Cryptocurrency is a legitimate threat to PC gaming

Crypotcurrency is causing massive spikes in the price of PC components and huge supply shortages.

As we speak, there is not a single online retailer here in Canada that has a GTX 1070, 1070 TI, 1080, or 1080 TI in stock. That isn't an exaggeration, you can check stock yourself (Newegg, Canada Computers, NCIX, and Amazon all have zero stock). A few physical locations in remote towns have 1 or 2 units in stock, but that's it. The moment they get online stock, it sells out within a matter of hours/days as the crypto miners put in bulk orders. And then gamers are stuck waiting another few weeks/months for the next shipment.

Prices have also risen 50% on GPUs and RAM.

I just fried my motherboard and thought I'd go ahead with a new build. I don't mind paying the new price (it sucks, but whatever). But the fact that I can't actually buy a GPU is brutal.

For anyone that doesn't know, crypto mining is GPU and RAM intensive, so the demand for those components is incredibly high. Since Nvidia and AMD aren't equipped to meet that much demand (the crypto mining market is many times bigger than the PC gaming market), we get supply shortages and price increases.

Nvidia and AMD don't care who buys their products since they're in the business of making money. It's unlikely that they will increase their production capacity unless the cryptocurrency boom can show that it's a long term market and not just a bubble. This could take 2-3 years.

Is anyone else afraid this might hurt PC gaming? It could start to push a lot of PC gamers towards consoles. If you need a GPU but can't find one anywhere, you might start considering switching to console gaming. I'm sure the market will correct itself eventually, but there could be some damage done in the interim.

GPUs selling well is bad for gamers? This only shows, that there is demand which will lead to a higher production in the future and hopefully faster development in the hardware. Sure it sucked I had to wait 2 weeks for my Aorus GTX 1080 Ti, but I survived it

The problem is it's going to be a while before they increase production capacity because they want to see if the crypto craze is a bubble or not. Until then, prices will keep going up and supply will continue to be scarce.

They won't increase production capacity only for the crypto market to crash in a year or two.

@ArchoNils2: They run these GPU's at full load 24/7 until they burn out, and they do it by the dozens. Manufacturers like EVGA still have to honor the warranty on them. So no, it's not a good thing. This literally only benefits miners.

They're not increasing the stock by much because of the volatility of cryptocurrencies. They're also able to get more profit because miners are willing to pay more for cards. There's also no real incentive for them to release new cards if the current cards are selling out instantly.

Ideally they would have a separate product for mining, something more expensive but also better performing for mining (MPU?), but not so good for gaming. Cryptocurrency has been around long enough, I think it's time they target that specifically, and have GPU's for gaming.

Consider switching to console gaming? Lol, NO!

Unless consoles start providing amenities like keyboard and mouse support for games, there's no way in hell I'll switch my gaming to consoles.

An increase in GPU and RAM prices wouldn't deter me. Obviously, there are many here too young to remember when CPU prices were $500 to $700 a pop and an ordinary, mid-range, DIY PC can approach $2k.

I'm just hoping the cryptocurrency market crash and burns till it no longer becomes profitable if it means gpu prices would go back to normal. I would have no problem with that. It's even hard to find a gtx 1060 6gb at reasonable prices.

Yeah this is horrible. Just checked the online prices today and found out about this cryptocurrency malarky. These damn cryptofarmers are ruining it for gamers. I will wait until these ripoff prices subside and then pay a fair price for the proper card.

Its a damn shame it has come to this.

Welp, guess I'm holding onto my two 970s a bit longer.

I think there is some irony here. Buying a prebuilt pc seems like the more cheaper alternative than buying the parts separately

jesus christ I just checked WTF Happened? a Geforce 1080 is like 1200 dollars, swear to god it was ~800 a couple months ago.

And they're sold out everywhere. Prices will continue to rise to the point that crypto miners are willing to pay. Last I heard, one GTX 1080 earns them about $10 a day, so that's $3650 a year. So yeah, prices will continue to rise.

Volta cards will probably be sold out nation-wide within a few hours of release.

Nvidia, AMD, and the retailers love it. PC gamers are the only losers here.

Somebody explain this whole mining thing, what exactly are they "mining" for?

Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.).

Here is a good write-up on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/7pjbus/video_card_prices_and_cryptocurrency_mining_v2/

The market for cryptocurrency is booming right now (get into buying and selling it if you want, it's the safest investment in town at the moment). Some analysts say it's a bubble that will burst, but it's been going strong for 3-4 years now, and has picked up a lot of steam in the last 12 months.

Apparently GPUs are more efficient at farming crypto than CPUs, so the miners buy up warehouses full of consumer-grade GPUs (and RAM sticks), leaving nothing for us gamers. This emboldens retailers to jack up prices because demand exceeds supply.

At this point its basically cheaper to buy a prebuilt PC

Yeah I'm really pissed. I mean, it's a free world and if the product is for sale someone can buy it. But this is the most expensive time to buy consumer gpus in history, and marks an appalling backslide in costs

http://www.pcgamer.com/its-a-terrible-time-to-buy-a-graphics-card/

Aha just found this on google. Looks like the beginning of the end.

Definitely gonna wait this out - in 6 months this could be a whole different scene.

yeah no getting around it at the moment. now is a bad time to build a PC. things have been great on the CPU and mobo front since ryzen released. both AMD and intel bringing their A game which is great for competition.

but the price of ram is obscene and GPUs are very volatile (now is really bad). i bought an RX 580 nitro+ 4GB for around 260 euros last year which is already well over the asking price but it was the cheapest 580 available (on a side note: inferior models of the RX580 actually cost more at the time. mad). that same model has gone up basically to the same price as an 8GB model now which is closer to 350 euros.

as i understand it the price of GDDR5 has gone up also so thats going to have an effect on card prices.

some companies have tried to make mining specific cards but they are only chosen as a last resort as their resale value wont be as good (no video outputs).

apparently the crypto market is crashing at the moment but its so volatile that i dont think its going to stop miners buying cards any time soon. it would have to be consistently crashing for months accross all currencies which is very unlikely.

its also so volatile that manufacturers are unlikely to ramp up production to try and meet the demand. so its a mess. i doubt they could do something like nerf hashing rates at the driver level as they will just get hacked anyway.

As a PC gamer and miner I am torn. You are definitely correct that it is hurting the PC gaming community because there is no incentive for Nvidia or AMD to develop the next gen GPU's because they're making a killing with what's already out there. This in turn will strangle game development as game development studios can only create games that target current technology. I can see console graphics overtaking the PC in the not too distant future unless someone finds a way to create a GPU that's awesome for gaming and rubbish for mining.

Yeah it sucks but there are multiple other factors. Fabs are already pushing production to new limits due to SoC and memory demand from the mobile space. I'm sure if Nvidia and AMD could increase production of chips they would but it is difficult when you got the likes of Apple, Samsung, and others eating up precious wafer allocations.

Demand for wafer has increase so exponentially that the supply side is playing catch up and PC components are not a priority.

I'm expecting this to last for a few more years. Mining isn't going anywhere, neither are phones. We just have to wait on the fabs to construct more plants.

It's easy to increase production. It's just a huge risk. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to increase manufacturing capacity. You only do that to meet stable demand growth. The crypto market is just too volatile for Nvidia/AMD investors to sign off on such an expensive investment. If the crypto market crashed tomorrow, all that extra production capacity they invested in becomes useless.

@nortski:

That's my long term fear. The mining market is much bigger than the PC gaming market, so they will easily overtake gamers as the primary consumers of GPUs (they already have). Our only hope is for Nvidia/AMD to create efficient mining cards.

Vague reassurances from Nvidia?

LINK

Just PR bullshit. If they really cared, they would limit the sale of consumer GPUs to businesses. This is how organizations manage supply shortages. You make specific products for business and prevent them from buying the consumer product because they'll cause a shortage in the market. Nvidia and AMD don't give a shit though.

I was reading a comment in an article today and some mining asshole who was defending the practice had a warehouse with 2304 GPUs dedicated to crypto mining. Then we wonder why they are out of stock everywhere. That's like the quarterly stock of GPUs in all of Canada. No wonder that shit is sold out everywhere. **** these losers and **** Nvidia/AMD for abandoning their core customer base for a quick buck. I hope it comes back to bite them in the ass. Not only are they starting to lose customers to consoles, but the GPU market will also go to shit when those mining assholes flood it with used GPUs not too long from now (another consequence of selling consumer products to businesses).

Wait a second. So miners buy thousands of cards and the GPU companies can't keep up with demand but you blame the GPU companies for it ?

They're the ones selling to miners. You can restrict the sale of consumer parts to businesses if you want to.

And they also (understandably) aren't bothering to increase production.

The ball is in their court.

"They're the ones selling to miners. You can restrict the sale of consumer parts to businesses if you want to."

Well yeah, if someone orders video cards from NVIDIA/ATI then they are going to sell them. How do they know they are miners? And also they sell to video card manufacturers that then sell to retail shops, not directly to consumers.

You just put it in your license agreement. Small businesses use WIndows Home edition, but serious businesses get the Professional edition. You lose out on product support if you buy the wrong edition.

The biggest problem isn't the average Joe who buys 6-12 GPUs (they still suck and should feel bad), but the large scale operations.

@UssjTrunks: Maybe I worded it wrong, but what does all that processing power go towards? That write up was just about the prices, I want to know what the actual process is for mining the coins, and why theres any actual value to them?

Well first of all I've worked in IT for more than a decade and I can assure you that most businesses (Small or Big) use Pro unless someone made a mistake and bought a Home Edition PC.

Again explain how NVIDIA knows who it's selling to when it doesn't directly sell to consumers?

You can enforce what your retailers do. I worked in ecommerce before (for an aftermarket car parts company). The parts manufacturers would each have an authorized dealer list. If you didn't meet the conditions of staying on that list, you would get removed, and the manufacturer would advise customers not to buy from you (they can withhold product support if you bought your item from an unauthorized retailer).

It really is awful from a gaming perspective. I would like to upgrade to a 2070ti later this year. As I settled with a 1060 3G just weeks before this insanity. But there's no guarantee I could even get my hands on a GPU for a reasonable price. So I'm just gonna have to buy the second first gen cards are announced.

Its even got me thinking that I should add more Ram at the current prices. Even with my rather tight finances now. Before Ram spikes up even more. It would be cool if Nvidia/AMD could make a GPU specializing in mining. But they probably think its not worth additional R&D costs for a very volatile crypto market. Where a crash will dump excessive GPU's on the market.

@vfighter:

I've honestly been hooked to cryptocurrencies since i looked into it almost a year ago. Not just because of the profits but because it has the potential to change so much for the better. If I would have mined instead of buying the coins I would've made way less money and probably even lose some if i used my 1080 to mine. But its also probably due to higher electricity cost in my country. I see that my online retailers still have plenty in stocks but it says they only sell a maximum of 2 cards per person / company because of mining. Prices haven't gone up here (switzerland), but they also haven't droped (my 1080 costs the same as almost 2 years ago). The market is not over in 6 months, bitcoin is just correcting itself for now after that way too massive of a bullrun.

@vfighter Mining is a proof of work in cryptocurrency. Not all cryptocurrencies use it but some of the biggest like bitcoins do because it has kept the network safe so far.

Its pretty complicated if you go into the technical details, but to answer your question in simple terms:

When someone does a transaction of Bitcoins from point A to B it gets encoded in a mathematical way with other transactions together inside a block.

Miners (GPU or ASIC) have to solve that code with their hashing power (its pretty much a guessing game like typing passwords until it gets the right one). CPU's are too slow for this type of problem solving but there are cryptocurrencies made for cpu as mining aswell. Usually a stronger card for gaming is also better at mining bitcoin, but not always, before the gtx 10 series it was pretty much only AMD Cards that had a good Performance per Buck. The power consumption also place a role since these cards run at 100% 24 hours a day. The one who solves the block first gets rewarded with Bitcoins (right now 12.5 Bitcoins, drops 50% every 4 years). The difficulty of the code tries to match the Hashrate of all mining power so each 10mins a block gets mined. This can vary because of increasing or decreasing hashrate and the network takes time to change difficulty. There are many Pools so the reward gets distributed. This is all done so nobody can cheat the network. It hasn't been hacked since it started 9 years ago and is pretty much the strongest Network of Computers in the World. You need like 500 of the best supercomputers in the world times 10'000 to match the Hashrate of Bitcoins Network (probably a lot more now). And in order to manipulate anything in the Network you need 51% of the Network Power. There are currently almost 17 millions bitcoins circulating and the maximum there ever will be is 21million. Lost Bitcoins are forever lost and can't be recovered.

As soon as the Problem is solved, the lets say 1 Bitcoin you sent from A to B is now at B and recorded in the public ledger. So the network knows wallet A is now -1 Bitcoin and Wallet B is +1 Bitcoin. This prevents double spending which is also a problem in banking since it went digital but thats a easier problem to fix there since they are a centralized entity. Bitcoin is trying to cut out that middleman who in the end has too much power.

I urge people to look into more closely before calling this just a hype. When looking at the negatives of Cryptocurrencies look at the negatives we have right now. Bitcoin consumes a lot of Power? How much Power do all banks in the world consume and still get hacked? Cryptocurrencies are upgradeable, Banks are at their Limits.

Ofcourse it sucks right now if you wanna buy a graphics card but Its solving a way bigger problem we have right now. And who knows what the future holds maybe someday you'll be mining while you're playing.

If anyone wants to look more into it, i can recommend this Documentary:

I like cryptocurrency in concept, although I'm not sure if has potential to become tangible. Governments will want to regulate it eventually, and nothing can stop them from doing it. There are also way too many cryptocurrencies. A new one gets released every day. People are already talking about how slow and inefficient Bitcoin is. A currency needs stability, and if new coins keep supplanting old ones, you won't have that.

Also, the GPU market in Europe is much different than in NA due to higher electricity costs (as you mention). Nobody is mining there, so you don't have supply shortages and high prices. It's a different story in North America. Here in Canada, for example, you can't find a single GTX 1080 in stock at any retailer in the entire country (while prices are marked up by $200-300). As soon as any retailer gets online stock, it sells out within a few minutes. None of the manufacturers (like EVGA) sell their cards in Canada directly, so we have to buy from retailers, who only care about clearing inventory as fast as possible, at the highest price possible. Newegg (the biggest computer parts retailer here) is selling their GPUs in bundles of 6 to make it even easier for miners to buy up inventory.

@UssjTrunks: Governments are already regulating it and thats not a bad thing. The New York agreement for example helped ******** get to where it is now. And most regulation is due to criminal activities and tax fraud. But they can't regulate everything, they can't freeze your account, they can't stop people from using it. Yea theres tons of coins, just like the internet bubble, they are not all competing with Bitcoin but rather offering different busisness solution with Blockchains behind it, which opens up a wider gap in the possibilities. Theres tons that will just die out eventually, but the strong ones will survive like Google, Amazon etc. You have to look at Bitcoin as an early access / Alpha game, the scale it has right now is too big for where the technology is (the mining is already big enough tho) and it will take its time. Bitcoin can't just try out new technologies like that without risking the whole network, thats why its nice to have something like litecoin that does it up front to test it and thats why bitcoin is slowly migrating to segwit and lightning network which will make it a lot faster and cheaper. Its the wallets that are slowing it down and most of them are on Fiat Gateways or Exchanges and they also have additional risk factors when upgrading to take into account, but like they say in games, they'll release it when its done.

Yea I guess it sucks for NA atm. Now that I think about it, when segwit and lightning are adopted mining might get less profitable, so that could reduce the miners.

Game developers will have to adapt. My guess is i'm going to get a few years more out of that GTX 960!

They already do that. All multiplats are console ports, which are designed to run at 30 fps, medium settings. The point of PC gaming has always been to go beyond that.

I found a EVGA 1080ti kingpin for $819 shipped, they have 10 in stock...is a bit cheaper than most places I've seen.

@UssjTrunks: Totally agree, but it would seem the market currently does not favor this.

This is a a pretty good explanation of what mining is and how its done

https://m.benzinga.com/article/9953629

Looks like Nvidia and Amd are looking into creating chipsets that are specifically designed to mine crypto currency. That'd be great for the video card market.

@Yams1980: most likely cheaper to buy from EU and pay the shipping than pay hundreds of dollars more in NA

The Nvidia store is the best option at the moment if you live in NA. They sell at MSRP and restock pretty often (although the stock runs out in minutes).

You can also buy directly from manufacturers (like EVGA), but this only works if you live in the US (they don't ship to Canada).

@UssjTrunks: Glad you made this thread. Just logged onto Newegg and a 1080 Founders is going for $1200......wtf....

This is at the very least killing the custom gaming PC market. I was about to upgrade, but not anymore. I wonder how many gamers were planning on buying or upgrading at this time that simply won't?

Also, what incentive is their for Nvidia or AMD to come out with the next Generation when all of their stock is instantly selling out at a decent clip and profit? At these sales, there's no point. Unless they ramp up production significantly, and I don't see any evidence of this being reported, we are in for a long stretch of very high prices. Super bummed to be honest.

Plenty of fake ebay.co.uk listings for 1080/1080ti from hacked accounts for ~30-100 GBP, lol.

re: Nvidia and AMD, their attitude towards gamers is approximately of the "Behold! The field in which I grow my fcks...Lay thine eyes upon it and thou shalt see that it is barren" variety.

They are prob having their best stretch of sales ever and making mountains of money. One could argue that not supporting gamers during this mess would be short-sighted (ie, if/when bitcoin market crashes and GPU prices and market go back to normal), but....companies are usually too dumb to see beyond the $$$.

I suspect this whole thing postpones the launch of Volta as well. If Pascal cards are still selling like hotcakes, it gives Nvidia no reason to release their next series. The Vega cards from AMD were a joke, so there is no immediate threat from competitors. AMD doesn't have any problem with this series of events either since their cards are selling like hotcakes too.