Is GPU shortage actually getting worse?

My god, I should have waited selling my 1080 TI. Sold it for about 350 USD

 

I could probably make a mint with my 1070 if the thing wasn't on the verge of death

 

I managed to get an RTX3080 at launch time and I'll tell you what. I pretty much live in fear of that thing dying.

 

I swear if my GTX1070 dies I'm gonna end up working primarily on a laptop unless things change, or pre-builts still have GPUs in stock.

 

I sure hope my 1080ti stays the course if this GPU shortage is going to continue the way it is.

Especially if a new top end GPU costs nearly as much as my entire rig when it was new.

 

Sure, its just that right now - you are paying 3080 prices for a 1660 ^^. Listening to harware sources and even AMD and nVidia themselves, thats not going to change for at least a year.

I'm still on a 970 though. By the time this is "likely" over, I'd been using it for a decade... now thats value .
At this point I should probably treat it as a museum piece... nap time during the day, tuck it in at night, speak loud and clear - laugh at its jokes...^^. Burn strong Betsy, do not walk towards the light!

At this point, if he has something to trade - I'm listening

 

My brother just picked up a 3090 for list price. Insane luck on his part

 

Which worm hole did he take?

 

For some reason one web shop had 1 card in stock and he was able to get it. Same shop have a huge back order list so I have no idea why he got it, human error maybe

 

This is basically how I was able to finally purchase a 5950X. In fact it's a little amazing how many web stores exist that look shady but have solid reputations. The one I purchased from had the most barebones website I had ever seen but they had been in business since 1996.

 

But this was one of the biggest web shops in Northern Europe Im guessing they got a cancel but somehow the card didn't get back into their backorder list (there are people that have waited for months for their cards).

 

Glitch in the matrix. Would need to sign up for a mortgage just to aquire that kind of funds ^^. Apple (and I guess intel) might not be able to compete, but perhaps they could help to squeeze the prices a little - we're in dire need... Not that it will matter with the shortage still being in effect.

 

It has nothing to do with a chip shortage.

All the GPUs are being scooped up by crypto mining. I spent years working on games, spent lots of time, money, effort. Was so proud to launch several big projects. Their return on investment was abysmal. No matter how much time and effort and money was spent on marketing, the earnings werent worth it at all.

I converted my rendering rigs into mining rigs. I made more in one month of crypto mining than I did in years of game development.

So I scooped up as many GPUs as I could, cleaned out local shops, bought out online stores. And thats why the shortages for GPUs exist now, miners are buying them up because the profits for crypto mining are insane. Go look it up. Miners are literally buy 10 - 30 GPUs in one shot. Dumping tens of thousands of dollars or more to get those GPUs.

Thats why there is a shortage.

 

Well, that's still a "shortage", isn't it? Supply isn't meeting demand, regardless of why.

However, that doesn't explain why other industries and/ or markets are impacted. Do people buy PS5s for crypto mining? Or cars, which are also seeing delays?

You miners are making things far worse, but you're not the whole story.

 

Nonsense. While a chip shortage might not be the reason the whole situation started it's the reason the whole situation is continuing. There is a demand and supply is not being met.

 

When the pandemic hit auto manufacturers reduced orders of chips expecting demand to decrease. By the time they discovered it hadn't the companies manufacturing the chips had already reallocated the freed capacity to other products.

Currently TSMC is the top company in chip manufacturing and the overwhelming bulk of current generation chips is coming from them. AMD's CPUs and GPUs, AMD's custom chips for the consoles, Apple's chips, etc.

In fact Intel, which is currently the top ranking manufacturer in raw capacity, is using them.

https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel...-be-fabbed-on-tsmcs-6nm-and-3nm-nodes-report/

Just to get an idea for how in demand they are right now TSMC's expansion budget for the next three years is in excess of $100 billion.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/01/tech/tsmc-investment-chips-intl-hnk/index.html

By comparison their expansion budget for 2017 was just barely over $4 billion.

https://www.digitimes.com/newsshow/company.asp?datePublish=2017/11/14&pages=VL&seq=204

 

So it's your fault.

Seriously, it's the combination of things (obviously)
- crypto-crazy (demand)
- pandemic (hinders the supply chain and creates more demand since more people stuck at home)
- mismanagement (hinders supply chain)

 

Speaking of supply chain one of the major ways computer parts are delivered is through air mailing them. When the pandemic struck though air travel went down because it was no longer safe to pack everyone together. How does this affect anything you might ask?

Mailing packages by air is inexpensive thanks to the bulk of the cost of flying them being paid for by the people in the aircraft. When the pandemic struck it greatly reduced how many people were flying which in turn made air transport prohibitively expensive forcing companies to rely on sea transport.

Suddenly ocean freighters are having to transport packages they weren't previously transporting in addition to all of the packages they need to transport in addition to having their own shipping problems thanks to the pandemic.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anothe...em-skyrocketing-cost-of-air-cargo-11588687216

 

I wouldn't say it has "everything" to do with the chip shortage, but it does have *something* to do with the chip shortage. There have been plenty of reports of extremely low supply - not of that supply being bought up by miners immediately, but of low supply itself to AIBs or the actual retailers.

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT & RX 6800 Reportedly Have ‘Terrible’ Launch Stock, Almost As Bad As RTX 3080

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Flagship Big Navi Graphics Cards Listed By AIBs, Launches Tomorrow In Very Limited Quantities

NVIDIA Confirms That The Majority of PC Gamers Won’t Be Able To Buy A Gaming Graphics Card This Year, Shortages To Persist Throughout 2021

MSI Plans To Increase The Price Of Graphics Cards In Response To Increasing Demand With Low Shipments From NVIDIA & AMD

Unrelated...you didn't really get into games to make money, did you? How do you tell moving stories, or create interesting gameplay, by mining cryptocurrency? Maybe I'm naive but abandoning the former for the latter seems to me to imply the former was done for the wrong reason (something something "fund your art with your real job"...) from the get-go.

 

The return is that good ? Also if i may ask is it enough to support a living with just that ?

Thanks for any insight, if is that good i may as well soon become part of the GPU shortage problem

 

RTX 3070 mines about $6.5 per day. It supposedly has a street price of $1300 right now ( https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index )

Meaning to get back the initial cost you'll need to keep it running for 200 days non-stop. It can also fail in that time.

Depending on the amount of RAM at certain moment it will be no longer usable for mining ETH, supposedly 6GB cards will become unusable in 2023.

Additionally, Crypto Mining is not exactly safe. There were several stores of mining farms causing fires.

 

And that is not including the system it is running, nor the cost of electricity to run the thing. (Plus cooling the room if you're running many of them.) In some areas, your price per unit of electricity can go up if you use enough.


Related to that, as someone who used to work in the legal field, I really wonder how many cryto-miners have gotten raided as suspected grow operations? A spike in utilities plus a higher thermal signature can be used to demonstrate a likely drug operation in some jurisdictions to get a warrant. ... Now I have to go do some Googling and see if I can find any reliable reports.

 

On the contrary an RTX 3070 is capable of more than $7.60 per day ignoring the cost of electricity which would mean to hit only $6.50 you'd need to be spending around $0.40 per kilowatt. Most articles discussing the topic include a high electricity cost but the actual cost isn't that high in most countries that are actively mining.

https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx-3070

Cost of the system is only a concern in my opinion if the machine is going to do nothing but mine. Having played with mining myself the only component that is working in a mining system will be the component set to mine. All other components will be an idle state allowing you to continue to use them normally.

In fact with a second graphics card you could very easily do your normal tasks while you mine in the background.

 

Honestly, the main reason I haven't started mining is because I got my rtx3080 for list price and my biggest fear is that it dies before I can get another one for list price

 

This seems to be generally unstable. Leads to random graphics driver resets.

...or so I've heard anyway...

 

Don't worry. You'll never see another RTX 3080 for list price. You might see an RTX 4080 for list price.

 

Just get water cooling, the 3090 is known for operating hot and more so the VRAM on the back. And with my EK waterbloxk the GPU stays at around 45 to 50 degrees on max load. And the VRAM at around 60 degrees and the back is passive cooled, though they surely get some cooling from the active cooled side

 

Just got a thought on this, please correct me if I'm wrong here.

As the crypto's price goes up, the supply for GPUs goes down, meaning the GPU's price will go up. So, as the crypto's skyrocket, the price of GPUs will skyrocket. So can't someone just buy a couple of GPUs, and as the crypto's continue to go up, the GPU's price will go up, so I can sell it in a couple of months? Note that I'm not suggesting this idea at all, as it's going to make the shortage worse, but this is just a thought I want to put out there.

 

It's already happening though I would argue anyone attempting to do it now is basically late to the party. Getting the cards while they were close to MSRP and holding onto them until they were a couple thousand is where the real money was made. At this point barring a sudden spike in value you're only going to see a small profit and only if you don't sell through stores like eBay where the store takes 30%.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/scalpers-have-sold-50000-nvidia-rtx-3000-gpus-through-ebay-stockx

 

They can, but they'd need to be able to see the future. And if they can see the future, they can just play stock market instead. I didn't see the current shortage coming, for example.

Some people actually did what you said - bought GPU early (by accident) and sold it later at higher price.

Some people are trying to do what you describe right now, buying GPUs and trying to resell them at profit. And those people are actually contributing to the problem.

 

Yup, its no longer a matter for meeting market demands, they basically need to flood it in order to remove the middle man. If that doesnt happen, they can just keep snagging the cards from where ever and selling them at a premium.

People might even stockpile just to drain the suppliers.

 

This quote should be pinned at the top of our "Made with Unity" subforum. A lot of people posting there would benefit from seriously thinking over if the world indeed needs their Flappy Bird clone #5349, or maybe their time and work could be better invested into building mining rigs.

If the current cryptocurrency craze will work as some kind of quality filter, removing from gamedev all people who can't earn through their artistic skills more than through mining, I think nobody will mind.

 

If we're talking a few dollars per day with up-front investments of thousands of dollars worth of equipment then I suspect there are other businesses you could get into with better returns. Almost all of which will do more good for the world than jumping into an arms race for wealth redistribution...

 

I'm not aware of anything like that, which is the reason why people are trying to join cryptomining train.

Basically, opening a business may require an upfront payment of, say, $100k, and then it might take one-two years to get the money back, and that's if you're lucky and didn't bankrupt it. And that's with you needing to babysit it all the time.

Stock investment supposedly returns 15-50% (probably untrustworthy info, or with a caveat that 75% of all investors lose their money) per year, but that's if you're lucky and don't bankrupt yourself. Bank deposit is even less.

Meanwhile even at current inflated prices, money spent on on something like 3070 can be returned in less than a year. That's, basically, insane.

Based on my own limited information, you can only experience this kind of thing in other areas if you chance upon an open niche nobody else noticed, and those kind of situations are rare and not easy to spot. There are also ways to get even higher returns through trading, but that's assuming you're clairvoyant, as that involves using financial instruments that can wipe out your savings and put you into $500000 debt in 30 minutes (there were stories like that).

So, it is relatively safe (aside from possibility of burning your house down, being robbed, hardware failed), high return, and easily accessible.

However (this is important), those are dynamics of a bubble.

 

Imagine if we just got proof of stake first.

 

It reminds me that somewhere on the planet certain dude probably still remembers that half-a-billion usd pizza order he ate in 2010. (he paid 10000 btc for the order)

 

Stock options give you even more if you're up for the risk.

 

The "risk" part means that you're also up to lose even more.

 

Risk and rewards go hand in hand, and the higher the reward the higher is the risk.

At some point you'll have a chance to have 100000% return, but at 0.00000000001% possibility. You can guess how that dice is going to roll.

So realisticially speaking, you can't aim higher than that.

 

I tend to agree about the abundance of crappy games, but can crypto really compare? This implies that an average indie game will make roughly $4,000. I see some developers pumping out multiple games a year (most hentai match 3 games that appear in my recommendations despite me "ignoring" the developer, but also Choice of Games and Hosted Games type stuff). Obviously not everything is going to make even that, but there's potential there for serious gain for the work of a few months (well...not really "serious" gain...but in comparison, just wait). I took a look at this and it implies that for an AMD rig (I'm sure it's outdated now because the 3000 series is supposed to be better, but whatev) that costs $4,000 upfront it will take 20 months to recoup the cost and another 20 to make another $4k.

Again, I'm sure mining is more lucrative now, but 10 vs. ~3-4 months is a pretty big gap.

 

Yes, because making a game requires work, while running a crypto farm requires nothing aside from hardware purchase.

 

I make just short of 1100 USD a day as a consultant. I just need 153 RTX 3070 and I can live on mining, nice!

 

Are you doing nothing? If you aren't doing nothing, that's not the same thing.

 

Also "making a living" and "living at my current standards" are two entirely different things in this situation unless he's just the worst with money.

 

A farm of 153 GPUs surely needs maintenance

 

It's doing nothing (it's not really, you need to tweak things and set up the machine appropriately and keep the software updated) but it's also for a lower potential gain. There are surveys and such you can do online (like Amazon's MTurk) that are "less work" than game dev but we still have plenty of crappy indie games because the difference in return is pretty large.

 

Well, I think there's a reason why you aren't making "hentai puzzles" or doing MTurk surveys (those reach minimum wage if you work hard, I believe?).

There's a difference between potential and guaranteed gain.
Your potential earning from gamedev is infinity dollars. Is this what you're going to get? No.

Mass producing crap is a good way to build negative reputation fast.

 

Personally I'd be happy "just making up some of the absurd difference between the cost of my new components and the actual MSRP". My CPU was $1250 when it was supposed to be $800 and my GPU was $975 when it was supposed to be $500.

 

It's not all "crap," I did mention Choice of Games after all--actually I don't know if they're crap but I'm assuming they aren't. They released like 17 games in 2019. Most of them don't have enough reviews to have a "rating" but the ones that do (in 2019) are all Positive (one Mostly Positive). They have 10,000 followers of their "developer page" on Steam.

There's definitely a market there, and crypto probably wouldn't offer the same amount of return.

 

Did the 5950x cost 800 USD? my god it's cheap not living in a socialistic country

I paid 1070 USD included VAT which is deductable so 856 USD