they quickly jumped up in price (around £100 in a week, even more a few weeks later) and just weren't available for quite some time AFAICT.

> In addition, the Vega architecture is pretty efficient and your statement about being power hungry and very hot is false.

Excuse me, but I speak from personal experience here. It's really not very efficient, I bought a 64 on launch day. It was hot, noisy and power hungry compared to nVidia cards at similar performance levels, which is the main reason I didn't keep it for long.

Stock Vegas are overvolted (ridiculously so) and clocked past their efficiency range.

The architecture is quite efficient up to ~1400MHz.

Re the competition in the gpu space: that’s also still the case in the scientific computing / ML fields, where CUDA is still several years ahead in terms of functionality and existing investment.

Disclaimer, I am long NVDA

My understanding is that it's been mostly Ethereum driving demand for GPUs. Bitcoin can be mined on dedicated ASICs and mostly is. Ethereum requires more general purpose hardware with a large pool of RAM so people use GPUs instead to mine it. I presume the recent decline in demand for mining GPUs is due to the decline in price.

Quote from the last earnings call:

"[...] my sense is that there's a fair amount of pent-up demand still. Fortnite is still growing in popularity. PUBG is doing great. And then we've got some amazing titles coming out. And so my sense is that the overall gaming market is just really, is super healthy. And our job is to make sure that we work as hard as we can to get supply out into the marketplace. And hopefully, by doing that, the pricing will normalize and the gamers can buy into their favorite graphics card at a price that we hope they can get it at."

- Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidea CEO

You can run Fortnite on a toaster though. The recommended specs are an Nvidia GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7870.

Meanwhile PUBG requires three 1080-tis and a whole lot of luck for a stable framerate

Prices went up because of mining, and now that the craze is over price stay up because companies want to pocket the extra money. It's as simple as that.

Nothing you said is wrong but your argument is based on the incorrect assumption that they're talking about high-end GPUs.

The article states that the oversupply is in low-end GPUs not suitable for mining.

Yes that was true six months ago it is not any more.

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