> a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price
Consumer GPUs had far from a 'stable price' before the mining boom.
GPUs have more than tripled in MSRP once you factor in that NVIDIA has moved lower-tier chips that previously only featured in their lowest end x50 and x60 tier GPUs up the stack and started selling them for $400+ MSRP. Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330.
It's even worse at the high end. Flagship GPUs like the 980ti and 1080ti launched at MSRPs of $650 and $700 respectively, now the high end GPUs are $1200 (2080ti) and $1500 (3090).
> none of it is malicious.
It absolutely is malicious. NVIDIA is trying to stop a strong second hand market from being formed so that they can continue to charge ridiculous prices for GPUs that should be 1/2 to 1/3 their current price if the market was healthy.
I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then miners would be buying less of them. Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty quickly.
I think Nvidia has some problems and their chips should be cheaper - but if that were the case then this solution (splitting the markets into regular consumers and miners) would be even more necessary.
I also disagree with it being malicious, I think it's a perfectly reasonable decision to attribute to some pretty sane decisions around market preservation. We here know about miners eating up the GPU supply, but for the average consumer Nvidia is just hording their chips or they're idiots that didn't produce enough - no matter what the imagined reason they're the people between the average consumer and shiny ray tracing in minecraft.
> I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then miners would be buying less of them.
It would increase supply by forcing fabs to scale (would take years anyway, but should happen sooner rather than later).
> Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty quickly.
And that isn't going to change even with these limited GPUs. Mining with ethash is still profitable even with the halved hashrate, and other algorithms like kawpow and cn-gpu are not limited at all.
The only thing that's going to get rid of PoW mining is the entire shitcoin market tanking. As long as the bubble continues there's going to be idiots spending money on scalped GPUs.
The fabs did scale down near the beginning of COVID-19 AFAIK when the economy was in a panic and all sorts of manufacturers were canceling orders from people further up the chain - and that does account for some of the shortage we're seeing now (since that production time was resold to other consumers) but it's a much smaller impact than the 30XX line's attractiveness to miners. I don't think there is honestly the capacity to meet these levels of demand right now (as opposed to there being readily available production capacity that's either idle or doing something that could be outbid).
I also don't really see how keeping all of the consumer groups (miners and regular folks) using precisely the same model of card instead of two incredibly unbelieveably similar cards would actually increase demand. If anything there being a card optimized for hashing (i.e. with unnecessary bits stripped off) might lower the cost to produce such a card and allow miners to actually purchase more of the card compared to paying for a nearly top of the line consumer video card.
I don't actually know how much we'll see Nvidia try and scale up (since that extra purchased capacity will be a liability if Eth suddenly tanks) but I think their decision to increase scale will only be minorly impacted by this effort. I will admit there will be some impact since they could refuse to increase the 3070 supply (please correct me if I've got model numbers turned around) without having as dramatic an effect on their customer base - however, that'd honestly just return them to square one where the miners are going to pick up consumer grade 3080s to keep up with mining projections.
I think the important thing here is that nothing is being made impossible - it's being made difficult which should have a corresponding effect on the value of these cards to miners unless they screw it up again in a major way. People trying to absolutely prevent video game piracy have either
1. Screwed it up and allowed a sharpie to defeat their system
2. Bricked a whole bunch of legitimate users' computes and ended up in class actions
The successful approach to prevent piracy is to price things fairly and while making it less convenient to pirate things - honestly a huge driver here in the modern world is content that's enriched by being online, not stupid "You must have an internet connection to play this single player game" but "If you're online you can tap in a friend for help" - that sort of online integration significantly lowers the value for pirates while allowing legitimate users to only see upsides.
> Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330.
Looks like I'll be hanging on to my 960 for the foreseeable future, then. I'm not interested in mining, but I've started thinking a bit about playing with CUDA, and I'm suddenly a lot less interested if Nvidia might decided to gimp my work because I inadvertently did $FOO that is commonly done by miners.
Consumer GPUs had far from a 'stable price' before the mining boom.
GPUs have more than tripled in MSRP once you factor in that NVIDIA has moved lower-tier chips that previously only featured in their lowest end x50 and x60 tier GPUs up the stack and started selling them for $400+ MSRP. Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330.
It's even worse at the high end. Flagship GPUs like the 980ti and 1080ti launched at MSRPs of $650 and $700 respectively, now the high end GPUs are $1200 (2080ti) and $1500 (3090).
> none of it is malicious.
It absolutely is malicious. NVIDIA is trying to stop a strong second hand market from being formed so that they can continue to charge ridiculous prices for GPUs that should be 1/2 to 1/3 their current price if the market was healthy.