Can't it be both? Seems like a win-win for Nvidia and gamers.

I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.

It makes sense to me that gamers as a market are more likely to be brand-loyal and gaming is also more moat-able than hashing.

For miners, they just want whatever does more hashes per second. There's no loyalty there and the hardware is competing solely on hash/power/cost. For gaming, you have proprietary software and APIs like "RTX"-branded stuff, game-specific driver optimizations, etc. where you can better defend yourself against AMD.

So for Nvidia, if they're going to sell X GPUs either way, they'd rather sell to gamers than miners to help preserve their gaming market share which plausibly has more long-term value. Just my guess, at least.

I think the cynicism is akin to apple removing the charger/headphones from new iPhones. They claim it's for environmental purposes, and maybe they really do care, but many think it's just a cash grab.

companies are people too!

Globo Chem "We own everything so you don't have to"

Their stated purpose is still true. They want to get these GPUs to gamers and their mining GPUs to miners.

I think there are better ways than intentionally crippling a general purpose compute platform.

On the surface, the easiest, cheapest way to alleviate the situation would be to require government ID for purchases and limit it to 1 GPU per person, and relax the limitations for educational institutions doing ML research.

A more serious way to do it would be to administer a test that you take in person (similar to the DMV); you pick either a gaming skill test or a machine learning test, and if you pass, you get to buy 1 GPU. This takes a bit more resources though, logistically, and although it sounds silly I think it would work.

This is what my local microcenter does. They have a sign when you walk in saying ONE gpu per customer per 30 days, and they write down your license number to make sure. I still was never able to get one(because people camp outside the store the night before deliveries) but I appreciate their effort.

It is legitimately difficult to get a 3080 right now and I suspect that Nvidia is actually eating a lot of bad PR for it now. That said, if society turns around and starts viewing mining as a significant climate change issue then building hardware to specifically support that market is likely going to be another PR disaster.

I suspect Nvidia's marketing team has grown too comfortable on consistently edging out AMD for ray tracing and isn't the sharpest bunch of tools in the shed.

It doesn’t seem like a load of crock to me. I don’t know why they would even bother creating a separate line for miners unless they were worried about essentially telling the whole gaming market “too bad” indefinitely. That might be more lucrative in the short term because miners are willing to pay more than gamers for the same card, but nvidia probably don’t want to just burn their bridge to the gaming community.

It really isn't a load of crock. For whatever reason NVIDIA has a real interest in making gamers happy. You hear this as being a serious motivation for them even from employees not on the record. The most cynical take on it would be that they want to do this for long term growth. Which if so, is fine. An example of capitalism working.

Either proof-of-stake or ASICs are gonna make GPU Ether mining rather short lived.

Nvidia fears that all those customers will vanish over night.

> Nvidia fears that all those customers will vanish over night.

Exactly - and the fear seems justified since it already happened once before in 2018.

They only fears that those consumers gonna sell their used hardware which gonna cause drop demand for GPU for a long time.

Well if the invisible hand off the market works in favour of me for once, I'm not gonna complain