According to a new report by Jon Peddie Research, over three million add-in boards were sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017 worth $776 million, and most of these GPUs were coming from AMD. Still, it appears that the primary driver for GPU sales, was, is and will remain PC gaming.
As Dr. Jon Peddie, President of Jon Peddie research, said:
“Gaming has been and will continue to be the primary driver for GPU sales, augmented by the demand from cryptocurrency miners.”
Dr. Jon Peddie also confirmed NVIDIA’s claims that prices will not drop anytime soon.
“Gamers can offset those costs by mining when not gaming, but prices will not drop in the near future.”
Going into slightly more details, AMD’s overall unit shipments increased 8.08% quarter-to-quarter, Intel’s total shipments decreased -1.98% from last quarter, and Nvidia’s decreased -6.00%. Discrete GPUs were in 36.88% of PCs, which is down -2.67% and desktop graphics add-in boards (AIBs) that use discrete GPUs decreased -4.62% from last quarter.
Last but not least, the overall PC market increased 5.93% quarter-to-quarter, and decreased -0.15% year-to-year.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Besides the PC rivaling three platforms nowadays, now the miners have also emerged. Too bad, these have a greater risk of raising prices for an important component to play on the PC.
We knew for a while they would be adjusting MSRP due to availability with memory. Price gouging will still account for the high price of GPUs in the vast majority of cases.
It’s terrible for gamers right now, but maybe this influx of cash will at least get us better video cards in the future?
One can only hope.
You’d think someone would step up and fill this memory manufacturing void by now. There has to be money in that. Perhaps no one has the technological background…
Well you can’t just step in and start making memory just to fill a void that might go away in a few months, It takes years and billions to even do that anyway.
Indeed. It would be a huge investment. But, memory demand has only increased over the last decade. With more devices, phones, wearables, smart TVs, fridges, cars, etc, I can only see the demand continuing to climb.
When this Ponzi scheme inevitably collapses, the market is going to flood with used GPUs selling for pennies on the dollar.
I wish for this to happen like yesterday.
I for one woudn’t want to buy these overworked GPUs with no warranty.
I won’t be buying a new GPU for at least 3-4 years. I’m even thinking of selling my 980Ti. It’s in my work PC and don’t even use it.
If you have no use for it and your 1080 Ti still has a good bit of warranty left on it then I would sell the 980 Ti. Miners are paying crazy high prices for a card like the 980 Ti right now.
I’ll look around on eBay. Haven’t used eBay in forever, though.
Xbox one x native 4k gaming for only $500.
Uh, no thanks.
lol..no
Here’s to hoping the cryptocurrencies go up in flames very soon.
For the shortages to end and prices of GPUs to return to sane levels that is exactly what must happen and I’m hoping for either a crash in crypto or for Government meddling and regulation and taxing the profits made on crypto mining to take their toll.
One crypto service has already turned over their records to the IRS. Tax evasion is expensive and it can mean prison time too.
In future…… it would be pointless to use a GPU for mining, that would be the best scenario. Nvidia and AMD should make GPUs designed for mining ONLY.
So far there is no way to stop miners from using gaming GPUs to mine. Several ideas have been suggested but each one won’t work.
One suggestion was for Nvidia to make gaming only GPUs not work for mining through it’s drivers but someone would just hack the drivers to make mining work again.
Another suggestion was for Nvidia to make gaming only GPUs not work for mining through the BIOS but miners would just flash the BIOS and use them anyway.
The only thing Nvidia could possibly do is to engineer gaming only GPUs that don’t work efficiently for mining but it’s unknown if that can even be done and if it could it would take years to develop a new architecture and get the GPUs to market.
Indeed and I doubt Nvidia would actually spend resources and their time developing gaming-exclusive GPUs that don’t work efficiently for mining given the amount of cash flow miners currently generate.
LOL i’m not mining with my PC screw that.
Why don’t nVidia and AMD just make a dedicated mining card? Do they just not care that miners are buying up all the GPUs? Because it seems to me that the whole “PC gamers must be put first” narrative is a lie. They probably don’t care who buys their GPUs as long as their GPUs are bought. Especially AMD. At the end of the day, their GPUs are being sold like hotcakes and that’s all that matters to them.
Well, Nvidia and AMD don’t make anything. They engineer and design GPUs but they don’t manufacture anything. In Nvidia’s case TSMC manufactures all of their GPUs and they also manufacture Apple’s chips. Apple takes priority over Nvidia because their contract is much larger and they pay more. TSMC’s Fabs are running at maximum production capacity already so they can’t make any more GPUs for Nvidia than they already are. Hence the shortage. TSMC doesn’t want to build anymore Fabs because it would mean an investment of billions and no guarantee that demand would continue with Crypto Mining being unstable.
Nvidia is already planning on releasing a mining only GPU called Turing but it will make absolutely no difference in shortages of GPUs for gaming. See above paragraph for why. Whether Nvidia has TSMC manufacture GPUs for mining or GPUs for gaming they can only get the same amount of GPUs overall as they are presently getting from TSMC. Miners will buy up all of the Turings and then buy up all of the gaming GPUs so nothing will change. That’s why Nvidia has stated that shortages will continue and prices will continue to rise throughout the year.
Miners will not buy them , there is no re-sale value
Bow to your crypto master race pc peasant…..lmao.