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  • ZoZo - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    "NVIDIA says that they are doing this to better ensure that GeForce cards make it to gamers, as opposed to being conscripted into mining farms."

    That's definitely not their main motivation, by far. The main motivation is to get miners to stop buying GeForce cards, so that when the mining bubble crashes, NVIDIA won't have to compete with a flood of used latest-generation cards, which would result in a significant dive in sales and therefore benefits.
  • lilkwarrior - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    It can be a legitimate latent function of this; there's not exactly one sole reason for this you know.
  • Zingam - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    They could push for faster adoption of RT and I guess RT acceleration ought not be useful for mining
  • StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    Did that happen with the last Crypto boom though? I don't recall much in the way of a flood of GPU's on the 2nd hand market.
  • Marlin1975 - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    Yea it was not a long/multi-year thing. But I got my RX580 for $100 because of it.

    Right now COVID put a lot of people at home so they can do mining like this and those that mine can do more as they can watch the systems more now.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    I got a pair of cheap 1070's in dec 2018 during the last slump.
  • Spunjji - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Nvidia missed their quarterly targets because of it. Of course, that may also be because they seem to have predicted the effects of the mining boom to go on for longer than they did... it's not entirely clear, tbh.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    The last major boom was only for AMD cards though, i forget exact tech wise, but they had something that did mining better than nvidia cards at the time so they was completely sold out. Which didn't effect %90 of pc gamers
  • GoldenBullet - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link

    AMD was preferred but nvidia gpus were fine for mining too.
  • GoldenBullet - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link

    My bro mined and I sold 15k of his gpus on eBay and Kijiji in 2019. Buyers got excellent deals.
  • Yojimbo - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    No. Firstly, miners don't sell their cards that much. Miners buy GPUs during crypto booms, when prices are high. and they mine with them as long as they are profitable. If they become unprofitable then when they want to sell them the cards probably won't be worth much. Plus they have to get them from the remote crypto mining places to the US and Europe to where the buyers are. It makes more economic sense to just store the cards waiting for another boom so they can avoid buying cards at high prices again during a shortage and instead quickly take advantage of the boom and make much more money than they could make by selling second-hand cards as low prices. Secondly, the gamers buying the cards from the miners would be gamers that would have otherwise bought the cards from NVIDIA instead of the miners buying it from NVIDIA. So the miners don't cost NVIDIA sales. What they do do is make the sales more lumpy and hard to predict and cause booms and busts. And that is a concern. But it's not nearly as big of a concern as NVIDIA not serving their customer base.That customer base is gamers. Gamers are brand conscious and represent a long-term, stable demand. Miners are just quick cash. Selling to miners is much less valuable from a business point of view. That's one reason why when Bitmain had revenues and profits half of NVIDIA's they weren't able to price an $18 billion IPO like they wanted to even though NVIDIA's market cap was $100 billion at the time.

    So yes, cards coming onto the secondary market is a concern, but it's a secondary concern far behind the concern of getting the cards into the hands of gamers. Many people's default seems to be cynicism for anything successful. On the other hand, if the thing is unsuccessful they are more trusting. The world doesn't work that way. It's a good way to get hurt.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Not truly exact.
    Second hand market can be a problem for Nvidia (and AMD too) for a simple reason.
    Supposing that this crypt madness will soon end, gamers that could not buy a new GPU during these months will gladly but it on second hand markets when miners will dump their worthless mine farms. And seen the numbers the market will be flooded, the prices could just be quite low.

    As you said this is not a real economical lost for Nvidia which has already sold this immense number of cards but for two factors:
    1. if for any reason these mining cards won't arrive to the gamers' hands, Nvidia would sell twice. This is greedy, but money are money, though there's not really anything they can do to prevent that. Stop supporting old BIOS with ETH support is not an option. Nonetheless, any strategy to achieve that, even minimal, is a direct increase in future incomes.
    2. More important is that this flood of "new" GPUs in the game market will delay the need for the next generation. Depending on how much are the performance differences (and the prices, which however must be low to compete with the discounted second hand flood), next GPU generation could just be partially ignored for the exact time this crypto thing has lasted.
    A parte hte top enthusiast 2% of the market that wants the latest and fastest at any cost, anyone else will buy a second hand card with the equivalent performances of the next generation lower tier if the prices are lower. I mean, a 4060 must be competitive to a second hand 3070/ti price to have an appeal.
    So the economic damage just hit in the form of same incomes diluted in a longer period.
  • Yojimbo - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    "Second hand market can be a problem for Nvidia (and AMD too) for a simple reason.
    Supposing that this crypt madness will soon end, gamers that could not buy a new GPU during these months will gladly but it on second hand markets when miners will dump their worthless mine farms. And seen the numbers the market will be flooded, the prices could just be quite low."

    I already commented entirely on that situation in my post
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Which I think is a wrong interpretation of what happened with the first bubble when the market was flooded with too many second hand Pascal cards and Turing launch had to be postponed as Nvidia took almost a year to sell off the remaining stock of Pascal GPUs.

    I wonder what a miner could do today with a bunch of Pascal/Polaris cards instead of the same energy/space occupied by 3xxx generation GPUs.
    Selling them when they are worth something and then buy the new faster more efficient ones when they are needed (and after a bubble you do not know when they will) is the natural thing to do (as actually they did and probably will also do this time).

    Just hope that ETH will soon pass to PoS so that all those GPUs will be useless the day after and for the future for doing such a useless thing as the "mining" lottery.
  • Yojimbo - Monday, May 31, 2021 - link

    https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-gtx-1080
    https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-gtx-1060
    https://minerstat.com/hardware/amd-rx-580

    This is even after the price of ethereum has gone down 33% from its highs. Now why would they not be running these cards? If they had sold them back in 2018 they'd be running around looking to buy them again at a big loss (from what they sold them for), as well as a delay in getting them online, since they can't get enough of whatever is profitable. Miners believe in mining and believe in cryptocurrency. They are going to want to be ready for the next surge. They would have held onto their assets as long as possible until they started to go bankrupt and had to liquidate. And just because it took 2 1/2 years for the next craze doesn't mean they weren't all waiting around with baited breathe 6 months later, 1 year later, 18 months later, etc. Just put yourself in their shoes. When were they "worth something" to sell? Well they weren't going to sell during the craze when they were actually worth something. After the craze they were hardly worth much. So suppose they sold a heavily used 1060 after the crash for what? $100? $150? Now for the last 150 days they could be getting at least a dollar a day from it. But when were they going to sell it? When they decided "oh, nahh, crypto ain't ever gonna boom again." Tell me which miners were thinking that. The ones that thought it got out of the mining business and most likely sold much of their equipment in bulk to other miners in the same area. It's a lot easier and cost effective to liquidate in bulk locally than to try to pull and distribute thousands of GPUs across the globe.
  • alphasquadron - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    I don't know about the rest of your paragraph but I corrected one of the statements to read correctly:
    Many people's default seems to be jealousy for anything successful.

    For example, I hate it when I see people driving around in nice cars. Fuck them, why can't that be me. I bet they cheated somehow to get to that point in life.
  • Yojimbo - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    No, I don't think it's jealousy. It's a distrust. It's relates to their sense of order. I think it's a common trope inserted into the culture at various places by those with a Marxist viewpoint. Although it's possible it also evolved from the value against "selling out". That value doesn't seem to really exist so much any more, but the trope started back when it did. I'm not really sure but I definitely see a general trend of "successful = corrupt and evil, unsuccessful = oppressed and pure" among many people becoming fans of things, including of companies and historical figures (look at the Edison/Tesla thing for example. Tesla was as big of a self-promoter as Edison, he just wasn't as successful of an industrialist. But at some point the Cult of Tesla took over, although peak Cult of Tesla has probably passed now. It was really big 20 years ago).
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    No, its because they want to sell its own dedicated card just for mining, no graphics from it at all.
  • damianrobertjones - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link

    P.s. nVidia does nothing, unless it makes them money.
  • Zingam - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    Dumb. That reminds me of the long dead communism.
    Just make more cards.
  • quorm - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    Lol, how insightful
  • Samus - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    They're make more cards alright. Mining cards. For 2x the price. This is more a marketing move than a favor to gamers, but it has the benefit of still helping gamers. My guess is the limited-hash-rendering cards will not only be in stock but likely sell at MSRP as miners will be better off going with unnerfed cards of mining-based cards. The economics won't neccessarily work in their favor if nVidia orchestrates this how I think they are going to, but it'll probably be a wash regarding hardware costs. The benefit of mining-oriented hardware will obviously be they need less physical hardware and likely lower energy cost: instead of 6x3080's @50% efficiency, they can get 3x mining cards on the same GPU @100% efficiency.

    The entire thing is a joke. I can't wait til the day we look back on how much energy we blew searching for monopoly money because some people 'said' it was valuable.
  • Gigaplex - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    How do you propose they make more cards if the fabs are overbooked and supply constrained? They're making as many as they can.
  • Spunjji - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    "That reminds me of the long dead communism"
    What? How?!
  • Silver5urfer - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    Gimped GPUs for more price what else, Ngreedia. Esp the fact how CMP GPUs are horrible in their performance / power consumption / price no dumb idiot would buy them, the Antiminer E9 is the way to go for so called "Professional Miners" that Nvidia is using. As it crushes the bs GPUs to oblivion.

    Nvidia only was interested int this until they had tons of cash from Q4 2020 where they posted insane profits but little to none PC market userbase, they knew it all along how Ampere is going to rake the Crypto, but they didn't care then because money speaks, now that they got enough and want to save their ass when the bubble bursts so their constant income will stop. Primary reason they are selling the castrated parts to that people can only do what nvidia tells them to do.

    Still 1/2Hash rate won't fix the supply and pricing problems, so many are already vested in the ecosystem they will simply hoard the same GPUs at this point even AMD RDNA2 cards are used in mining even when they are bad vs Radeon 7 of GCN and Nvidia's Ampere. So it doesn't matter, if Nvidia really cared they would have either pushed Zero Hash Rate or no limits.

    The market will show how this move ends up. As for the posts making about the miners will beat and all, think again. The vBIOS on the Pascal and up GPUs are locked hard, you cannot unlock them at all not even modders can do a custom vBIOS the only exceptions are engg vBIOSes or those XOC vBIOSes, still they have a lot of limitations.
  • Gigaplex - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link

    The Antminer is likely a waste of money, as ETH profitability is expected to drop very soon (EIP 1559) and then mining will cease entirely anyway (ETH 2.0 Proof of Stake).
  • ABR - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    AFAIK proof of stake has nowhere been shown viable in cryptosecurity ecosystems, and that's why it isn't used anywhere major despite being talked about for years. I'm not expert enough to say why, but I guess the end problem is providing sufficient financial motivation for the network compute providers when mining isn't there. Ethereum continues to experiment around in this space, which is what EIP 1559 is about (integrating transaction fees more effectively into the system).
  • bji - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link

    I'm running a Solana validator. I find that there is sufficient financial reward. Many people do (well, many as in hundreds). A lot of people complain that it isn't accessible enough; more people want to do it. But at the moment the entry barrier costs and required stake to become profitable make it a very tough row to hoe for new entrants.
  • Achaios - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    ETH was supposed to have gone "proof of stake" 5 or 6 years ago and every single year hence.

    "Proof of stake" is just baloney powerless gamers post on msg boards imagining it as the nemesis of ETH while Miners laugh all the way to the bank and keep mining.
  • bji - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link

    I'm a Proof of Stake validator and I'm laughing all the way to the bank. I am quite certain I make more off of my validator than the vast majority do off of eth mining.

    These topics are complex and your over simplified and under informed analysis don't really help anything.
  • Silver5urfer - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Miners are the reason why ETH on top, if that drops ETH will plummet, that's what I think. Then why did Bitman one of the world's top ASIC miner HW company is investing that much money into their new hardware that too the Chinese corp which they alr hold a ton of mining operations.
  • zodiacfml - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    ..then leaks another driver without the limiter
  • watzupken - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    While it sounds great, but in reality, you still can't get one. Even if you can find it, its at an absurd price.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    I can't understand a thing here.
    The theory here is that these new cards have to come into gamer's hands and at a reduced price, I suppose.
    So, how is just halving the ETH performances is going to help not having miners buying these if with a reduced price these are still better than the CMP ones?
    CMP cards are based on last generation GPUs, so they are slower and more power hungry.
    If a 3060 LHR really that worse than a CMP 30HX? Will it cost more to discourage miners to get it instead of the CMP one?

    I do not really believe this strategy is really going to do anything for the gamer.
    I think it will just make thing worse, as miners will now need twice the cards to get the same HASH rate, so subtracting more cards to gamers, if ever possible.

    Unless I am missing something of this whole anti-miner strategy.
  • haukionkannel - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    The aib manufacturers has out their own msrp high… So,no,cheaper gpus in the future, but they may be easier to find in the market.
  • Achaios - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    So, I understand miners could simply flash an unlocked VBIOS from a unlocked earlier version of the card and go on happily mining.
  • timecop1818 - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Doesn't work like that, the bios is cryptographically signed and downgrading is prevented by current bios/firmware/software.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Of course it is not that easy and to prevent any cross flashing Nvidia has changed PCI ID so whatever you can do a BIOS+driver for the old cards will never work for the new ones.
    It's like a complete new series of GPUs which want their own BIOS + Driver, like you cannot flash a Pascal with a Turing BIOS and you cannot use a Turing driver on a Pascal GPU.
  • haukionkannel - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Interesting to see how long does it take to someone crack that protection… it is hard, but not impossible.
  • shabby - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    When there's money to be made lots of people will be working on it that's for sure.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    If there's a strong encryption with HW coded private long passwords, then the only way to "crack" it is IF those passwords come directly from an Nvidia insider, just like it happened with Sony PS3.
    Maybe that much involved money can bribe someone who knows.
  • Silver5urfer - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Since Pascal Nvidia vBIOS mods for custom vBIOS are non-existent. They employed a encrypted flash protection to prevent that, with Turing and now Ampere that is probably even strong. Impossible to break sadly.
  • shabby - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Lhr? Why not limited edition? 😂
  • plewis00 - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    Can anyone explain why, if nVidia can accurately detect mining, they don't throttle it to 25% or even zero? Ultimately we all know why they're doing it and it's so they can sell their CMP HX cards instead but with marketing spun at gamers.
  • Mordhaus - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link

    The real reason they are doing this is that mining shortens the lifespan of the card because it is always maxed or overclocked. They don't want to deal with the upcoming RMA fights over multiple cards failing early.

    Not only does it make them look bad if they have a rash of failures, but then they have to try to decide if they are going to cover all cards or try to establish a protocol to tell if they were being used for mining.

    Mining should be regulated anyway, it is a massive ecological waste in terms of the sheer power output consumed. Bitcoin alone consumes the equivalent of some countries electrical usage and annual carbon output.
  • damianrobertjones - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link

    Personally, I'm just counting the days until I can buy a 2060 at a reasonable price. 1080p gaming and not much else.

    P.s. I've been visiting Anandtech for over 20 years (ish), and I've never read so many posts with incoherent babbling, mistakes and a lack of any attempt at grammar. I'm not perfect, but it's pretty bad here. You guys are the future... . ??
  • damianrobertjones - Friday, May 28, 2021 - link

    Doesn't matter. Until people stop paying stupid prices for older cards, on eBay, the prices won't go down. There's also the army of 0 feedback accounts inflating bids.

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