Is GPU shortage actually getting worse?

What the title says.

I've checked prices for the new RTX cards recently, and basically, the stores in my region offer RTX 3060 for about $1300. GTX 1660 super is about $830, and RTX 2060 is at about $930, and 3070 is $2000. They used to be high, but lower.

Checked Amazon, and the situation is close, although prices are a bit lower.

At this point it feels like it could be a better idea to buy another autonomous headset instead of hoping to ever upgrade a GPU.

 

It's probably going to get worse or be this bad for at least a year. The chip shortage won't be easing up any time soon.

 

This. I work for a semiconductor manufacturer and we do not expect things to level out until mid 2022.

 

There is a shortage of raw materials so the economic chain is locked up. Additionally the crypto craze still has everyone building bonfires of gpus all the way to the moon.

A little more relatable is the car manufacturers are halting due to the shortage as well, so the stagnation of the problem is rippling to the consumer market in a lot of ways and can't be fixed until resource refinement can pick back up.

 

If you thought it was bad when the 10XX series came out, you ain't seen nothing yet.

 

The whole situation made me stumble upon this reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vent/comments/6tkbuf/i_hate_cryptocurrency_miners/

This is from 2018. Eerily similar to the current situation.

I'm currently eyeing 1660 that came up on local baords for $427 and thinking whether I should grab it, given that I use VR and my 3GB 1060 is below minimum requirements which actually affects the use of the helmet...

*sighs*

 

WTF? :O

I guess I'm lucky, I bought a RTX2080TI overclocked for a little above $1200 before the armageddon.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6h62ag/the_gpu_shortage_is_awful_for_buying_a_pc_right/

From a year before, which is also a year after I had to cancel two 1070 orders to get one that was in stock.

 

Well, my local stores tend to up the prices on all valuable electronics by about $130...$200 compared to say, Amazon.

However, on Amazon RTX 3070 is about $1800 right now.

 

I get the impression that's fairly standard, if by "local" you mean a "bricks and mortar" physical retail store. They have more costs to cover, and they can charge a little premium for being able to get your thing now instead of waiting for delivery, too.

Yeah, we're seeing similar things in my part of the world. There's a very clear trend where cards with stock, or even with shorter estimated stocking times, have prices 50 - 80% higher than equivalent cards with longer expected delivery times. There are 3060s here with significantly higher price tags than 3070s. That's vanilla 3060s, not the "Ti" versions.

I recently upgraded everything except my GPU. Back then a 1660 was ~$450. Now their imaginary price is $650+. I say "imaginary" because there isn't any stock to order anyway. So if you're feeling the need to update your 1060, and you've got both cash and availability, I'd lean heavily towards going for it.

To clarify, for people just playing games I'd say "keep your cash and just turn your settings down". For those of us who work with real time graphics, though, consider it from a productivity perspective instead.

 

Yea, its bad out there, no matter where you live. Doing dev work is hard on cards, i go through a card per year. I just killed another card, have a temp backup, but grabbing an RTX series card in the US, is costly right now.

 

I thought it was expensive on release, but just checked the eBay prices for 3080 RTX.. glad I got mine on release day...

I think if you really need a card the best way to do it is a pre-built one. Like a dell or something where they make a small margin, but you get a RTX card. Even if you throw out the rest of the parts it is still cheaper than buying a used one or from a reseller..

 

Definitely looks like it could work out better this way, and I've heard people reporting success with this. However, do look into what you're buying. Some brands have non-standard parts which can't be swapped out or upgraded, so depending on what you're planning they might not be suitable.

 

Yes. Apple is sometimes described as a supply chain company because of how fantastic they are with maintaining their supplies during shortages, but the semiconductor shortage has reached the point that even they are starting to be affected by it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/29/9919...and-macs-suffer-wrath-of-semiconductor-crunch

Apple's semiconductors come from TSMC which is the same company making AMD's CPUs and GPUs. NVIDIA is on Samsung who were having yield troubles a few months back and I have yet to hear anything about them fixing the problem.

All of the major semiconductor companies have started investing heavily into new fabs but we won't see anything from these new factories for at least one to two years in the case of TSMC (they were already working on a plant), two to three years for Samsung (they were too), and three to four years for SK Hynix (just starting). All of these are "at the earliest" figures.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16483/samsung-in-the-usa-a-17-billion-usd-fab-by-late-2023
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/...n-chip-fabs-sk-hynix-plans-106bn-fab-complex/

Just be aware that if you want a pre-built you may not have much of a choice. A month ago some of the pre-built companies started to sell gaming computers without graphics cards. Some of this is to keep the price down for people who already have a graphics card but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually the OEMs exhausted their own supplies too.

https://www.pcgamer.com/weve-offici...-gaming-pcs-shipping-without-a-graphics-card/

In fact regularly checking the store where I purchase my components through I've noticed just about every gaming computer below $2,000 is now sold out more often than it is in stock. Wait too long and you might miss this band wagon too.

 

So glad I got the 3090 when it was at list price. I was also lucky to get a AMD 5950x får listprice back when it was released.

edit: Now its just to pray that the things hold until this sitation is solved
edit: My 10 year old Seasonic PSU have started to coil whine under extreme load, I have ordered a new one and its listed to arrive in July, I really hope that will hold.

 

As an expansion on what is going on with the chips, expect trickle down through other aspects including used parts. It is already happening in automobiles. I was just recently reading a Consumer Reports article about how the prices of used cars are going up now as a trickle down resulting from the chip issues for producing new cars. That's a likely predictor about how used graphics cards will go as well.

While most businesses don't buy high end graphics cards, as the economy in various countries opens back up there will necessarily be an increase in computer buying for new employees (or different computer buying because work from home or whatever). This is going to have an effect on all kinds of computer chips for a while. (I'll put money on cash registers next, because if brick and mortar retail recovers, etc.)

In the end, it will smooth out. There is just too much money to be made in making the supply line smooth out. But like in the early 1990s when a certain RAM manufacturer burned, there will be some pain while we wait for things to recover.

 

I'm sorta disappointed with current technological level.

With things humanity has achieved one would expect a large company to be able to unroll a new factory in a month.

Spoiler

Like this, I guess?

Yet here we are.

On related note, somebody announced a SSD-based cryptocurrency recently, so now there are no M.2 ssds larger than 512 gigabytes in the stores, largest SATA SSD is 1024gb, and the prices for large capacity drives went up.

 

Here in sweden there is no shortage on 1gb gen4 nvme

edit: Thre is 2 and 4 tb avaiable too

 

Because the related crypto hasn't even taken off and so it only affects some regions. Most likely, the further from China you are, the less likely you are to feel the effect.

https://www.extremetech.com/computi...tion-is-causing-a-short-term-storage-shortage

 

Time to stock up on NVMe

 

How so? When the economy "opens up" it's generally going to be returning to pre-pandemic levels. The increase in employment will be to roughly what employment levels were before. And if those jobs were already equipped with whatever gear they needed many of them won't suddenly need to buy new stuff just because they're active again.

 

Already upgraded one HDD that was about to fail to an SSD.
I prefer sata at the moment.

 

Why you prefer sata? gen4 nvme means more than10 times the speed of SATA

 

I dislike the connector design. A motherboard usually would have only one slot, the way of attaching the drive is awkward (insert at angle and press down), it is possible to lose that screw, and on top of that some chipsets disable 2 sata lines if a NVME drive is inserted.

A SATA SSD is already many times faster than a traditional drive, so that's good enough for me.

 

I shaved off several minutes on build times when going from gen3 to gen4 so I cant imagine what the difference for SATA to gen4 would be.

I love the formfactor, its great in a workstation / desktop to get rid of the SATA cables. High end AM4 motherboards comes with two m.2 anyway.

 

To each their own. The preference might change in the future.

Regarding form factor I would prefer it to be slotted like memory modules or extension card, with a latch and without screws. Current design just feels seriously half-assed.

 

On my HTPC which is mini-itx the slot is on the backside of mobo. Wouldn't work with standing slot like memory dims ;D
Its really nice to hide the storage as part of the mobo, clean builds, this is my HTPC

 

You already have a standing slot for RAM, and M.2 has roughly the same size.

Either way, this kind of build is for situation when you want a tiny computer and not a fullsize ATX board with ton of extension slots and a lot of storage.

 

In short, I think that the change necessitated by how large sections of our society are changing after what the world has been through will require business changes. Business changes nowadays almost always seem to include hardware and software.

I could be way off base of course, but I see three reasons for changes in what businesses need. Since no company I've ever worked for or anyone I know has worked for wants to buy used equipment, new equipment seems likely to me.

The first is that there were businesses which closed permanently. If the economy returns to pre-pandemic levels, then those businesses will get replaced with new businesses. (Note that small businesses routinely fail, so there's always churn and needing new office gear, but the pandemic has really thrown the 'average' cycle off on this so we may see a surge.)

The second is businesses which either grew or will grow based on changes in the market. They will need new gear for new people or upgraded gear because companies are always having to keep up with new software and such. I lump new businesses into this, like ones dealing in solutions like making offices more in-person safe.

The third is companies which have already or will pivot. As an example for this, the company I currently work for has invested a massive amount of money into work from home solutions, and plans on continuing to invest more to improve our current ability to accommodate people working from home. We are not the only company that has realized that work form home has a lot of value, with everything from employee morale to lowering the costs of maintaining office space.

In that last one, I include schools. In many areas, kids with good access to computers was limited. The pandemic required schools to provide computer equipment to assist in learning. I firmly believe the inclusion of technology in the classroom (real or virtual) is only going to increase.


Or I could be completely and totally wrong. I for one thought cryptocurrency originally was a dumb fad that would go the way of bellbottom jeans and the Rubik's cube. Boy was I wrong about that one.

 

The disk is on the back side of mobo

 

The GTX 16XX and RTX 20XX are no longer being produced I believe, so don't expect their prices to drop while current gen cards are unavailable, and don't expect their stock to increase.

If the crypto bubble pops, you'll see the GPU shortage solved, as current gen graphics cards flood the used market.

 

Adapter boards already exist (which isn't surprising as an NVMe slot is just a differently shaped PCIe 4x slot).

https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Controller-Expansion-Profile-Bracket/dp/B07VYWR91T/
https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-advanced-solution-Controller-Expansion/dp/B07JKH5VTL/

My favorite adapter though has to be the NVMe to USB 3 adapters. My motherboard has six high speed USB ports which while can't all be used at the same time would allow me to easily connect up to six drives at once in addition to any internal drives.

https://www.amazon.com/SSK-Aluminum-Enclosure-Adapter-External/dp/B07MNFH1PX/

In fact nothing prevents me from buying one of these USB 3 header to port internal adapters to have two more internal drives which would bring my total internal drive support to five NVMe drives (my motherboard supports three PCIe 4.0 NVMe slots but the trade-off is the GPU is reduced to 8x).

https://www.amazon.com/Ports-Female-Motherboard-20pin-Header/dp/B00L2O0I5K

 

If there's no more 16xx cards being produced, then by Q3 of this year, the expected new 14"/16" Macbook Pro could well have the fastest GPU on the market, better than anything that's actually available to buy for PCs?

 

Which means it is harder to access.

That looks more reasonable. I just dislike "tilt and screw" design for some reason. Seems to go against the way everything else is made, because other cards are slotted in.

 

Not on a full tower chassi with access panel. But yes on the HTPC case. But I haven't needed to access it once on the four years it's been up and running. I value the form factors ability to be compact.

 

I was lucky enough to get a new RTX 3090 for 2200€ early 2021. They cost 2900€ today. (Germany)
Same with used GPUs. Could get a GTX 1080 for 300€ a few months ago. Suddenly they are at 500€.
Even prices of broken GPUs almost doubled here in the past months. (Probably because you currently can earn a lot by repairing them)

All I've read so far indicates that it will stay like this for at least another year, so just buy one right now if you really need it for work I guess.

For gaming you still have the option to buy any older GPU with 4gb video memory or less, as they are much cheaper right now since crypto miners need 5gb+ to mine ETH.
A GTX 1060 with 3gb costs about 130€-150€ here, while the 6gb version costs 260-300€ already. Same goes for the RX 580, 250€ for the 4gb version, 500€ for the 8gb version.

From my testing between zero and none. IMO M.2 SSDs are overrated, as I couldn't find anything that really benefits from using them. Sure, their theoretical numbers are higher, but whenever doing something in Unity or Windows, the difference between SATA and M.2 isn't noticeable, and they start throttling pretty quickly under full load anyway.
The only case where I ever noticed a difference was when the system was running out of RAM and Windows started using the SSD for the page file. But in that case you need more RAM and not a faster SSD.

I don't want to derail too much now as this topic goes a bit deeper, especially if you take a look at the designs of standard consumer motherboards. But in general it's safe to say that SATA SSDs are a foolproof, well supported option that nothing can go wrong with, while M.2 SSDs have some downsides without offering any real-world advantages other than the smaller physical size.

 

SATA over m.2 will not benefit anything. You need to use a NVMe drive.

Here i open a large scene and then build game on a Gen3 NVMe

Here do the same thing on gen4

 

Throttling only occurs during extremely heavy write activity. If you're seeing it regularly you're either working with a very large data set, have a drive that is undersized for your purposes, or made the mistake of purchasing a model without a DRAM cache.

A Samsung 980 Pro, for example, has a 4 to 49GB SLC cache for the 256GB model, 4 to 94GB for the 512GB, and 6 to 114GB for the 1TB. SLC cache size decreases as the drive fills to capacity. If you fill a drive then you purchased too little. If you expect to fill a drive beyond 80% capacity you should purchase a larger drive.

Everything else is basically spot on for desktops. For the vast majority of use cases it's the random accesses that matter the most and there is no performance difference for them between SATA and NVMe. Moving large files will naturally see a difference but you'll often end up bottlenecked elsewhere with them (eg by your networking).

For a server it's a completely different story as the AHCI protocol used with SATA has an upper limit on how many IOPS (IO operations per second) it's able to accept and can very easily be overwhelmed in an environment where you have high queue and/or thread workloads.

For SATA the maximum IOPS you can achieve is around 100,000. Meanwhile for NVMe it's completely normal to see desktop drives hitting around 500,000 with the fastest server drives hitting as high as 10,000,000 IOPS.

By the way a good deal of this will change when Microsoft DirectStorage is finished and we start seeing systems like Kraken become available for the PC. Kraken, just for the record, would be bottlenecked by the NVMe drives currently available for desktop with SATA being completely unviable.

 

You are comparing 2019.4 with 2020.3. Considering that the 2020 versions were focused on usability and performance, I'd say your testing results are invalid for this comparison. I remember 2020.2 being a lot faster than 2020.1 already.

Sadly I made no videos of my tests, but I still have the notepad file with the results, so time to derail this thread:
I've tested a 7.2k RPM HDD array, a 15k RPM HDD array, a Samsung 850 Pro 256gb, a Samsung 970 Evo 512gb, a ramdisk over network (octa channel DDR3) and a local ramdisk (quad channel DDR4) with a Threadripper 3960X, GTX 680, a Perc H700 RAID Controller (1gb) and Intel X540-T2 10GbE network cards. All devices always had their maximum possible PCIe bandwidth. The network ramdisk was tested as network share and not over iSCSI.

I used a 6gb (excluding library folder) Unity URP project on 2020.3 for testing.
Step 1: install editor on target drive
Step 2: unzip the project folder (library folder not included) on target drive
Step 3: start Unity and see how long library rebuild takes
Step 4: change a script line and see how long recompilation takes
Step 5: start building to target drive and see how long it takes (IL2CPP only)

8x 7.2k RPM HDDs were a bit slower, 3min 10sec import, 4 seconds script recompilation time, 113 seconds build time.
8x 15k RPM HDDs are nicely usable already. 3min 1sec import, 3 seconds script recompilation time, 102 seconds build time.

(After that point the differences are so small that I don't see any reason to choose a SSD over a 15k RPM HDD array other than form-factor and energy usage if you really don't need the extra space...)

850 Pro 2min 59sec import, 3 seconds script recompilation, 98 seconds build time
970 Evo 2min 56sec import time, 3 seconds script recompilation, 96 seconds build time
Local ramdisk 2min 56sec import time, 3 seconds script recompilation, 97 seconds build time

Network ramdisk was a bit special as I couldn't install the editor on it. Installing it locally on the 970 Evo instead and only placing the project on it also came with a few issues, but I could test the import time and the script recompilation time at least: 3min 20sec import, 4 seconds script recompilation, crash on build.
I really should have used iSCSI for that one, but I was too lazy to set it up just for testing, and the local ramdisk result should be good enough anyways. The network sharing protocol overhead is real however, and Unity hates mapped drives for some reason.

I've also taken a screenshot just before a build finished on the 970 Evo.
As you can see, building is completely CPU-bound for me and only hits the storage at build end when copying the final build to its destination. As the build is only about 1gb in size however, this makes no real difference as all tested drives (except the 850 Pro) could copy it in under a second.

So yeah, I can't see any real benefits here. All tested storage mediums (except 7.2k HDDs and network shares) performed pretty much equally in my tests.
I guess if your project is really, really big, it might make a difference, but in that case you also have better methods of optimization available.

This indeed seems to be the case for my 970 Evo 512gb. (It has good aircooling with a heatsink + thermal pad)
After about 10gb data written at ~2.2gb/s it throttles down to ~700mb/s, making it not much better than a SATA SSD.
Sure, short write bursts could be useful in some cases, but at least on any consumer Intel platform it's absolutely not worth to waste 4 PCIe lanes for this imo.

 

Sounds about right. It's only somewhat recently that drives have started getting large caches. Your 512GB 970 EVO has at most an 18GB cache.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-970-evo-ssd-review

Meanwhile the 512GB 980 (they dropped the term EVO) has a 122GB cache.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16504/the-samsung-ssd-980-500gb-1tb-review

Incidentally the 970 PRO unlike the modern 980 PRO didn't have an SLC cache as the entire drive was capable of maintaining maximum performance. I remember it being way more expensive back when I was building my first SSD-based computer so I ended up with an 850 EVO instead which didn't have a cache since it was SATA.

 

The gen4 980 Pro that I have can fit more on the cache and have better random access. My Gen3 was a 970 Pro. I can test and see the difference in 2019.

 

GPU prices where insane, even before the shortage. Remember people being wide eyed about titans costing ~1k, that will barely get you midranged these days. In my country, the 3090 is well above $3000 dollars - why? Seriously, you could get a top of the line gaming system for that money a few years back.

Only seen "meh" cards in stock (e.g. 3060 non ti, 6700), at twice the msrp ofcause...

I simply have too much pride, paying that amount of money for a card I don't even really want - nor would I feed the scalpers.

Hell, if Apples upcoming chips are strong enough, I'd almost be tempted to jump ship. You know times are rough when Apple looks like a bargain.

 

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who has been thinking this lately.

 

Apple is 100% going to be more interested in high-fidelity archviz and XR viz at the expense of anything even gaming hardware adjacent. Anything Apple puts out is going to have a 3080's MSRP and a 1660's performance and I'm 100% certain that the absolutely lacking support Apple Arcade continued to get is a major signifier to them that there isn't much point in supporting the traditional games space.

Like when one of the top paid apps on your platform is over 17 years old and another is Minecraft you don't really care about having the equivalent of any RTX cores.

 

Well, I'm stuck with windows platform for a while, so transition to apple ain't happening.

My main gripe with the current situation is that I need to upgrade my GPU to at least 6 gigabytes of VRAM but with the way prices are now, apparently one GPU can cost as much as 4 Quest 2 headsets.

 

Same on this one for me. Never going to touch Mac personally (even with all my audio production), but I'm just not paying the nonsensical prices for some of these cards, even the MSRP. I can deal with being a generation or two behind.

Not about price, but value.

 

Let's just hope it's only one or two generations behind.

 

yup, 5700XT so I'm pretty well off, though I'd hoped to upgrade this year. #WaitForNavi and all. The stuff I'm working on also isn't very graphically intensive so it's not a big deal either way.

The only part that makes me uncomfortable is the risk that if it goes kaput for some reason, I'm going to have to pay through the nose for something new.

 

$500.00 on newegg only gets you a GTX 1650. Which is a $149 card from 2019.

 

Selling your soul to the devil