Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low...as manufactures began to sell years old video card technology for the cost of an entire gaming system and began blocking crypto mining in firmware

submitted by SoCo from tomshardware.com

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[–]Canbot 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Blocking mining makes no sense at all. Those idiots are their best customers.

A lot of boards were sold specifically for mining at a discount. For a long time you could buy a gpu from one of the many failed mining farms and moddify the board to unlock it for graphics. It was a way to get a $1000 gpu for like $200.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You'd think they'd want the faster CPU's as many have decent onboard internal graphics to do your stock reports and spread sheets very fast. I don't see where graphics come into play for bitcoining as that's just data transferring which GPU's don't really do anything for single core use where as gaming your using a lot of 3D pixels that need that extra chalk space. For single core use your better off with a good CPU which should be out of stock everywhere unlike GPU's.

CPU is like one chalk board and one person who can draw/do math really fast: GPU is like having multiple chalkboards and an extra aid for more advance complex formula's freeing the main teacher for the main task.

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A cpu can on do as many calculations as it has cores. So a 20 core cpu can do 20 calculations in one cycle while a GPU can do trillions in one cycle. Even if the cpu cycle is 100 times faster the GPU still destroys it because it does trillions of calculation in parallel.

In mining a gpu can try a trillion different numbers at once and a CPU has to try 20 at a time.

[–]SoCo[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They use the GPUs for Cryptocurrency mining, which rewards them with coins. It used to be very profitable, but now the competition is tight and margins are slim. Most bigger coins have long since been unprofitable to mine with GPUs, but some purposely chose algorithms to avoid more industrial mining, in efforts to keep mining decentralized, by being done in the hands of the average Joe.

The mining requires mostly doing lots of one cryptographic algorithm with specific inputs, such as Scrypt, SHA256, and a bunch of weirdo ones that have since sprung up.

The GPUs are uniquely well setup for such a task, by naturally doing tons of parallel processing, compared to CPUs. A GPU may have thousands of compute cores, normally used for pumping vertex and color data through transformation pipelines for 3D rendering, but they do just as well as parallel Scrypt hash processing cores.

[–]HiddenFox 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Not sure who is buying the Nvidia 4000 and AMD 7000 cards. Here in Canada you are looking at near or over $1700 for @ 7900xt or a RTX 4080.

When I went to buy my 1080 it was under $800. That's what 6 years ago? That's quite the increase. This recent pricing is what card were going for at the start of the pandemic.

Hard to justify the cost...

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What's weird is bitmining you'd want a more powerful CPU NOT GPU as what graphics are there in mining digital money? A better CPU would do it because GPU's are for multithreading with graphics like Blender or picky gamers who need that 80FPS in their games but bitconing is just making digital text with minimum graphics perhaps for spread sheet so you can do graphs but that would only need a decent onboard card.

Onboard cards have actually got pretty good for non high end gamey stuff.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This was how it was in the 1980s. Dad saw the market and it was a choice between a 500$ Commodore 64 that had a full digital sound chip or a monochrome Apple II for 1500$ and you were locked behind their stuff. We went for the Commodore 64 and by the time we got it the C64 was down to around 300$ for a FULL computer not a game machine (though it did that)

[–]Myocarditis-Man 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I will only buy used video cards now, AMD and NVidia can eat me.

I figure that eventually though, they will require you to link your video card to an email address and possibly a phone number, to block second-hand usage. Consumers were stupid enough to allow this to happen with video games and it's only a question of how long before it comes to hardware.

Also I literally just gave away my old 970 and 770 cards; hopefully that stunts sales some more. Some gamer with modest requirements can use them; they were pretty pathetic for Blender, which is more what I'm into today.

[–]Evola 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The thing is that there's no good games that make people want to invest anymore and the market is flooded with cheap GPU's as crimecoins start to reach peak demand for mining.