
Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy - smacktoward
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-boom-creates-insane-global-graphics-card-shortage/
======
jakebasile
I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at
this point.

Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to
build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers
to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony
and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher
game prices but no such cushion exists for PCs (this is a strength to be sure,
but a double edged sword in this respect).

PC gamers have spent years disproving the image of PCs as prohibitively
expensive and now it's coming crashing down due to people in a faux gold rush
wasting hardware and energy. I wish it would stop, but I don't know how much
of the damage to the hobby can be repaired.

Of course there are other factors. Machine learning is eating up cards,
smartphones and tablets are eating RAM, and I don't doubt there's price
fixing. But ML is at least useful to humanity (sometimes), smartphones and
tablets are tangible products, and price fixing can be investigated and
punished.

I'm relatively shielded from this as I just built a high end machine (i7-7700,
1080ti, 32GB DDR4) that will last a while but the next time I want to build a
machine might be painful. While I would probably pay the price, others will
not, and the hobby will suffer.

~~~
jdietrich
Most PC gamers aren't using high-end machines and don't upgrade very often.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the majority (74%) of PC gamers have a
1080p monitor and a plurality (37%) have a video card with 2GB of VRAM and 8GB
of system RAM (47%). The GTX 1060 only recently overtook the GTX 750 Ti as the
single most popular video card.

Pricing of high-end hardware is largely irrelevant to the success of PC gaming
as a platform. The majority of users have always opted for value-oriented
hardware.

[http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

~~~
baldfat
I can't get a mid level graphics card either. These cards in the article are
$200 and $250 cards from AMD. They are going for over $400.

I am the person that buys $200 graphic cards and high end is $500+ like a
1080ti or some sort of Titan. I always thought that $200 was the sweet spot
with the best price to performance ratio. I can't buy a $200 card now.

I was lucky and got a new AMD 480 last year for $220. It sadly has an issue
and needs to go in for warranty (3 years). It can only handle the simplest of
graphics or it hangs and freezes the computer. No big deal, I wanted to make
my kids a Minecraft and coding computer and I can't buy a decent $150 card
either.

RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least
16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also
due to the miners.

~~~
hanbura
The effects on prices are quite bad, but the pendulum always comes back in the
other direction two. Every GPU shortage leads to the second hand market
getting flooded a few years later with used mining GPUs.

So in effect we get short term problems, but if you time your purchases
correctly you can get deals too.

~~~
frakr
Would you want to buy a piece of hardware that had been run at 100% of it's
capacity for years, without any warranty?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Well, not everyone is aware of this, and 2nd hand mining card price points on
various market platforms probably will push down the prices of everything else
to varying extents. (both new, as well as 2nd hand gamer cards).

------
ilitirit
The shortage is not entirely because of miners. Nvidia manufacturers switched
to using slower RAM in some of their cards. This was actually a very smart
move (they should expand it to all their cards IMO). If you want the fast RAM,
you have to buy the "mining" version of the cards. So in theory, it should
have no impact on the gaming market.

For some of the popular mining cards (e.g. RX 470/80), well they simply
haven't been available in many places for over a year now. Their successors
aren't that great for mining either because of the increased power usage and
RAM "lottery" (you don't really know what type of RAM you're getting when you
buy a card). But most gamers don't generally care about RAM speed. This is
also why the 5 series is generally cheaper than the 4 series (where you can
find them).

However, the biggest problem is that there simply isn't enough RAM. The RAM
shortage is being driven by smart phone and GPU production, and suspected
price fixing. Samsung said they plan on increasing production (apparently they
don't like it their competitors who make inferior RAM are making similar
profits), but we will probably only see the effect mid-2018.

[https://www.dramexchange.com/WeeklyResearch/Post/2/4815.html](https://www.dramexchange.com/WeeklyResearch/Post/2/4815.html)

[http://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-to-increase-dram-output-as-
ra...](http://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-to-increase-dram-output-as-ram-prices-
continue-to-climb/)

~~~
icelancer
AMD gambled on HBM2 and it paid off in ways they never expected. They were
simply getting dominated by Nvidia and threw a hail mary pass on memory
bandwidth and speed, knowing they couldn't compete on compute loads.

Enter the CryptoNight and Dagger-Hashimoto algorithms, and well, the rest is
recent history for the RX architecture, primarily the Vega line.

~~~
mamon
And yet the most efficient (hashrate/tdp) GPU for Etherum mining is GeForce
1070, not any of the Radeon models. Even Vega 64 couldn't beat it.

~~~
washadjeffmad
Vega 64 has improved since launch, beating the GTX 1070 in efficiency this
past Sept 2017 by achieving 0.20 mHash/W over the 1070's 0.18 mHash/W.

They're still within 10%, so it's not a great margin unless you're very
focused on density.

------
013a
Its bad. Its never been this bad before. Just go on pcpartspicker and realize
that there are GTX 1080 Tis selling on third party websites for over $1500,
and that's the only place you can get them beyond getting lucky.

Nvidia isn't going to ramp up production significantly because crypto could
crash any day, simultaneously destroying their new sales and flooding the used
market with old mining hardware. Combine it with the industry-wide RAM
shortage... What a disaster.

The funny thing is, I remember back when ASICs first started coming out for
Bitcoin, and a whole bunch of new cryptos came out saying "we're specifically
designed to thwart ASICs so everyone can mine on the cards they have!" Well,
here's what you've created. No one can afford cards anymore, and you made
making more efficient hardware harder. Thanks for destroying the planet.

~~~
paulmd
ASICs aren't saving the planet either - people are incentivized to burn up to
$BLOCK_REWARD of electricity per block, the number of hashes it takes to do so
is irrelevant. If you come up with a better ASIC, people will buy more of
them, the network difficulty increases, and you're back where you started.
It's just another stage in the Red Queen's Race.

The only thing ASICs do is centralize control (because economies of scale
favor companies who can produce+operate their own chips). Full stop.

Proof of stake doesn't actually work either, or at least not without a
centralized master key to prevent stake grinding/rewriting history (at which
point why have staking in the first place). And in many cases, it may devolve
to proof of work anyway.

There is no efficient cryptocurrency, and the cat's out of the bag now, there
is nothing that can (practically) be done to stop it. Apart from charging
people exponentially-increasing rates on their utility bills, that is, but
China isn't going to do that, so the planet is just going to have to take
another one for the team.

~~~
AgentME
Though there is some benefit to cryptocurrencies that rely on ASICs for
mining: it means that someone with a significant amount of CPUs/GPUs under
their control (such as botnet operators, or government groups like the NSA)
can't waltz in and trivially 51% attack the blockchain with their existing
general-purpose hardware, and then go back to using it for other things. An
attacker would have to commit to buying/building specialized mining hardware
for the attack, and then that hardware can't be repurposed for anything else
after the attack other than mining.

~~~
dingo_bat
ASICs are supposed to be orders of magnitude more efficient at their job than
GPUs. So NSA can make a 0.01x the investment and "waltz in and trivially 51%
attack the blockchain", all while not touching their existing equipment.

~~~
mseebach
The only reason to invoke NSA in this context is for their ability to make a
10000x investment, with no concern for this being (directly) economically
viable. The question then is, what will they _do_ with control of the
blockchain?

~~~
akvadrako
Idea: prevent North Korea from spending their coins?

------
elcritch
Bought some cards during the Christmas break season and prices/availability
were fine. I was surprised when I went to buy some more and saw the prices! I
reason that if crypto currenices crash I can re-purpose my nice new collection
of GPU's to do Deep Learning training. It's got me pondering how one could do
a distributed deep-learning training as the proof-of-work for a crypto-
currency. Then the POW would be doing useful work anyways!

Along with causing issues with GPU card supplies there's been a lot of
articles talking about how crypto-mining wastes electricity and hurts the
environment. That's not necessarily the case across the board. Instead of
running an electric heater this winter I am running a few GPU miners which
produce a decent amount of heat. That helps me get a two-for-one benefit for
~9 months of the year since it's relatively chilly here year around. Might not
work in all climates, but in many places its nice way to produce heat that'd
just be waste heat anyways.

~~~
visarga
Yeah, heat and (80dB of noise) the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner in both
power and noise. You can't have these near humans.

------
locusm
I think the supply cost issue is more related to memory production shortages
and cost increases. RAM has increased in price over 100% in 12 months in a
number of markets. Crypto isnt the only culprit here.

------
jpatte
Interestingly the French market (and more generally the European Market?)
seems to have been spared from that trend, at least for now. The prices have
remained steady during the last year and there is still stock available for a
large choice of card flavors. See for example
[https://www.materiel.net/achat/gtx-1080/catNom-
cartes+graphi...](https://www.materiel.net/achat/gtx-1080/catNom-
cartes+graphiques/?f%5Ben_stock%5D%5B0%5D=1&ppp=50&sens=0&ordre=prodPrix)

~~~
jrs95
Perhaps electricity costs there are higher than in the U.S. so mining is less
profitable?

Although I don’t have these issues in Ohio, either. You can find any NVidia
card you want easily, and only AMD Vega is in short supply at the moment.
Still doable though, if you’re willing to put in a bit of effort.

~~~
revelation
France famously derives >70% of it's energy from nuclear energy and has vastly
lower prices than neighboring countries.

~~~
user5994461
Electricity in France is 0.10 to 0.20 E/kWh. Depends on the terms and the time
of day.

It's more than China and USA cities with hydro. It's less than some other
places.

We may have lower production prices but it's either not significant or not
passed down to the consumer.

------
doitLP
In the long run, explosion in demand for GPUs will help lower prices and push
the technical envelope for enveryone, including the gamers complaining in this
article.

~~~
rosser
This is an oft-repeated article of faith, which I have yet to see realized
despite _years_ of sustained extra demand for GPUs.

~~~
icebraining
I'm not saying doitLP is right, but "years" is not a long time for building
extra production capacity across the manufacturing process. Hell, they
probably need a couple years of sustained demand to even consider upgrading
it.

------
stordoff
It's (unsurprisingly) pushing the used market up. I'm selling a 1070 I don't
need anymore, and it's already at more than I originally paid for it, despite
being over a year old at this point.

~~~
paulmd
My local Microcenter has an open-box 1070 they want $800 for, an open-box 1060
3 GB they want $475 for, a couple new 1060 6 GBs they want $600 for, and a
couple 1050 Tis they want $350 for. That's their entire stock apart from some
misc GTS cards from like 10 years ago.

So yeah, they're marking everything up to double MSRP basically.

~~~
jrs95
That’s crazy, where are you located? My Microcenter is basically fully stocked
with whatever GPU you’d want (aside from Vega)

------
segmondy
I wanted to buy 2 1080 for deep learning experiments, but that's going to have
to wait.

I picked up a used 32core 128gb server for $1000 recently... It's only a
matter of time before these 1080 will be sold for pennies on the dollar.

If your lively hood doesn't depend on it, wait.

~~~
fermienrico
I understand most people are wishful to see Cryptocurrencies crash but what if
it doesn't?

What would happen if Crytpo booms big time?

~~~
topspin
First, segmondy didn't attribute future low GPU prices to a cryptocurrency
crash. Second, it isn't necessary for a crash to happen to collapse demand for
GPUs.

Bitcoin isn't driving GPU demand; Bitcoin is mined with ASICs. Ethereum is
mined with GPUs, a consequence of deliberate design. However, when `Casper'
lands (Ethereum's Proof of Stake scheme) mining will end, and so will the
extreme demand for GPUs. If that happens Ebay will fill up with thousands of
discrete GPUs and you'll buy them with a song.

------
rbanffy
I am curious as to what we'll do with all that surplus computing power after
crypto currencies (or mining on general purpose hardware) fade out of fashion.

Better weather forecasting? AI?

And don't forget the investment on cheap power sources.

~~~
z3t4
It could be used for decentralized cloud computing.

~~~
rbanffy
Yes, but it's numerics-heavy, so the workload would be very specific. Think
SETI@Home on steroids. If we could solve the trust issues, pooling retired
mining rigs into distributed supercomputers for rent would be viable.

~~~
z3t4
About trust: You could distribute the load randomly, and do double work, if
two data sets doesn't give the same output you do the calculation again and
blacklist the node that was wrong.

~~~
rbanffy
Yes, but you won't want any sensitive data to be processed on the platform
unless an irreversibly unrecognizable transformed version of it is what is
processed.

------
JudasGoat
It seems as though the large PC companies like Dell are still getting high end
graphics cards. Ironically It's probably cheaper to buy an Alienware right
now, as opposed to making a PC from parts.

~~~
mamcx
I was this close to buy a hackintosh with high end parts (before this help me
in save a lot) and now the iMac 27 5k not look bad..

If only Apple put bigger ssd at lower prices...

------
rthomas6
One of the biggest culprits, Ethereum, is working to change its consensus
model to Proof of Stake, which will remove the need for mining. This should
help with a lot of the demand.

------
davidmurdoch
After finding and disclosing a vulnerability in a graphics card manufacturer's
site they offered me cash or a brand new GTX 1070. Which was sold out
everywhere at the time and was selling for about 2x the retail cost on eBay.

Not sure what you can take away from this, but could it be possible that the
"storage" is in part manufactured by the card manufacturers themselves? (or
maybe they thought this would be a special reward I might have wanted?)

------
alkonaut
Curious: what will happen when it's not economic to mine Ether anymore?
Especially if it happens suddenly (e.g. after a crash or a switch to proof-of-
stake).

Won't the opposite situation suddenly appear, where second hand GTX1070's and
GTX1080's suddenly flood the market and sell for $100?

Or will miners just switch their rigs to whatever coin is possible to mine
with their rigs, instead of selling off their rigs?

~~~
volkl48
Probably depends on if it's a broad crash or a single-currency one.

If it's just one currency people would probably switch.

I suspect that when there's a crash it's going to shake confidence in all
crypto and you're going to see them all drop significantly in value.

------
bdcravens
Isn't this a pricing problem then?

~~~
wmf
Not really; if NVidia set their MSRP to $1,000 then gamers would still
complain.

~~~
sosborn
To be fair, any time anyone does anything, gamers complain.

------
secstate
Maybe there's something I missed about GPUs and mining, but how can an amateur
rig like these hope to keep up with ASIC rigs? Can you profitably mine with
residential electricity and GPUs still? How long can that possibly last?

~~~
wmf
Some cryptocurrencies are mined using only ASICs and others are mined using
only GPUs (because there aren't any ASICs for those algorithms).

~~~
jrs95
Some (like Monero) are also still able to be efficiently mined by CPUs. Mining
Monero isn’t very profitable right now though. It’s probably half as good as
ETH.

------
sonabinu
Shouldn't be surprised that the stock prices of the graphics card makers are
skyrocketing

------
nn3
It's great. Once ethereum etc. crash we can buy used high end graphic cards
cheap.

~~~
fermienrico
What is the basis for an overwhelming assumption on HN that Cryto will crash?
I am genuinely curious. What specifics indicate that it will crash?

~~~
richardknop
Most people here are engineers and can see through the buzz words all these
crypto tokens are throwing around to lure in naive investors. So it's assumed
that it is a bubble as majority of tokens are worthless from technical
perspective.

------
csours
Sell pickaxes (during a gold rush).

~~~
knodi123
Go out of business after gold rush ends, because market is flooded with
barely-used pickaxes being sold at a loss by failed miners.

~~~
icelancer
I'd be glad to make a bet with you that the 1080ti doesn't collapse
significantly after the "gold rush ends."

Come to think of it, I'd like to hear your predictions about when the gold
rush will end. Or what the gold rush even is.

------
icelancer
Funny that in this image in the article:

[https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/bare_...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/bare_shelves-1-640x378.png)

The entire shelf is sold out of GPUs, but it's a near-lock that the RX550 2GB
model for $71.xx had a higher ROI than any single card purchased for
cryptocurrency mining.

Now, that being said, gamers (and to a lesser extent, deep learning
researchers) need to shut up and enjoy a good thing while it lasts. Gamers who
have 1080tis (who don't get close to their maximum performance, nor need it)
just walked into a situation where they can print money for owning equipment
they already have or would already buy - in their spare time when they aren't
gaming.

It's very odd to watch a group of people bitch that they are handed a bunch of
free money, but gamers manage to do it.

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
That is in my opinion an overly simplistic way of looking at it.

First of all, many people (myself included) would not _want_ to have to burn
electricity in order to offset the increased price. Even if you disregard the
obvious environmental reasons, people sleeping close to their computers simply
do not have the choice of leaving it running 24/7 unless they want to have
vivid dreams about vacuum cleaners every night.

Second, even if the higher prices can be evened out in the long run from
mining, this forces people to pay more money up-front in both hardware and
electricity. Buying gaming equipment suddenly became an investment.

