With Intel's Coffee Lake and AMD's Ryzen cores making giant leaps forward for the PC Master Race, gaming on the PC is achieving a renaissance lately. With more high end hardware becoming ever so slightly obsolete as the years go by, discounts and sales have seen gaming hardware that was once out of reach of the average millennial gaming casual become more affordable, making PC gaming among the biggest gaming platforms in the world.
And then there's the video cards...
Usually reserved for the gaming enthusiasts, high-end Graphical processing units (or GPU's) are pretty much a necessity for anyone who dares call themselves a PC gaming enthusiast. Unfortunately, they are becoming much harder to come by these days, and it isn't because of their value for gaming.
The average high-end GPU's ability to process teraflops of data has made them a popular choice for people trying to generate digital crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. Since big companies can afford to buy these cards in bulk at a wholesale price, (much lower price tag per-GPU card,) corporations are buying the vast majority of GPU cards on the market. This is causing a scarcity in the graphics card market that more than doubled the price of all video cards across the retail space in mid July.
But why video cards in particular?
Cryptocurrencies are part of a peer-to peer encryption system that use cryptography to secure information called blockchain. With blockchain, all data is encrypted across multiple computers across the internet at the same time, segmented into little pieces while also being encrypted. The fastest machines able to encrypt the most links in the blockchain are rewarded with the most crypto-money. The problem is in today's world, tossing in a few Xeon processors in a workstation won't give you enough processing power to encrypt all of this stuff. You need compute units able to handle hundreds of links in the chain at the same time.
In the early days of Bitcoin, for example, ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circiuts) could be used specifically for Bitcoin mining, and were developed purpose-built to do only that. However, the rise of alternative currencies like Etherium, which works much the same way, don't have ASIC boards developed for it yet. Regular CPUS, even with 16 cores couldn't encrypt even a fraction of what an ASIC can in a short amount of time, so the next best thing for Etherium miners to do is buy a bunch of high-end GPUs to do the encrypting.
Back in the day, Bitcoin mining was the only game in town, but the recently developed Etherium crypto-currency has seen many high profile investors seeking to gain an early monopoly in this newly created market, which would explain why the prices of GPUs skyrocketed only recently. It wasn't until early May of 2017 that Etherium was around $650 per coin, and could be exchanged for bitcoin already.
In the early days of Bitcoin, for example, ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circiuts) could be used specifically for Bitcoin mining, and were developed purpose-built to do only that. However, the rise of alternative currencies like Etherium, which works much the same way, don't have ASIC boards developed for it yet. Regular CPUS, even with 16 cores couldn't encrypt even a fraction of what an ASIC can in a short amount of time, so the next best thing for Etherium miners to do is buy a bunch of high-end GPUs to do the encrypting.
Back in the day, Bitcoin mining was the only game in town, but the recently developed Etherium crypto-currency has seen many high profile investors seeking to gain an early monopoly in this newly created market, which would explain why the prices of GPUs skyrocketed only recently. It wasn't until early May of 2017 that Etherium was around $650 per coin, and could be exchanged for bitcoin already.
AMD corners the market in video cards for mining Coins
Since AMDs development and hardware is way more open-ended than Nvidia's, it has made developers of crypto-mining apps the ability to use the hardware in the video card way more efficiently than Nvidia's largely closed-source development environment. This has made AMD the biggest name in the mining scene, with availability of high end Radeon cards like the RX 570 and 580 nearly impossible for gamers to buy new right now. The second hand market isn't much better, with RX 570s almost a thousand dollars a card on Amazon.
Miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship enormous lots of video cards.
Apparently, ever since the price of bitcoin skyrocketed to around $2,100 per coin some time in mid june, the video cards just aren't coming fast enough. the next logical step was to rent air buses, then pack them with nothing but video cards in order to get them to customers willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on them.
In what one could only speculate is a move to laser focus on gaming performance, AMD announced their new RX VEGA video cards starting at $499, but there's a catch: You can only get these cards bundled with other AMD products, as well as two games, all of which are sold in the same box.
This is still kinda expensive if you're a gamer on a budget though, with the highest grade bundle costing $800. This is still, however, a bargain when you consider that a GTX 1080ti is going for a little over a thousand dollars on Amazon these days.
One of the major selling points of being a PC gamer used to be the affordability of building your own rig, which you could easily upgrade in the future. However, with what's been going on with the gaming hardware economy now that Etherium mining is in, the affordability part is now under siege by elements that have nothing to do with PC gaming. Naturally, this has gamers pissed, because it's making any current high-end GPUs virtually impossible for us to get our hands on.
There is no word on when the mining crisis is going to balance out in gamer's favor. Some speculate that Etherium prices might bubble, resulting in a crash in its market value.
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