drosse1meyer wrote on 2022-01-20, 23:07:

A rising tide lifts all ships

Ha. Everyone gets their extra cooling fans out and underclocks/volts their cards. Keep her going as long as she'll float mateys. Rough seas ahead.

2-3 years ago there was some place on eBay selling thousands of RX460 2GB cards which were apparently unused overstock intended for some HP computer. The price was good so I bought one. It's performance lies somewhere in between a GTX1030 and GTX1050. It was all I needed.
Now I'm stuck with it. I didn't anticipate this would be a long term investment.

I've started playing a couple games that really could use a better graphics card, but faster cards aren't worth the cost.
I hit a low point a few nights ago in Assetto Corsa when I enabled the "Custom Shader Patch" (CSP) and tried running a night race at Daytona, which was awesome, but my framerate was 15fps.
Back in the 1990s I used to play Papyrus NASCAR Racing with that framerate, and liked it, but I can't do it now, at least not with this game and using a wheel. Perhaps the detail of the physics makes it less forgiving at low framerate, I don't know. Driving a simulator at 15fps feels like being a fully alert drunk driver. I couldn't control the car and got pissed off.

I'm sure it would take an expensive card to quadruple my framerate, and that's ignoring the CPU which of course is also a factor - really I could stand to build an entirely new gaming PC but that's even more money that I can't afford.
I think I'll have to live without that CSP mod. I really wanted time of day transitions and racing at night, but it's not worth what it costs to make that happen.
Oh well. One of the reasons I bought Assetto Corsa was because the vanilla game has low requirements, and it did run well before I modded it.

It's a bubble market. Eventually the bubble will burst and people who hold a deep investment will lose their shirts.
Unfortunately that risk also goes for the GPU manufacturers, and that's a deterrent against them ramping up their capacity as much as it seems they should. They don't want to be stuck with tons of excess inventory and production capacity that they later don't need.
The China vs Taiwan situation adds even more uncertainty to their planning.

The only issue I have had is that the RTX series dropped support for interlaced resolutions even with DP->VGA or HDMI->VGA adapters.. this only bothers very few CRT/Plasma use cases

I have my gaming PC attached to a 1080i LCD TV, and have been frustrated by some games' refusal to list that mode as an option. I didn't know this issue now extends to video cards themselves.
720p sucks on this TV. Not only is it low-res, it also has overscan. 1080i works perfectly when games let me use it, but the TV is too old to recognize 1080p (it was nonstandard back then).

shamino wrote on 2022-01-21, 01:04:

2-3 years ago there was some place on eBay selling thousands of RX460 2GB cards which were apparently unused overstock intended for some HP computer. The price was good so I bought one. It's performance lies somewhere in between a GTX1030 and GTX1050. It was all I needed.

I saw the tail end of those and was too slow. I was trying to get a low/mid end card for wifey's machine that was a bit newer, but prices were already sliding upwards, didn't realise crypto frenzy was pulling up bottom end prices even then pre-2020 , thought I'd wait it out... so yah, still ain't got one.

shamino wrote on 2022-01-21, 01:04:

I have my gaming PC attached to a 1080i LCD TV, and have been frustrated by some games' refusal to list that mode as an option. I didn't know this issue now extends to video cards themselves.
720p sucks on this TV. Not only is it low-res, it also has overscan. 1080i works perfectly when games let me use it, but the TV is too old to recognize 1080p (it was nonstandard back then).

I have kinda the opposite problem, got this dumbass 720p native TV which insists it supports 1080p mode, which it scales, so get moire crap sometimes, and sometimes small text is unreadable, and I keep setting devices back to 720p manually, but they keep going "Hey, this TV supports 1080, lemme fix that for you...."

I just bought an HD5750 for my Athlon II X4 640 second PC I use to play mostly XBOX 360 era games on. My HD6850 died and I looked online for a replacement, something like an HD5850/6850/7770 and fuck me, the prices..

appiah4 wrote on 2022-01-21, 07:46:

I just bought an HD5750 for my Athlon II X4 640 second PC I use to play mostly XBOX 360 era games on. My HD6850 died and I looked online for a replacement, something like an HD5850/6850/7770 and fuck me, the prices..

Similar with my XP/Vista machine. I'm thinking on upgrading the 8800GT ot a GTX550 Ti, but the prices almost tripled and it doesn't worth me that much.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-01-21, 07:46:

I just bought an HD5750 for my Athlon II X4 640 second PC I use to play mostly XBOX 360 era games on. My HD6850 died and I looked online for a replacement, something like an HD5850/6850/7770 and fuck me, the prices..

You mean that box of 5850s I collected is worth something? 😆

kolderman wrote on 2022-01-21, 09:20:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-01-21, 07:46:

I just bought an HD5750 for my Athlon II X4 640 second PC I use to play mostly XBOX 360 era games on. My HD6850 died and I looked online for a replacement, something like an HD5850/6850/7770 and fuck me, the prices..

You mean that box of 5850s I collected is worth something? 😆

Oh hell yeah..

Meanwhile Russia (currently third largest cryptomining country after USA and Kazakhstan) decided to ban crypto operations and mining within their borders. Bitcoin (and everything tied) is currently 38k and still going down after countrywide riots in Kazakhstan. And if USA will decide to heavily regulate crypto, that's pretty much game over. There's not that many places on this planet, where infrastructure is capable to feed cheap electricity to cryptofarms on industrial scale.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-01-21, 08:05:

Similar with my XP/Vista machine. I'm thinking on upgrading the 8800GT ot a GTX550 Ti, but the prices almost tripled and it doesn't worth me that much.

This was my main card for most of the last decade. Towards the end I had two of them in SLI. They ran all my favorite games fine, however eventually the 1 GB memory became too much of a limitation.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-01-21, 11:45:

Meanwhile Russia (currently third largest cryptomining country after USA and Kazakhstan) decided to ban crypto operations and mining within their borders. Bitcoin (and everything tied) is currently 38k and still going down after countrywide riots in Kazakhstan. And if USA will decide to heavily regulate crypto, that's pretty much game over. There's not that many places on this planet, where infrastructure is capable to feed cheap electricity to cryptofarms on industrial scale.

This is one of the few times I would agree,
Crypto farming destroys the environment for no purpose

Ban away

By this point in time all new PCs should use under 20 watts full load, place energy star ratings on consumer tech and it will further level computing power to the lowest common denominator, which should make it easier to target a platform

I still believe in the potential of blockchain technology, including cryptocurrency and DeFi.

It's just that the energy demand of the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism has become too big to justify anymore.

It looks like Bitcoin is (unfortunately) not switching to Proof-of-Stake any time soon, but then again, all relevant Bitcoin mining is being done with specialized ASICs these days.

Miners use GPUs mostly to mine Ethereum. And the Ethereum blockchain is expected to (finally) migrate from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake some time this year, in a widely anticipated event called "The Merge". At that moment, Ethereum mining will simply cease to be a thing. And for the sake of both the climate and for gamers, that moment can't come soon enough. 🙏

Heck, even the Dogecoin developers have announced their intention to switch to Proof-of-Stake eventually. 🐶

I know there are many other PoW-based cryptocurrencies in existence that GPU-owning crypto miners could switch to, but honestly, most popular tokens of value (notably ETH and most popular stablecoins) are ERC-20 tokens, which are all on the Ethereum blockchain. And aside from Ethereum, pretty much all of the interesting stuff seems to be happening on newer blockchains that are all Proof-of-Stake already (Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Algorand, etc).

So even though the chip shortage will probably continue for some time after it, I'm really curious what will happen to the GPU market once The Merge has taken place. My guess is it will likely incentivize crypto miners to liquidate their mining assets, including the mass dumping of their GPUs on the second hand market, so they can purchase as much ETH as possible to stake instead (or simply to cash out and exit the crypto business altogether).

And then there's Intel, which is finally about to make its serious entry into the midrange consumer GPU market. That should shake things up in the market as well.

So never lose hope. 🙂

But what will arrive first, too cheap to meter fusion power or Ethereum switching from PoW? ... I jest, but both have been meant to arrive "real soon now" for ages.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-21, 22:40:

But what will arrive first, too cheap to meter fusion power or Ethereum switching from PoW? ... I jest, but both have been meant to arrive "real soon now" for ages.

Point taken, although there's a difference between waiting half a decade and waiting half a century. 😂

However, the Beacon Chain, the new Proof-of-Stake-based blockchain of Ethereum, has been running live (on a mainnet) in parallel to the old PoW chain for some time, with plenty of time to mature. Considerable amounts of ETH are already being staked on it. A reasonable fusion allegory to this would be something like a research reactor such as ITER already being operational and having achieved the holy grail of consistent positive energy output, with the next step being wide-scale commercialization of the technology.

So Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake implementation isn't vaporware.

All that remains now is The Merge, in which the "old" Ethereum and the Beacon Chain will merge into one, finally doing away with PoW.

True, it's been a long time coming, and delayed many times, but Ethereum's transition to PoS really looks to be in its home stretch now.

Hey, if I had my way, I'd flip the switch on this yesterday. 😁

Seriously though: I cannot imagine The Merge not causing at least a significant drop in GPU prices, chip shortage or not.

rmay635703 wrote on 2022-01-21, 21:01:

This is one of the few times I would agree,
Crypto farming destroys the environment for no purpose
Ban away

Governments around the globe rarely have any real concern for the environment. Most of crypto regulations are tied to how it can hurt economy, fund terrorist groups or destabilise political scene.

digger wrote on 2022-01-21, 22:36:

It's just that the energy demand of the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism has become too big to justify anymore.

Arguably, it never was. And now we're paying for this. Literally.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-01-21, 11:45:

Russia decided to ban crypto operations and mining within their borders.

It is just a proposal from central bank.

And here we go with USA: It’s official: The Federal Reserve is toying with the idea of issuing a U.S. digital currency

As mentioned above, the majority crypto Bitcoin isn't eating GPUs and hasn't been for most of a decade, it's all custom hardware. It could be more energy efficient, but how energy efficient is it already? You can see it all together and say "that's one big lump, this big lump has to go" but what if we lump other things together. High street retail banking, a single chain of US banks with a few hundred branches, will use about the same amount of power just keeping lights, HVAC and it's terminals turned on... and serve about half the amount of customers that bitcoin is currently servicing... but wait, all those customers and staff have to come and go, and that doubles the energy use again... so bitcoin is four times more efficient than retail banking. About 8 times those number of branches are needed to cover whole US, (Other brands of major banks and all the little and regional ones added up) bitcoin should be able to serve many more users at the same power cost.

Added to this, where fossil fuel electricity isn't subsidized, by say not having what's practically slave labor for coal mining, the cheapest is always hydroelectric, windpower and geothermal, so large mining farms tend to go to where that is in surplus, because surplus is cheaper still, it means lack of sufficiently local demand for it, excess capacity. Bank branches have to be where their customers are, usually that's in a large concentration of population where supplemental gas or coal fired generation might be necessary to meet population demands.

Finally, many western crypto operations are only the first user of the energy, with co-generation arrangements, such that local loop heating, greenhouses for food production and some production operations that use heat are supplied with a large proportion of the energy "consumed". Do you see veggies growing in your local bank?

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-22, 14:31:

As mentioned above, the majority crypto Bitcoin isn't eating GPUs and hasn't been for most of a decade, it's all custom hardware. It could be more energy efficient, but how energy efficient is it already?

Yes most large scale operations now utilize custom ASIC chips for mining (look at the stocks MARA and RIOT). The market has moved on and GPUs simply aren't as efficient, not to mention nvidia has been actively working against this for consumer level hw.

drosse1meyer wrote on 2022-01-22, 15:06:

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-22, 14:31:

As mentioned above, the majority crypto Bitcoin isn't eating GPUs and hasn't been for most of a decade, it's all custom hardware. It could be more energy efficient, but how energy efficient is it already?

Yes most large scale operations now utilize custom ASIC chips for mining (look at the stocks MARA and RIOT). The market has moved on and GPUs simply aren't as efficient, not to mention nvidia has been actively working against this for consumer level hw.

Majority isn't a relevant term. "Enough" is more accurate. Even if only 1% of mining is GPU related, the GPUs are still gone. Nvidia has hardly been working against it. Yeah, there was a driver limit (already circumvented) and some without proper display out. Does anyone think this stopped anyone? C'mon! heh.. this is Vogons.. look around.. everyone here is circumventing and reinventing hardware left and right. I bet the LHR versions are running faster than the non-LHR limited at this point. Let's ask the Russian guy putting together old Voodoo 5500s from old parts onto brand new PCBs how long it would take him to get around this pebble of a roadblock Nvidia threw out there for PR purposes.

I bet the LHR versions are running faster than the non-LHR limited at this point.

No, but you can mine multiple shitcoins simultaneously. Only ETH is limited.