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Comment by Brave-Steak | Hacker News Reader

At this point all I care about is the price. The price of GPUs has ballooned in an insane way recently and it’s impossible to get a decent deal that’s significantly faster than what I have now (and I haven’t upgraded in years). The used market seems to have been decimated, with even last gen cards going for crazy high prices. I suspect the 30x0 line will be even more expensive than the current one, and I hate it.

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The later 1xxx models are expensive in the aftermarket because a handful of cryptocurrencies are still ROI positive mining on them.

To a lesser extent the 2xxx series is going to be dominated by people wanting to do password cracking. A 2080 Ti will do about 13 billion checks/sec (using NTLM benchmarks), which starts to make financial sense for cracking high complexity passwords from data breaches.

It would be nice if in the 3xxx series they could figure out a way to make it only fast for games and not ML/cracking/crypto.

Unfortunately, it seems they're more than happy with the current state of things and they don't particularly care who buys their cards. They can push up the price and the used market will move in lockstep because demand is so high.

FWIW, I think they do care, because it would be bad for them if gaming on the PC dies, since it drives a lot of innovations in graphics, and nvidia is still at heart a graphics company.

However, there is little you can do when the stock of gaming oriented graphic cards disappears on day 0, and re-appears on ebay on day 1 at 4x their recommended price.

This products are just very valuable to a lot of people nowadays. Nvidia could ramp up production, but production is not something that you can quickly ramp up or down.

There is the fear that crypto will die, and then you end up with a lot of stock that you have to eat at a loss.

>FWIW, I think they do care, because it would be bad for them if gaming on the PC dies, since it drives a lot of innovations in graphics, and nvidia is still at heart a graphics company.

And because cryptomining is volatile as hell.

More than volatile, at some point, using GPUs is just not worth it for cryptomining.

Honestly, I think that once they discovered the issue, and decided what to do about it, then the ROI on mining bitcoin was already fading and people were migrating to FPGAs, so maybe they thought "things will get back to normal on its own".

Turns out, the number of cryptocurrencies exploded, and many of them are worth mining. Also, every time the ROI on mining one disappears, a new cryptocurrency appears.

Maybe they are just still waiting for either this problem to fix itself, by slowly ramping up production, but nothing too steep.

Strong disagree. We need more democratization of ML capability, not less. Right now the cost of playing around with GANs is pretty prohibitive.

Well Nivida just released a dev board for $99 that has the GPU chip from a Titan X in it. That is nearing Raspberry Pi levels of "democratized" computing.

I don't know much about ML, but my knowledgeable friends say they are saving tons of money moving from GPU farms to GCP TPUs for training.

The only thing it has in common with the (2015) GTX Titan X is the Maxwell architecture for the GPU but with only 128 cores and lower clocks. That would be some magic if Nvidia managed to get the GM200 GPU's power consumption down one order of magnitude from 250W.

The Jetson delivers ~2 TFLOPs of single precision performance vs. Titan X's ~6 TFLOPS. Great from such a small board but not quite "same GPU".

From what I can tell researching it, the 99$ Jetson Nano has around 1/2 teraflop of computing power for 7.5 watts of power. The Jetson TX2 has from 1.5-2 teraflops and costs around 500-600 but there was/is a student Dev kit for 300$, whereas the Titan X has 12 teraflops of computing power.

Indeed I posted the numbers for the bigger brother. The Nano is offically slated at 472GFLOPS. The 2015 GTX Titan X (GM200, ~6 TFLOPS, +/- 10% depending on source) is the only one that has something in common with the Jetson - the Maxwell architecture.

The one with 10-12TFLOPS is the 2016 Titan X (GP102-400) but that was already using Turing so the comparison would be even more stretched.

6-7 years ago you could buy a complete upgrade of performance parts for the same price as a a single gpu today. It's crazy.

Blame the perfect storm of VR, ML and Crypto :(

The RX 480 was an affordable way to do VR.

Most people doing ML either use Nvidia for Cuda or GCN based gpus for their compute.

Crypto is pretty much over by this point Look at all the cheap 4/580s on ebay.

Can you expand on what you mean by 'crypto is pretty much over'? I thought miners had simply moved to better cards to stay competitive resulting in said price drop of older cards?

Miners didn't move to better cards, they moved to ASICs. Once the currency is too hard for a consumer GPU to mine, miners move to specialized hardware which is far better at mining. When mining gets even harder, the only way it can be done profitably is to set up entire farms of chips that mine away, and that's a serious amount of cash at this point, far beyond a 1200 dollar card. By this point, mining is pretty much over for the rest of us mortals.

Which just goes to prove that the emperor is wearing no clothes: The vision of democratized crypto mining has not been realized. Instead of millions of people collectively holding the network in check, the mining power is being centralized by big key players. It's only a matter of time until the mining power has centralized enough to where the network can be sabotaged and taken over by whichever party is mining more than 50% of the work.

What do you have now? A 1060 or 1070 will be enough to keep you going for quite some time.

Yeah, I'm still waiting to upgrade my GTX970... it's running things well enough on 1080p and nothing you can buy right now is 4K proof below 1200$ :/

GeForce GTX 1080 Ti works fine with a 4k display.

Pretty sure he means gaming, even my 2080 ti struggles with 4k gaming (well imagine wanting the highest setting of every game in 4k, most gpus can handle that in fullhd n 2k, but 4k every gpu is jsut to weak)

Even a 1080 does fine pushing a 4k display. Mine stutters a bit when I stick two 4k displays on it, but it's fine pushing one.

Nvidia RTX 2060 Founders Edition is US$299

Doesn't seem too crazy high. How much are you looking to pay and what do you have now?

That's the bottom end of the RTX cards. $300 for a low end card that would have been $150 a few years ago.

Yeah, I really don't want to pay more than around $120 for a decent GPU, which gives me a used gtx 1060 or 780ti. Both of those play new games at high settings on 1440p, what more could you want? Shelling out $700 for a GPU to get good VR or RTX tech demos just isn't worth it.

It is if you use a high refresh rate. My 1080ti is barely adequate for 1440p165... and even at that I’m usually turning setting down to average 100–120fps.

Good VR is absolutely worth it. After getting a VR setup I haven't touched a single none VR game. I recently upgraded to a rx 5700xt and love it.

You do not play new AAA games on 1440p high with a $120 card.

High end RTX are worth it on 4K screens. I can confirm that a £1200 RTX 2080 Ti can run new AAA games on 4K high at a stable 60 to 70 fps. Not much higher than that.

Sure they're expensive but they are indeed significantly faster than cards from a few years ago.

There's an expectation that the price / performance ratio also improves as time goes on. Put another way, you should be spending the same (plus inflation) every few years, and getting significantly more bang for your buck. I haven't done the maths, but I guess a lot of people are not feeling this.

They are and they aren't. We're not seeing definitive levels of higher resolution performance, we see concrete performance boosts but in the real world and in terms of real use it's pretty marginal considering the costs involved. Hardware Raytracing is clearly an attempt at a value add bit the results have been somewhat underwhelming. For people content at 1080p60fps we're not that far behind if you ignore RTX/AMD Equivalent.

I mean I know there are some real gains, some amazing gains on paper or specific application but when playing a game the realizations are a bit less pronounced for everyone that is not hounding on RTX or pixel peepling.

Just my $0.02 of course and I can respect any differing view but this is just my thoughts from watching and waiting with a 1070 I use for 1080p60fps. It certainly taking more fiddling with newer titles to get that level of IQ and performance but I'm still happy in my niche. I would love to move up a level or two in resolution or FPS but it's hard to justify at the price levels we are seeing.

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