GPU Shortages Are Now Intolerable

After prioritizing the GTX 1650 GPU for notebooks, Nvidia is extending the availability of GTX 1650 cards to the desktop consumer market. This is excellent news. Since the GPU market is currently so hot, it is now better to consider old reliable cards like the R9 290 or R9 290X if gamers are backed up in the corner. This may be a long haul before this “GPU crisis” ends, so the increased availability of low-cost cards will allow people to buy a decent GPU to attach to a system.

However, the increased availability of a low-end Turing with no ray tracing capability or a relaunched GTX 1050 Ti is not precisely what PC gaming is meant to perform. Supplies of Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs remain highly restricted, according to ODMs such as Asus and MSI. Some of these issues are allegedly triggered by Samsung yield issues, others by a pandemic-driven semiconductor shortage, and more significantly by new demand in cryptocurrency mining. It is unclear how much responsibility should be allocated to the tech community, but this strongly suggests that the GPU shortage will not be alleviated until 2022 or further.

The Great GPU Shortage is tolerable momentarily. As long as the GPU doesn’t malfunction completely, it’ll continue to provide sound output in older titles, and many people have a backlog of older games they’ve never played. Cryptocurrency mining is an annoyance in the short term. In the long run, it could pose an existential challenge to PC gaming as we’ve known it since the GPU’s invention. It is not an argument if PC gaming will die — I don’t think so — but it could change a lot, not for the better.

When the price increases above what the market can afford, people search for alternatives. Here, options include the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and cloud gaming platforms such as Stadia and GeForce Now. Series X and PlayStation 5 have their issues, but they’re less expensive than graphics cards on eBay.

A Radeon RTX 3070 could cost $400. They’re reportedly going for between $1,200 and $1,700 on eBay. According to eBay listings, an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 would cost between $750 and $850. As long as console prices continue to decline while GPU prices remain unstable, the gap can only widen.

This issue is exacerbated somewhat by the ray-tracing issue. At the moment, turning on ray tracing in an AMD or Nvidia GPU imposes a significant output penalty that is not always offset by 1080p. Both Ampere and RDNA2 provide more ray tracing efficiency at a lower price than Nvidia’s Turing did in 2018. Still, gamers are looking for ray tracing cards that whip them to pay a premium price for good performance. The PS 5 and Series X also have ray tracing out of the box, a significantly lower price point than an Ampere or RDNA2.

PC Gamer’s Forfeiture

Not every PC gamer builds their computers and not every PC builder plays games. However, there is significant overlap between gamers and the Do-it-yourself market, mainly if you include people who buy an OEM PC and upgrades the GPU. If the GPU market continues in this manner, we might be looking at a future in which paying OEM prices for component upgrades appears to be the rational choice. This is not a good sign for the DIY gaming market or the CPU retail channel. If enough gamers are stopped from purchasing overpriced GPUs, developers will respond by concentrating on OEMs’ capabilities. This is a revolution waiting to happen.

It’s easy to ignore this as a short-term crisis that will be resolved by itself, but this is the third cryptocurrency-related shortage in seven years. By then, the GPU market will have been undersupplied and overpriced for 3–5 years more. AMD and Nvidia may end up releasing RDNA2 and Ampere replacements until the current generation is widely and consistently available at the suggested retail price.

High GPU prices will not destroy PC gaming outright, but continued access to high-end 3D hardware will radically change the types of games we can play. One reason is desktop GTX 1650 cards have a fighting chance that their 4GB VRAM buffers and low core counts make them less likely to be targeted for mining. For decades, PC gaming drove the GPU business, and now gamers are forced to scavenge along its outskirts for the scrap that the cryptocurrency market does not want.

In a scenario where GPU prices remain high and gamers are pushed out of the market, we might see a movement in the kinds of games launched on PC. There would be lesser AAA games, and there would almost certainly be a vibrant indie scene. One can also imagine AMD and Intel enhancing their integrated GPUs to compensate in part.

Persistently high market GPU prices may also drive a significant number of gamers to cloud services. This will also be called killing Desktop gaming as we know it, but it is not the same as destroying it physically.

We need to be optimistic that GPU prices will inevitably fall. The shortages caused by the pandemic will subside. Almost definitely, the crypto market will implode once more. However, In the next five years, we’ll be writing about how GPUs spent less than half of a decade available at MSRP by 2026 if the trend goes on. Suppose cryptocurrency mining continues to be a significant and erratic source of demand. In that case, the best-case scenario is that PC upgrade cycles may become highly irregular and start when crypto mining becomes unprofitable, with at least some gamers migrating to various cloud services for AAA titles. The worst-case scenario is that people abandon the hobby in favor of other OEMs.

In either case, we’re looking at a scenario where uncontrolled demand further delays PC gaming advancement by suffocating new hardware sales to real gamers. Nobody wants to be trapped in that situation if the bubble bursts and the additional capacity is no longer needed. This causes foundries to be cautious about expanding to meet a cryptocurrency market’s needs.

It becomes evident over time, as shown by people holding onto cards for longer than they previously did. The most worrying fact of our current issue is the probability that GPU prices will remain elevated for at least 15 months. That is significantly longer than any of the previous cryptocurrency bubbles. It’s long enough for customers to become irritated with the wait and purchase something else.

Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all making enormous profits due to continued high demand. When the first cryptocurrency bubble burst, AMD posted good results for its Radeon division, but its market share plummeted like a rock at the same time. What’s suitable for GPU companies and good for gamers tends to be inversely proportional to crypto mining. Nothing in the market right now is beneficial to PC gaming.

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Source: https://medium.com/technology-hits/cryptocurrency-mining-could-kill-traditional-pc-gaming-ae5c7b6764e0?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency