NVIDIA Wants Retailers to Sell GeForce GPUs to Gamers, Not Miners

Megalith

Megalith

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NVIDIA has publicized some of their thoughts on the GPU pricing situation: speaking with ComputerBase, spokesman Boris Böhles thinks that gamers, not miners, are more deserving of their products and that retailers should better meet their needs. There is no indication that NVIDIA will actually engage trading partners to ensure this happens, however.

“For NVIDIA, gamers come first. All activities related to our GeForce product line are targeted at our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers’ needs as usual. “
 
I'm sure that bakeries in 1999 didn't appreciate everyone dicking down apple pies all of a sudden but I didn't hear them complain about the money they were making.

PR/lip service is exactly that. Bullshit and hypocritical. Hey Nvidia, why don't you start making your own cards at MSRP if you're so fucking worried about it?
 
Mut1ny said:
I'm sure that bakeries in 1999 didn't appreciate everyone dicking down apple pies all of a sudden but I didn't hear them complain about the money they were making.

PR/lip service is exactly that. Bullshit and hypocritical. Hey Nvidia, why don't you start making your own cards at MSRP if you're so fucking worried about it?
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Nvidia has been selling their cards at MSRP. 1070Ti cards were in stock for $449 on their website for a while after most retailers were sold out of everything.
 
NVidia makes cards to sell. Distributors and retailers sell cards. Stop crying. Welcome to supply and demand 101. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Hey I know, maybe you can get the government to regulate the sale of video cards! Ya, that'll help.
 
look we know that the cows we milk don't find grass no more, but the wild cows at the quarry have much bigger tities...
what to do...maybe some lip service for those poor neglected cows at the farm, they often fall for emotional stimulus.
 
Dwayne said:
NVidia makes cards to sell. Distributors and retailers sell cards. Stop crying. Welcome to supply and demand 101. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Hey I know, maybe you can get the government to regulate the sale of video cards! Ya, that'll help.
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In the case of non-critical goods and services I believe a market solution is the preferred one. However government does have a role to play when mass speculation causes unsustainable market conditions in critical areas. You couldn't have food or fuel prices do what bitcoin has done in the last year without mass riots.
 
I applaud nvidia's comments here, even though they may not mean much. I wish they could somehow bork their cards for mining, or somehow make mining-speccific cards.

I don't really get the increased prices. New consoles are always scarce upon release but their price doesn't increase just because people are buying them up. They remain the set price and you either find them in stock or you don't.
 
Mut1ny said:
Ahhhh, I see how readily available they have them. Makes sense that they have so many in stock because it's not like it's Nvidia selling and making Nvidia stuff. /s
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GTX1060s (and 1070s I believe) were in stock on nvidias site 2 weeks ago or so for MSRP. Of course they sold out in a short time. You’re literally posting bullshit.
 
schoolslave said:
GTX1060s (and 1070s I believe) were in stock on nvidias site 2 weeks ago or so for MSRP. Of course they sold out in a short time. You’re literally posting bullshit.
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Oh shit! They had a few 1060's a couple weeks ago? Man, looks like Nvidia really does care about the price of their GPU's being too high and getting more into the hands of gamers. Glad they're on the case!

My posts aren't bullshit, Nvidia saying stuff like this is. They're in for the money, you think they care if gamers are getting their cards or not? If they did don't you think they'd make more than some 1060's here and there? That's my point. If you don't think that's bullshit then I don't know what to tell you.
 
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If they're actually *serious* about this and not just fishing for PR, then they need to make code changes in the drivers to kill hashrates on mining algorithms. Let the mining-edition cards have the unlock, but tank the performance of the gaming cards. They've already shown willingness to use their drivers as a profit engine (prohibiting data centers from using Titans instead of Teslas via driver EULA changes), so there is precedent.
 
Paladin21 said:
If they're actually *serious* about this and not just fishing for PR, then they need to make code changes in the drivers to kill hashrates on mining algorithms. Let the mining-edition cards have the unlock, but tank the performance of the gaming cards. They've already shown willingness to use their drivers as a profit engine (prohibiting data centers from using Titans instead of Teslas via driver EULA changes), so there is precedent.
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This is just a hack that would itself get hacked.
 
heatlesssun said:
This is just a hack that would itself get hacked.
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They could at least put their money where their mouth is IF they're going to say stuff like this. I DO agree with them and I DO think GPU's are outrageously priced but I'm in no position to do anything about it.

They are, they're saying they care...and then do nothing. Cool. Just don't say anything at all.
 
There is no way they could enforce this anyway even if they wanted to.

Best they could do was a little popup when you are adding to cart "Do you intend to use this card for mining?"..... ummm.. lemme check that NO box... muahahahahaha!!!

Any code changes to the drivers to purposely tank performance would either be quickly bypassed or people would simply use the last driver that wasn't tampered with.

Anyway it's just like somebody mentioned previously. 100% lip service.
 
Well gaming doesn't need the compute side that mining uses so I would in theory be possible. But then anybody who wants to use CUDA would have to buy a Quadro.
 
I paid ~320 CAD for my GTX 1060 a year or so ago. Current prices for the same model are ~500 CAD. Something obviously needs to be done, the question is what? It isn't like they can just flood the market to force down prices because miners ALWAYS need more cards so demand is potentially infinite.

Nvidia/AMD could gimp the cards so that they don't work for mining. Would have to be done at the hardware level to prevent easy workarounds. They could also release mining specific cards.

My concern is that if this trend continues for too long it will begin driving people away from PC gaming and we'll start to see less and less innovation in the GPU market. I mean, why innovate when you can sell last year's model for the same price?
 
So NVIDIA.. why don't you get some stock out to your partners to actually sell?

And if you want to stop this I am sure your smart dev team could find a way to block mining on your cards...
 
nvidia could sell only to retailers thar put a limit to max gpu sold per house, but they dont, at least give them more stock than retailers that sell dozens to a single person.
there are plenty of solutions it's just that no body really cares as long as they make profit
 
Mut1ny said:
They could at least put their money where their mouth is IF they're going to say stuff like this. I DO agree with them and I DO think GPU's are outrageously priced but I'm in no position to do anything about it.

They are, they're saying they care...and then do nothing. Cool. Just don't say anything at all.
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But this isn't anyone's fault specifically. This is all being driven by speculation and the only good solution is to simply make more GPUs but these things don't grow on trees.
 
Paladin21 said:
If they're actually *serious* about this and not just fishing for PR, then they need to make code changes in the drivers to kill hashrates on mining algorithms. Let the mining-edition cards have the unlock, but tank the performance of the gaming cards. They've already shown willingness to use their drivers as a profit engine (prohibiting data centers from using Titans instead of Teslas via driver EULA changes), so there is precedent.
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Didn’t the titan also receive a 30+% perf increase in AutoCAD LT or something? It was when the frontier vega came out and they were behind a little bit. Poof! Here’s your free performance to keep buying our cards, not theirs! I think its ironic the shareholders of Nvidia are the same as AMD (and Intel vs AMD) just reversed on how much they own of either. No matter what happens in the market, the bigs are gettin the cheese while we fight amongst ourselves over stupid crap.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this. Yes you could throttle via drivers, but the people with huge farms would find a way and it would mainly hurt people like me mining with a couple cards when I’m not using it to work or game.
 
htpc_user said:
I applaud nvidia's comments here, even though they may not mean much. I wish they could somehow bork their cards for mining, or somehow make mining-speccific cards.

I don't really get the increased prices. New consoles are always scarce upon release but their price doesn't increase just because people are buying them up. They remain the set price and you either find them in stock or you don't.
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I bet if they really wanted to they could modify the BIOS of the card or GPU code to check if performing certain operations or code and block the mining process.
 
heatlesssun said:
But this isn't anyone's fault specifically. This is all being driven by speculation and the only good solution is to simply make more GPUs but these things don't grow on trees.
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What speculation? That retailers are jacking up prices? That miners are the cause of the market influx? That Nvidia saying something doesn't mean actually mean anything and they're doing nothing to stop it?
 
Mut1ny said:
What speculation? That retailers are jacking up prices? That miners are the cause of the market influx? That Nvidia saying something doesn't mean actually mean anything and they're doing nothing to stop it?
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Even if retailers were selling 1080Tis for $1 people would just buy up everyone and then sell them for $1300 on the secondary market. That's the speculation. With the level of FOMO going on in cryptocurrency these days there's little retailers can do.
 
You can't really prevent miners from eating up stock. There really isn't any way to know the intentions of the buyer. Most retailers have a 2 card limit per order but that's only a minor annoyance.

What they really need to do is institute a queue of sorts. Instead of simply notifying you via email you need to be able to reserve the product with a somewhat reasonable timeframe on restock.
 
Mut1ny said:
Oh shit! They had a few 1060's a couple weeks ago? Man, looks like Nvidia really does care about the price of their GPU's being too high and getting more into the hands of gamers. Glad they're on the case!

My posts aren't bullshit, Nvidia saying stuff like this is. They're in for the money, you think they care if gamers are getting their cards or not? If they did don't you think they'd make more than some 1060's here and there? That's my point. If you don't think that's bullshit then I don't know what to tell you.
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Nvidia has to meet their commitments to their AIB partners as well. They can't give themselves preferential treatment.
 
Now that Nvidia is faced with the same problems that AMD has had to face. I wonder how/if they will combat this?
 
Amperage said:
What they really need to do is institute a queue of sorts. Instead of simply notifying you via email you need to be able to reserve the product with a somewhat reasonable timeframe on restock.
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I don't think that would help. You'd just have folks pre-ordering and then reselling at jacked up prices. The bottom line is that we have a market that will pay a lot for GPUs. That's the problem and there's no quick fix.
 
Well played Nvidia. Well played.

You’ve endeared the idealist gamer heart without doing a darn thing!

Nvidia and AMD don’t want to stop miners. Miners have driven up sales to unprecedented levels this last year. You have many gamers who have never bought a high-end card (highest profit margin) that now have bought six or more high end cards to stick in a mining rig.
Case in point, basically, before mining, I never bought a single top tier card new. Mid-tier cards were sufficient for gaming and I’d been buying mid-tier since my original voodoo 1 in the 1990s.
But, now -- in the last six months I’ve bought 25 1080ti, 12 RX580, and 3 Vega - not to mention lesser cards in quantities too. That’s a tremendous delta for just one consumer!!! --- and I'm not alone.

You know AMD supports it because they made custom beta mining drivers that hash 25-30% faster than their mainstream drivers in late 2017 and then they implemented those changes (compute mode) into their regular mainstream gaming driver revisions. NVidia sure hasn’t made any effort to dissuade miners from buying their cards, and have even dabbled in releasing mining specific cards. Moreover, they get to sell cards that came out 2 years ago at FULL MSRP directly on their own NVidia site with no middlemen taking profit. BUT THEY LIMIT ORDERS TO 2 CARDS YOU SAY. So,? My co-worker buys cards nearly every day from NVidia.com with the same credit card and shipping address to either resell, or mine with, because they have no substantial cooldown period before you can order again. Does that sound like they really want to put the kabosh on people ordering multiples for mining or reselling? Or more like they just want to sell cards. I ordered six more 1080TI from a distributer. They told me my six cards would take 2-3 weeks + to come in because the distributers continually put the large orders ahead of the small orders – and many people were ordering 100 cards at a time. I called back a week later and he told me that they had about 3,000 cards back-ordered on every 1080TI they sold and that I should expect further delays. Don't tell me NVidia isn't loving this.

To put out this press release is utter nonsense. --- It’s similar lip service to when AMD said we are offering AMD hardware bundles (AMD Ryzen CPU, AMD Motherboards, and overpriced “free game” bundles “because we want to get our Vega cards into the hands of gamers!” (No, no, no, of course it has nothing to with selling more items in our AMD product line )

——Also, at the nearly the same time as AMD was selling Vega only in packages "to make sure gamers got them" - AMD was releasing mining specific drivers with giant performance gains strictly for mining purposes. To add insult to injury – these beta mining drivers were released —- while major gaming functions like FreeSync, EyeFinity, Bezel Correction, and even simple steady frame rates in ultra popular games like Player Unknown Battlegrounds were absolutely broken on the Vega cards for actual gamers. Frustrating to be sure (and the reason I sold my Vega's) ---- but hey --- these "gaming cards" can mine better than ever!!!


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These “gamers first” PR messages are false words from silver tongued foxes. Don’t be so weak-minded you fall for this. At the end of the day both companies are more than happy with the profits coming in right now!!!


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Expect 1180 to release at $800 MSRP. BUT Yep --- gamers come first!!! Gamers with deeeeeeeeep pockets that is.
 
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steakman1971 said:
If I was an investor of Nvidia, I'd be fine with miners buying up all the inventory. Just fine.
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I think Nvidia's trying to think more than one quarter ahead, not something investors are known for. The longer you starve gamers from having GPUs, that hurts their long term prospects overall. They don't want people jumping back to console and hurting their future sales in the long term. Or maybe because there are less gamers in play, that means weaker sales for the PC for 2018, which hurts development in the future. Like people said, theyr'e not actually doing anything, this is just lip service, but I think it is a legitimate concern for them also.
 
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The only way to solve this problem is to produce more graphics cards. Something only Nvidia has control of. That and AMD.
 
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