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Comment by cwhiz | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I don’t understand is why Nvidia isn’t raising their prices. The supply and demand is clearly out of sync. Prices should rise until there is an equilibrium between demand and supply. Why is Nvidia content to feed the eBay market?

If we aren’t going to be able to buy GPUs I would at least prefer Nvidia make a profit instead of scalpers.

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Same reason baseball teams don’t raise season ticket prices to the levels sold by scalpers.

They want to preserve the long term revenue stream which is more important than what they may perceive is a short term demand spike.

PR. Gamers would crucify Nvidia if they did it. All the hate towards scalpers would go to Nvidia doubled.

Right now there is a small chance to buy at MSRP. I managed to do it by calling around small stores in the area that didn't have a functioning online store - scalpers didn't bother with those..

Price definitely impacts reviews as well. If you want to boost customer reviews on any product, cutting the price resets customer expectations to the downside. Raising prices for any reason also raises customer expectations.

How about increase MSRP but offer a redemption via the web, one per user (ie only one per bank account OR email OR phone). Individuals could buy and get $X00 off, once. Scalpers would need a fresh email, bank account, phone number every time they wanted to get a GPU or would be stuck selling at $X00 above the true retail price?

I think there's a VAT penalty, but could it work??

Not enough, its super easy to create fresh email, card phone numbers. Only difficult thing to change is shipping address but only if that's strictly enforced to only USPS valid addresses which ive never seen anywhere

Gamers are already crucifying Nvidia. Nvidia is leaving billions on the table. I feel like they could win gamers back with that cash.

Personally, I have absolutely zero faith that any additional revenue would go towards improving their products or availability. It would go to their shareholders; NVidia (Intel) treats its customers like consumers.

If their prices aren't responding to supply/demand now, they weren't before either. The price of a NVidia GPU isn't set by market forces; never has been.

> NVidia (Intel) treats its customers like consumers.

nVidia's customers are literally consumers.

Those words aren’t synonymous in denotation—who wants to be called a consumer? I think the term customer implies respect for those you do business with rather than viewing people who buy your product as numbers on a spreadsheet.

These are luxury items, where 95% of people will be using to play AAA video games at nice but but pretty extravagant 144hz 1440p/4K or as space heaters.

Its the very definition of a consumer

I am a consumer; it bothers me exactly zero as it’s literally and figuratively true.

“Treat like transactions” or “treat like cash flows” or “treat like wallets” would give me the pejorative meaning presumably intended.

Given the spike in demand right now, traditional supply and demand would suggest raising prices and using the money to produce more chips, which in the end would net more money and bring the price down. The reason that won't happen has more to do with the feasibility (or lack thereof) of scaling production of GPUs by throwing money at it and the transient nature of the spike than Nvidia being helmed by a shadowy cabal that responds to neither their own incentives nor the market.

This one cycle might not be enough to fund more production but if your business keeps running into these shortage cycles then given enough cycles it would become profitable to put more money into production. This isn't the first time it happened.

Of course it's not the first spike, but adding enough capacity to cover every spike in the future would mean far larger production than is needed for the vast majority of the time.

Hell, raise prices and then rebate back if their drivers see you just running normal games and crap. Win/win.

Nope. You're still enshrining post facto control mechanisms by which the manufacturer controls what you do with the hardware after you recieve it.

Why is it so hard for businesses to just sell things? Why must they encroach? I'm not even a miner, but I'm not inviting anyone into my system to make a judgement call on whether my use of something I paid for is consistent with what they want. They sold it. They should not only have to part with the drivers, but with any semblance of software enforced binning too.

Because the “gamer” customers will still be there after Bitcoin crashes and it makes sense to not piss your long term customers off to please the short term ones.

At least that’s the argument. We’ll see how it plays out.

This is funny observation. Before some recent hurricane, thousands of cars were shuttling between empty network gas stations, presumably guided by their apps, to no avail, while I was able to top the tank by going several streets into nearest small village and finding standalone "mom and pop" station.

What you mean is there is a small chance for a bot script to buy them that checks the sites for the 24/7 . There is no chance of a human clicking on the pages with a mouse of buying them

Smaller shops get some stock too. Smaller shops often don't have an online store or the one they have is broken or doesn't represent current their stock. Scalpers don't bother with those stores.

I literally entered "computer store toronto" into Google and started calling every small one in the results. I found what I needed in fewer than 15 calls and picked it up an hour later.

Dunno about Nvidia, but the usual approach here is to keep MSRP the same on paper, but distribute more devices to your distributors that jack up their price and get a rebate from them or some other favour.

And you can bet every other vendor is paying MSRP with possibly 0% markup, but shutting up about it unless they want 0 deliveries. Maybe even paying more than MSRP and expected to, on paper, treat it as a loss-leader.

That's called a backdoor and it happens a lot. You sell it to a buddy that kicks back 150% then he sells for 200% on ebay you both win.

The prices have been raised. GPUs of the current gen are (relatively) a lot more expensive than they used to be. It's just the case that the scalpers make them even more expensive.

They can’t because they’re locked in with their partners. And if they raise it for consumers it will be considered price discrimination.

The prices are raised. The rtx 3060, released a few days ago, was not selling for MSRP. The only time there is an MSRP is for nvidia FE cards, but the majority of cards are not. The 3060 was called a "non existent card" by GamersNexus because the $320 price tag never happened.

What I don't understand is why gamers aren't petitioning their government to stop the trade tarrifs responsible for the price increases.

Gamers rise up /s

>The rtx 3060, released a few days ago, was not selling for MSRP.

Anecdote: I actually got a 3060 for MSRP (well, MSRP + 6 euros with no separate charge for shipping). But the store was selling it as an "introductory offer while supplies last" and it sure isn't at MSRP anymore.

Right, there were some but effectively the MSRP was more around $500 usd, manufacturers like Zotac were selling for that as I recall.

But if you're buying in a different country you don't have the tariffs I would assume.

NVIDIA is fighting against it while pushing their own mining products: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/geforce-cmp/

They're not fighting against it at all.

That's a load of horseshit and anyone familiar with both PC gaming and cryptocurrency mining knows it.

Why would you divert chips that could be powering GeForce GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the ability to mine on your gaming cards?

Unless, of course, you were scared shitless about an enormous secondary market forming for 3000 series cards when you release the GTX 4000 series... Why spend $699 for a GTX 4080 when you can buy a gently used GTX 3080 for $299-$399. Decent miners know you need to undervolt and underclock for maximum watt/hash performance - in other words, these chips weren't stressed intensively for months / years - they are the equivalent of a luxury car driven by a 70 year old Grandma to and from the grocery store and the department store.

I can guarantee you if NVIDIA had the capacity with Samsung to pump out a load of 3000 series cards, they'd do it, but they can't, so they're doing the next best thing - creating artificial scarcity.

Once these "mining cards" are no longer profitable, they have no secondary market. They go off to the landfill, or the e-waste processor.

This is about profit, pure and simple.

> Why would you divert chips that could be powering GeForce GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the ability to mine on your gaming cards?

Because you're using parts with defects which are irrelevant to mining (e.g. faulty video output, texturing, etc).

That's only true now since the 30 series cards are relatively new. Once the process node improves soon, the yields are going to go up, and they're going to use fully functioning parts to create mining cards. It happens everytime where they first use parts with defects to create lower end GPUs or CPUs, and then yields improve so they disable the extra cores, memory and restrict frequency in firmware and drivers.

There were many hacks in the past to revert these nerfs and get more functionality of higher end products for free. On one graphics card in the past, all you had to do was just flash the higher end card's bios, and it had a success rate of 75%

>Why would you divert chips that could be powering GeForce GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the ability to mine on your gaming cards?

The current cryptomining chips are actually based on Turing (RTX 2000), not Ampere (RTX 3000).

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-repurposes-turing-s...

Not all, the high end is ga102 ampere

Unless they make the other GPUs less capable of mining or the mining hardware reall cheap no one cares

They did make the other GPUs less capable of mining.

Software is easily defeated.

Not when cryptographic signature verification is built into and enforced through the hardware. See Nouveau. The can't reclock post Maxwell GPUs because their firmware blobs would have to be signed by Nvidia. Think of it as Nvidia holding back the steering wheel to a car.

Wouldn’t this fall under the same kind of right to modify privileges that everyone is always complaining at Apple for?

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