what a hypocrisy from Nvidia. They've been milking gamers for some time now (pretty full on on high end front since there is no competition from AMD)
what a hypocrisy from Nvidia. They've been milking gamers for some time now (pretty full on on high end front since there is no competition from AMD)
AMD learnt the hard way the last time when they increased production of their cards and the market crashed and screwed them over,so I can understand why both AMD and Nvidia are weary of ramping up production and OFC they also have limits too,ie,the amount of wafers they have already bought from GF or TSMC.
The main culprits are retailers and distributors who are ramping up the prices because they can,and the coin miners who are buying up all the stock - unless it can be proven that AMD or Nvidia have increased channel prices,the only advantage for them is not needing to apply rebates or give away free games,etc to sell the cards,as they are selling all they can make.
Edit!!
Also to those wondering why Nvidia is saying this,is down to one thing - consoles.
If cards become too expensive,it will stop gamers upgrading or they will simply just end up buying an XBox One X or PS4 PRO,as many major titles are multi-platform and longterm that might mean less sales for them,if the people who ended up buying consoles found them good enough and ended up using their PC less.
It didn't stay crashed, though, did it? Kinda like the stock market in 1928.
Question is, would it pick up (with XYZ-Coin or whichever mineable crypto becomes the favourite) quickly enough to make those overproduced cards still viable for mining?
Some things will always be better on PC though, whether you're into higher framerates or seated HOTAS/M&KB games.
Besides, many of us like that we can do all the other things on PC as well as play games. You can't get Excel and Powerpoint on XBox, can you?
Their marketshare did - the market was swamped with secondhand AMD cards,and they also had overproduced them and they had to discount and give away games to try and get people to buy new ones,and their sales marketshare got affected.
I would argue many home users only really buy desktops if they are into building their own computers or are gaming - laptops seem more convenient for people and a cheapo one would be sufficient for most purposes,and for a few years. Its not like anything much more than a quad core is really required for many of these tasks.
All this artificial price gouging is happening at the same time as:
1.)RAM prices being artificially jacked up to stupid levels,and countries like China now suspecting price fixing,which RAM companies have been fined for in the past.
2.)NAND prices being jacked up so SSDs cost more.
3.)A whole host of flaws especially in Intel CPUs,which drops performance(its been shown some games can be affected by the patches a decent amount) meaning additional costs have to be footed if you are affected. I certainly have been affected as I notice worse performance in FO4,with the Windows10 + Nvidia security patches.
4.)Case prices now starting to go up - look at the price jump on the latest Fractal cases for example.
5.)Bling on various computer parts,essentially jacking up prices for a few dollars of parts. I mean I looked at a Z series mini-ITX motherboard and a crappy one started at £130. I remember years ago getting a reasonable Z97 years ago for £90 for a mates build.
6.)Pound is weaker than two years ago,so parts will cost more.
7.)The sub £300 graphics card area has stagnated in performance in the last three to four years with similar performance. So basically GTX970/R9 290/RX470/RX570/RX480/RX580/GTX1060 are not far off each other if you look at an average of many games.
8.)Many PC games are getting worse and worse optimisations due to the world+dog jumping onto making every blasted game early access,which means most optimisations are not included,making the games very poorly optimised.This is even worse than the anaemic state of general PC games when it comes to optimisation,due to the use of ancient engines and penny pinching devs not even trying to make engines that can effectively even use 4 cores,ie,very poor core loading. Games which also don't even optimise things like textures properly so eat up too much VRAM,etc.
9.)HDD price fixing after the floods years ago,and pricing per TB has taken years to actually improve,and warranties have gotten worse too.
10.)Higher res monitors are now cheaper,but that is compounded by the stagnation in midrange cards and not all LCD monitors are so great if you go past their native resolutions. Yes FreeSync and GSync help,but unless you spend good money,the cheaper ones compromise in other ways and its a band aid over a bigger issue.
Consoles by extension,due to the model Sony and MS have,have not gone up as much,and even the greater cost of console games is partially compensated by the fact you can still buy secondhand games.
Personally I hate the analogue controls on consoles,and can't stand even joysticks on PCs either,so keyboard and mouse is what ties me to the desktop still,and I also like modding games and consoles are too limited still in that way. However,if this price gouging keeps continuing I think I will certainly be priced out of PC gaming and DIY PC building in the next few years when it comes to newer titles if this continues(DR luckily helped me out currently). I love mucking around with PCs,but honestly I can get FAR better VFM with cameras and Hifi in comparison.
I also see more and more friends starting to go back to playing more on their consoles too.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 23-01-2018 at 08:55 PM.
You can’t really GPU mine bitcoin anymore - not been viable for 2-3 years now in the UK due to our power costs,but there are many alternatives.
If you have an AMD card then ether is just about profitable, and if you have an Nvidia card then there is a lot of choice, particularly with equihash based coins.
Personally I make about £3 a day profit (after power costs) from mining Zcash on my 1080 when it’s not in use, and I cash out every month. It’s a nice little bonus in my view. I have strongly considered setting up a 6 GPU rig if I could find 6 1070s at a sensible price (under 400 a card) as it’s currently just so profitable if you have the capital to put down. Even at the current low rates for Zcash of $430/ZEC that rig would cost me $3k to build and net $500ish a month profit - if the price recovers to the $600/ZEC mark as expected then that profit just goes up and up. That’s with our silly UK power prices; the profits are 1/3 higher in the USA where power is cheaper.
If the price crashes then you sell the GPUs and recover the investment.
I really can’t see a nice/quickway out of this for gamers at the moment - mining is just too easy to start and too profitable. the only way to limit it is for the prices to go up higher..but that doesn’t help those who want a card to game on. Or the prices could crash ofc but at the moment that seems unlikely, given the amount invested in crypto in general these days. The only other alternative is to wait for the difficulty of the current alt coins to go up to the point they are nonger viable (as happened with BTC) but who’s to say another won’t come along - clone a popular coin, tweak the algo and start again.
With ICOs being a thing now that only fuels demand and investment.
Crazy situation to be in! Maybe this is a case of can’t beat em join em? If you do overpay for a card just use it for mining when you are not gaming..you will recover the price difference fairly quickly
Awesome,because it does not always work out:
1.)Not everyone can mine if they are living with other people and causes the average leccy tariff to go up,so affects them too especially if they are not gamers,or care about tech. Plus there coins are speculation so not always a slam dunk you will make much money immediately unless you sit on it. Plus OFC the pricing is so volatile it could just crash quickly. Try explaining that to a non-techy.
2.)The lifespan of the computer parts will go down.
3.)If you are borrowing parts from other people it would be rude to hammer them.
4.)Don't have the upfront cash to be spending loads on a PC since they have normal lives to consider,and that cashflow is more important for their families and other expenditures.
6.)If they were to invest the extra money,what if the coins crash and they lose £100s they have not got.
7.)They don't give a flying monkies about mining since they just want a PC to run some games,and are not interested in fiddling with their PCs,or are not technical minded enough.
8.)A family only has one proper desktop for things like gaming which is shared by many people,so you can't be mining on it all the time.
Plus can hardware enthusiasts STOP rationalising all the RIP-OFF price increase for every blasted thing.
They rationalised all the Titan rebranding,which meant now for a top tier Nvidia gaming GPU you are looking at £1000+ instead of the £500 we would have paid during the time of the GTX580 era,etc and AMD followed suit(just I said they would).
If AMD and Nvidia find gamers spending £300 on RX580/GTX1060 level performance,do you honestly think they won't keep the same tier pricing even if coin mining is not profitable anymore??
Has nothing about the RAM cartels,etc not shown you price fixing happens in computing??
If companies know people are willing to pay beyond the odds religiously they will charge you more.
If you want companies to charge less,simply don't pay overinflated prices.
At some point if less gamers pay the overinflated prices,etc and games devs start complaining their new shiny game is getting less sales since people are buying less new cards for gaming,then AMD and Nvidia will be forced to do something about it.
If people pay 20%,30% or 40% more willingly they are going to laugh in your face and have a nice bonus at your expense.
Its like with loot boxes - they only got that ingrained into games due to weak willed people who spent loads on them. People moan at companies like EA - I don't blame them at all. I blame all the gamers who gave them ideas by buying into them massively in the first place,since they are not charities and if they can extract as much money as they can from you,they will.
But see what happens when the stronger willed customers finally get fed up and do something about it?
Have some standards people,seriously!!
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 24-01-2018 at 05:17 AM.
It's not just price gouging/fixing there's a whole host of things going on, there is no one smoking gun factor and I wish people would stop that.
Here's some of the factors involved
Miners causing a supply shortage on certain models.
Increase in mining, mining has become a lot more visible to a larger audience and more people are trying it or trying to get into it.
Ram chip prices being very high.
Ram chip demand going up, not just the amount of vram on graphics cards, mobile phones are having a big effect on the ram market. The phone market is still far larger than the pc market and phones are hitting the point where ram chip requirements have jumped up.
Transport costs, when a certain model of card gets a rush, to get stock back in quickly stock will often be air shipped. Air shipping has a massive cost compared to container ship shipping. (I know that average container ship shipping lead times are ~60days, I'm guessing more for UK)
Margin recovery, many retailers/e-tailers as well as partners/manufactures have had their margins squeezed to very little over the past 10 years, I've heard single digit % numbers and they are trying to claw some back.
Demand for higher res textures, higher res and higher performance, Yes I agree with the points about badly optimised software, however the demand from gamers to push graphics doesn't help the situation.
Badly optimised/rushed games, this again has an element of gamers adding to the issue, now I'm not defending devs/publishers for rushing code out the door, our constant demands for new games and rushing content adds to the situation.
Side note Apparently some of the partners (ie EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, etc) are not happy with the mining situation, yes it's increasing sales but only on certain models of cards and the miners are not good customers, miners only want a model they are not picky about brand, they don't care as much about other products of the Brand. However Gamers & Enthusiasts are far more Brand loyal which is far better for them in the long run.
[rem IMG]https://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i45/pob_aka_robg/Spork/project_spork.jpg[rem /IMG] [rem IMG]https://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i45/pob_aka_robg/dichotomy/dichotomy_footer_zps1c040519.jpg[rem /IMG]
Pob's new mod, Soviet Pob Propaganda style Laptop.
"Are you suggesting that I can't punch an entire dimension into submission?" - Flying squirrel - The Red Panda Adventures
Sorry photobucket links broken
Miners also have a far higher RMA rate than normal, so the partners aren't happy about it for that reason either. And for the same reason AMD/Nvidia are at risk - they stand to lose a lot of sales in the short-mid term when tons of battered cards are dumped on ebay meaning they'll both struggle to shift new cards, and have a ton of new RMA tickets rolling in. Like I said earlier it's not a good market for anyone involved besides gouging retailers/distributors - most have little to gain and a lot to lose.
It looks like the latest wave of pricing madness has struck the UK - I checked on some prices IIRC last week and they were about normal at Scan and OCUK - they're up to stupid levels again now.
Edit: The likes of Scan seem to have just set blanket pricing across each model of GPU now regardless of brand, cooler, clock speed, etc. It's just bizarre.
Last edited by watercooled; 24-01-2018 at 08:42 PM.
You can't profitably mine Bitcoin on a GPU any more. This is most people using other cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum. Most of the Ethereum network these days is used to service the smart contracts required by Crypto Kitties. https://hackernoon.com/how-crypto-ki...k-845c22aa1e6e
You can't buy a GPU at RRP right now because of people selling each other multi-hundred-dollar cat gifs.
DanceswithUnix (25-01-2018)
I think it does suitably demonstrate the robustness and viability of the networks, they each seem to have their own problems where despite consuming downright vile amounts of energy, are unable to process transactions in a meaningful way once some niche takes hold. Speculation alone killed Bitcoin, it's basically useless as an everyday currency, and if I understand it correctly others are heading the same way, perhaps with different contributing factors?
Proof of stake or similar should IMO be at least a step in the right direction towards easing the disastrous consequences of the networks, but the issue is that 'miners' will want to do *something* with their hardware, creating clone after clone. Is there a limit of the sheer amount of clones before the value of yet more just bottoms out?
That's honestly not just from the PoV of a gamer (I have a modern card I'm fine with for likely years to come), it's just depressing to see so much engineering talent (hardware design) and increasing amounts of finite resources squandered on it.
It's funny how, like most things, it seems to have attracted a cult-like following (not by everyone involved obviously). Anyone who disagrees is a 'red', a 'marxist', etc. I see plenty of people freely claim it's down to making some extra money, it's a good excuse to play with hardware which pays for itself, which I get. But I'm not buying the other reasons, not even close. Nor how some see themselves as more worthy than gamers because it's 'hedonistic'. The argument might even hold a touch of credence if Bitcoin was even slightly useful for the general population. Because sucking vast amounts of power, consuming resources and disrupting an entire market is far more altruistic and forward-looking than playing the odd computer game after work/school...
Lisa Su says ram production is the current problem with graphics card availability.
https://wccftech.com/amd-ramping-gpu...hind-shortage/
I get that RAM production isn't like a tap that can just be turned on and off but you'd think the big three manufactures would at least be doing something, even if that's just a bit of PR, to solve or explain this shortage of RAM as it's having a knock-on effect for the whole industry and not painting them in the best light.
RAM production has always gone through cycles of price hikes followed by oversupply.
It isn't surprising that people don't want to build a new fab to make more ram (the only way to improve the situation) when building that fab will drop prices making it difficult to get the money back from building the fab.
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