Great commentary on the unsustainability of it all. Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market. Thus, they have every incentive to cut the legs out from under resellers. It would also be anywhere from hard to nearly impossible to give them an incentive to allow the secondary market to operate in such a way as to increase the sustainability of their product.
Edit: Aren't we a bit touchy today? (Turn showdead on and look a little down thread.)
They do in the sense that buyers often consider future resale values when making primary purchase decisions. It’s much easier to justify purchasing a $2500 “enthusiast” graphics card if you’re confident you can get a decent chunk of that back when you sell it in 6-12 months.
Similarly, car makers are incentivised to try to ensure their vehicles have decent resale value. Expected future residuals affect financing and purchase decisions today.
I think when you get to PC parts it becomes quite a bit trickier as everyone who is willing to buy used PC parts is way more knowledgable on exactly what they're looking for. A lot of things do hold their value pretty well. On the other side of things, you're taking such a risk selling computer parts on ebay (gotta be a lot of people frying components after buying them and not even realising it's their fault) that I can see why people couldn't be bothered taking the risk of reselling when they can just gift away the parts.
It mostly doesn't impact price as is, but the top equipped car will get much more traffic from potential buyers and therefore can get away with setting the price a bit higher than the current market.
Is this actually true or merely a theoretical thought? Because it would seem that car makers are incentivised to ensure their vehicles annihilate a couple days after their warranty expires and/or after a couple of miles after their guaranteed mileage is driven, and comparing e.g. reputation of second-hand cars manufactured in 80es/90es/2000s/10s seems to support it.
Meanwhile Toyota is able to charge a meaningful premium because their cars retain value. So I do think it is safe to conclude in the case of cars the effect is real.
Who buys Toyotas?
Why are those people's cars more valuable on the used market than corporate fleet's used cars?
Now see if your model explains the used value of a Dodge Journey, oilfield pickup and whatever car grandma owned.
Nissan spend the '00s selling to owners who's used cars are not held in high regard and this affected consumer perceptions of them. Toyota spent the 90s and '00s (and still is) selling to upscale people who treated their cars nicely and it affected consumer perception of them.
I know a lot of other folks who do something similar to that too.
TCO includes my time, so if I need to take a car to the shop, or miss meetings because things break down, that raises TCO by that opportunity cost. Selling a car is a hassle, and by the time I'm ready to give it up, it's not worth too much (and the buyers will probably be poor, since TCO exceeds a new car) so I don't feel the need to maximize resale value.
While this is an overly rationalist way of phrasing things, but most people I know take a similarly pragmatic approach. Teachers. (Real, not software) engineers. Etc.
I don't buy used cars, since some people sell to upgrade, and some sell because there's some issue. The headache adds a lot to the TCO.
And not by some technicality either, he literally hired a paramilitary group to disguise themselves as musicians and smuggle him out of Japan while on bail.
Since 2001 Nissan has used their defective CVT transmission in the vast majority of their lineup from the compact Versa to the Pathfinder SUV (aside from the sports cars and pickup trucks).
The average time to failure depends slightly on the model, but it's often around 60-70k miles.
The cost to replace it is typically most if not more than the value of a typical Nissan.
Because they were selling defective cars, their buyers dried up, so they had to resort to buyers with sub-prime credit. At this point it's joked the Nissan Altima is the official car of bad credit or bad neighbourhoods.
While the poor upkeep by the sub-prime owners certainly doesn't help, the poor resale value is largely due to everyone knowing they are ticking time bombs.
I've shopped for many different used 10-15 year old cars, and through my research have found the used market is extremely accurate in pricing in expected upkeep or failures, even among different variants of the same model from the same brand.
When I wanted an W211 E-class Mercedes (2003-2009), I researched the common failures and the cost to repair. I found the whole range was actually priced pretty similarly once you factored that in.
There were major defects in the 2003-2004 models which would cost around $2500 to fix. The 2005+ models were worth about $2500 more than a 2004 (despite only being worth $5000 and $7500)
The E500 had an air suspension failure issue which would be around $2000 to remedy, the same model year E320 with normal suspension was worth $2000 more. And for 2003-2004 they were only worth $3000 and $5000 respectively.
After months of browsing craigslist and test drives, it was clear it didn't matter which model or year I bought, a Mercedes W211 E-class was going to cost me $7500.
At that point I figured I'd just keep saving and get a Lexus 2IS for $10,000 as it was much better value despite the difference in owner reputation.
tldr: The used market knows exactly what a car is worth regardless of owner reputation. Nissans are worthless because they're shit cars.
On one hand you have FCA (I'm sorry, Stellantis) which leans into its not so positive reputation and does just fine.
The other hand you have Toyota who spend the 90s and 00s digging a goodwill moat in the minds of premium consumers.
Both approaches work but for different demographics. You'll never see a 4Runner with a magnetic company sticker sitting in an industrial parking lot or in less well off part of town and you'll never see a Pacifica in an upscale suburban driveway.
Huh? Pacificas are everywhere, especially since they also have the only PHEV minivan in the US. In the PHEV Pacifica FB group I'm in (I do own one, so I am a bit biased here), many people have Pacificas alongside Teslas and other EVs. But even the gas Pacificas are everywhere, including "upscale suburban driveways".
Though your point does still stand about FCA/Stellantis' reputation: we had to get over their our perception of them when we got ours, and I would never consider any of their other vehicles. But our Pacifica has been a really great van. I'm just amused that you picked the one vehicle in their entire lineup that doesn't prove your point.
You're right about the PHEV thing attracting a lot of people who otherwise would never own a Chrysler. Checking "just the right boxes" is something FCA is really good at with their more niche vehicles. The high horsepower Charger/Challenger/Cherokee and the Jeep Wrangler are amazingly good at creating a way for the married couple who can't agree on what vehicle want to both leave with enough of their boxes checked.
The reputation hasn't stopped FCA from selling to this market. Wranglers and Grand Cherokees are pretty common too, as well as the rare Hellcat.
Car makers need to do well against the competition, and resale value is something that people look at. They want your car to last 10 years and then fall apart - that being about the time people start to be willing to call a dead car dead of old age. Though they do like having a few collectors cars that are a lot older than that around because collectors also feed into car culture.
In my experience people buy what they can afford. So mostly *60/*70 (Ti) Nvidia cards. Few people who I know bought the 1080 are still using it. The second life for gaming GPUs mostly is to serve friends/relatives who ask to help building a PC for them.
The purchase price is what I am willing to spend on the device and it's usage, and a healthy dose of pragmatism about what is actually necessary.
I also overclock to stretch their usefulness out but I must admit the leaps in each generation recently, as well as some fundamentally new technology capabilities mean I am not keeping up as well.
Of course right now you can sell 4 year old cards for a profit, the market is crazy.
In a similar train of thought - there might be better data on this question if one was to look at the photography equipment market. Or other used consumer markets with high re-sale value.
Why? They are only incentivised to make more profit, and selling high-tech expensive cars that break after 10 years is great for that. The ones that will bear the cost of that will be either the financing companies (and it would be fun to see the market collapse as the current crop of shiny German cars hits the 2nd hand market and no-one is dumb enough to buy one), or those poor souls who insist on buying old-ish cars instead of leasing like everyone else.
Even with third-party financing, the anticipated residuals influence the attractiveness of the lease offer. A cheaper lease offer means more sales for the automaker, and thus more profits.
All the financiers have to do is make sure someone buys it for a good price after 3 years of being leased from new. That's not a bad proposition - the car will probably last a while longer with all of its electonic toys and gizmos working. It's the buyer after that (of which I am usually one) that will find out how expensive the car is to maintain.
So, I'm afraid that they already got (and applied) the idea :p
Moving to? Cisco owns Meraki, subscription based licensing is Meraki's entire business model.
[0] https://iscgroupllc.com/en/supported-equipment/tape-librarie...
Afaik Nvidia already tried that [0] but miners didn't really bite because the lack of resale value for those cards cut too much into their profits.
But getting back on topic, Bitcoin miners long since moved to custom ASICs, you can't make a profit with GPUs any more.
Not a ton of money but it adds up after a month and the GPU was a sunk cost since I got it for gaming. It literally is profitable, for my situation anyway.
I agree that the statement "you can't make a profit any more" is just incorrect because of the subjectivity of "you", but it's also worth noting that this is extremely variable - my electricity costs $0.38/kWh off-peak and $0.54/kWh on-peak.
Whether or not mining on existing hardware is profitable depends entirely on where you live, and since we're explicitly talking about the effects of an increased demand on GPUs due to mining, people are clearly not just using existing hardware.
It's literally a ROI of 100-300%.
Or to put it another way it's similar to a risky stock with a compounding yearly return of 41% for four years.
Using a graphics card for mining that you have anyway is just gravy (apart from externalities which are another big problem).
I'm not really a crypto guy but mining in your downtime on a decent gpu is a pretty good gamble.
And Flight Simulator 2020 needs crazy specs if you want the pretty graphics at decent frame rates. I was planning on doing the mining on the side just to reduce how much it cost, but I'm mainly getting it for the pretty Flight Sim graphics.
???
Doesn't all this limit the game publishers as well? Surely someone who is currently developing a game has to consider whether or not to even care that something like a 2080 even exists, it might as well not.
And if games starts to be developed with older and slower cards in mind, to ensure that games can even play them, won't that hurt GPU sales in the future?
> I have bought around 4 3070s/3080s all for under 1000 at actual retail pricing.
How much time and effort did you spend to accomplish that?
I've signed up with multiple AIBs and Nvidia itself for months to get notified if anything I'm interested in gets in stock. Nvidia stopped selling directly in my region (Europe) a while ago, no AIB has notified me yet. Probably because I picked all the most affordable models, all of which are still more expensive than 3080 FE MSRP, while 3080 FE has not even an official retailer left in mainland Europe.
Sure, I could setup a whole range of alerts and spend all day hanging out in a bunch of discords to catch one of those super rare stock drops.
But tbh that's not the experience I'm looking for when I'm already willing to spend money: I don't want, and most people simply can't, having to organize the rest of their life around the possibility for a purchasing "opportunity" at any given moment.
Can't just buy a gpu and plug it into a wall outlet.
*excluding laser research laboratories and weapons.
The light costs about $51 an hour. Arguably the smallest expense involved in running a casino hotel 24 hours a day. Less than a rounding error.
They cut back to half-brightness not because of money, or energy, but because they thought the light pollution was a little excessive.
The strip is mostly solar-powered so the Luxor is basically just taking sunlight and beaming it back up into the sky.
It's not like you could take that energy and ship it elsewhere, or do something more productive with it. The Strip's solar plant exists because of The Strip. If the Strip didn't exist then you'd just have sunlight hitting rocks in the middle of the desert like everywhere else in Nevada.
Oh, and moths to a flame? That's literal. There's an entire ecosystem built up around the moths who flock to the Luxor, the bats that eat those moths, and the owls that eat those bats.
Nor did the six P104s I picked up for an research project. And those cards smelled.. funny. I'm pretty sure they'd never seen aircon, and had no identifiable oem markings that I could find, but afaik, they're still chugging along 18 months after /whatever/ was done to them in their former life.
Honestly, I wonder if 'gpu burn' wasn't nvidia's first attempt to mitigate the cashflow drain of the crypto-cast-off-market.. before they decided it was more convenient to blame the need for drastic measures on a supply chain issue of their own design. -sigh-
But Google, Amazon et al. are very familiar with the concept of hardware lifetimes. Internally, calculations for some algorithms are done based on MTBF values for components - i.e. the cost of doing a thing is a certain number of CPU-hours, and you know a CPU will give you X-hours before it's liable to be hardware-dead.
A second hand gaming GPU has a very different power-on profile to a mining GPU - a gamer is going to struggle to on average put more then 4 hours a day or so through a card, most likely less. A miner is going to have that thing powered on the whole time, permanently. Even if the GPU is fine, the DDR RAM has been aging and that stuff fails faster.
The short answer is: people are going to be asking for a discount based on the expected lifetime of ex-miner hardware, once we know what that is. If the answer is "well it might last 6 months or it might last till you replace your machine" then the price will now reflect that expectation and risk profile. Not to mention the dilution factor which will be actually failing hardware being sold off by miners without properly marking it - after all, you might as well let someone gamble that bit flips in the GPU only lead to graphics aberrations rather then bad hashes.
Source: happened with an RX 560 that I bought second-hand. Driver installation failed in Windows 10 due to the modified GPU BIOS. Was fixed with a reflash of a stock GPU BIOS using atiflash.
Sometimes literally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8bp8a2QS4
"A Bitcoin Miner Heatstroked In His Sleep. This Is What Happened To His Organs."
Has anyone spotted electrolytics on a card in the last ten years or so?
The main cause of failure is the VRM, those components are the hottest, least reliable and least cooled.
Sadly, sometimes a blown transistor or capacitor can take out the whole GPU.
Aside from a few top end models modern desktop GPUs are not designed for continuous operation at max load. When you combine than with higher temperature the lifespan of the cards is indeed reduced. The real question is how much this matters.
Taking into consideration that the gamer segment is now well aware that miners and scalpers are ruining their supply, I really hope that when the flood of used cards happen, nobody with a grain of salt will buy devices that have run at 98% their thermal limit for years. I really hope that market-ruining miners will find themselves with a ton of hardware nobody wants anymore.
So yes, I fully expect those soon-to-break GPUs to sell like hotcakes, and a lot of crying soon thereafter.
https://www.gamestop.com/video-games/pc-gaming/games/product...
It's not like pre-orders are objectively useless like some people may paint it.
> The same market segment also rewards shitty game companies, producing half-finished, barely working product, with their money again and again
Most people buying PC games aren't the ones buying top of the line dedicated GPU's for their gaming rigs. They also aren't ones who will scrutinize super technical details (nor even gameplay elements) as if they are Digital Foundry. Lotta weird generalizations here.
3000 series is a huge performance boost, reasonably priced (at least at MSRP), and gives comfortable buffer on lots of scenarios like high-end VR, 1440p at very high FPS, and comfy 4K with all the good stuff turned up.
Meanwhile, the GTX 1080 was cheap and could basically play everything at 1080p. I think gamers just skipped over the 2000 because it was lame.
But hell, I hope you're right. I'm still rocking a 980, and I've not had any success trying to grab a 3070 to upgrade. Maybe these LHRs will actually free stuff up. (But to be honest, the 980 is still doing fine with most of what I play at 1080p.)
Some back of the envelope math. The current hashrate is about 650000 Gh/s, which is almost 4x as much as at the start of the year. So an increase of about 50000000 Mh/s. A 3060 Ti produces around 60 Mh/s, that's about 8.3 million 3060 Ti's. Of course not all of the added hashpower comes from new cards so the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt.
But stopping miners from buying one GPU model won't make it sell at MSRP. Miners switch to buying other cards, driving the price of those even higher, but the LHR cards are still going to be out of stock everywhere and scalped for 2x MSRP, because there are so many gamers buying GPUs.
Also, GPUs are pretty good at mining Ethereum. ASICs are only about 2x as efficient, many miners would rather have the security of knowing they can always sell their GPUs to gamers if it all comes crashing down.
On other note, the "cloud" Vega that AMD sold to the very few cloud videogaming companies comes with exact same limitations, and a clause of non-resale, and non-refurbishment. This way buyers, can't simply solder display connector to those cards, and sell them on open market.
Imagine Intel would've sold their Xeons with the same limitations... but wait, they actually did this for "custom fused" Xeons they sell to big dotcoms.
Now, who said that silicon vendors can't "vendor lock" their dotcom clients? By buying direct, all those dotcoms have exposed themselves to an even bigger supplier risk of this type, and not reduced it.
I suppose demand is high enough that people will buy whatever they can get though.
What they could have done is instead sell the video-capable cards in a way that discourages bulk buying (limits per customer, maybe a little bit bulkier and harder to correctly cool if several are in a rack) and then release a more bare-bone (no bulk, just a heatsink and optional fan) mining version that can be bulk-ordered and performs well in a rack mount.
Gamers (generally very price-conscious) get a more stable close-to-msrp price now and in the future, nvidia secures their supply
You're right with respect to e-waste, but I wonder if they may end up really subsidizing hobbyist data analysis.
edit: just to be clear, I dont have the expertise to check the wear, so it just seems like a bad gamble to me
I thought the non-LHR cards are fully featured?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
With so many more of them out there, it'll be interesting to see if this becomes more of a thing. Alternatively, it's easy to imagine that depending on just how constrained these are, they might eventually find homes doing non-crypto headless DC workloads, such as deep learning stuff.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
This is all a scheme to stop the used market from ruining their MSRP pricing.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-c...
AMD isn't even going to limit performance on gaming cards, nor are they using a different node for their mining cards like NVIDIA. They are straight-up just going to shunt wafers over to mining cards, while letting miners have both the mining cards and the gaming cards.
After being used for mining, it's e-waste whether or not it has video out. This helps prevent some poor sucker from buying e-waste.
The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold.
People think Nvidia is doing this to try to help them get better prices now, but really Nvidia is trying to extract more money from gamers in the long term.