@khm there are sooo many other good use cases for dedicated GPUs like that! Helping research projects in medicine for example
@sirjofri I'm in bio research and yes there have been supply problems. I have an RFP open right now and I anticipate more such problems, because society has decided that gaming and Dunning-Krugerrand are more important.
@khm as a game developer I have to say that gaming is important, and in fact, it is. But bio research is also very important. Bitcoin (and others) are a failed project imo. Not necessarily failed as a financial currency, but as a mega system to improve humankind! I mean, bitcoin produces more CO2 and consumes more power than entire states!
@sirjofri The good news is, despite nvidia's marketing, the improvements in this generation of cards are marginal at best, and there's still a reasonable supply of datacenter-targeted hardware on the previous process. It just sucks that we in the research community generally wind up living on last year's technology while the feeding frenzy calms down each release cycle.
@sirjofri Plus, part of the problem is our fault in the research community -- the embracing of CUDA over more portable software stacks pretty much locks the whole industry into one vendor's products. Obviously nvidia spent a lot of marketing dollars to make that happen, but a tendency to get locked in like this by proprietary software is sadly common in research labs.
@khm They announced they're starting to intentionally limit the blockchain hashing rate of GTX 3060 GPU. I think they are trying to get the GPUs in the hands of regular consumers, instead of them being bought up by crypto people. And they're trying to divert the crypto people to these new dedicated (overpriced) crypto models. I guess it's to save their reputation from being sunk with their most reliable demographic (gamers.)
I would say your guess is overly generous. They just want to maximize profit. Miners have more money to burn, so it's just a matter of math to decide how expensive they should make mining cards.
Nvidia makes really nice & powerful hardware, but they have *never* shown interest in "doing the right thing" or putting their users first.
Great to see AMD finally approaching Nvidia's performance, with better and more open drivers.
@cancel They play similar games with the VDI products -- first time I've seen a license check requirement in a video card driver, but this is the world we live in now.
@khm I remember being able to flip some bits in the FireGL drivers circa 2003 to get them to run with Radeon cards, which gave them the "real" OpenGL implementation that worked with CAD and other non-game GL software.
@cancel Yep, around the same time you could flash "quadro" firmware to nvidia cards -- trading speed for precision.
@khm
That's just disgusting. Actually creating a GPU specifically for crytpominers. 🤬