What exactly is the deal with GPUs

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Suez Canal : "Look at me, I'm the Captain now".
Won't affect shipments from China to the US and Canda, but it could affect oil from the Mideast. Plus make worse the worldwide shortage of shipping containers.
 
LTT did a video on this the other day. Their industry insider said it's simply because people are buying them all, which means stock is zero, which means people can do whatever they want with pricing. PC sales were up 20% last year (for obvious reasons).

And because cards appear to be hard to get now, that just encourages people to buy when they see them because it's hard to get.

Remember what grocery stores looked like in March/April last year? There was always enough food to go around if people just bought what they needed, but the few morons out there ruined it for the rest of us normal people.
 
LTT did a video on this the other day. Their industry insider said it's simply because people are buying them all, which means stock is zero, which means people can do whatever they want with pricing. PC sales were up 20% last year (for obvious reasons).

And because cards appear to be hard to get now, that just encourages people to buy when they see them because it's hard to get.

Remember what grocery stores looked like in March/April last year? There was always enough food to go around if people just bought what they needed, but the few morons out there ruined it for the rest of us normal people.
So basically graphics cards are the new toilet paper & lysol wipes...
 
I have to wonder. Isn't there a finite number of people who want the newest GPU cards AND are willing to camp out. After X weeks, haven't all those people gotten their cards?

Not really, because there is a sizable crowd wanting 3080's and 3080's are apparently the rarest ones to ever see. At my local MC in Denver you see plenty of people camp out hoping to get one, and oh they only got 3070's today and a few 3090's. Guess we'll try again tomorrow. And so on and so forth it repeats. I think most people who wanted a 3070 and camped for one, got it. 3090's, same deal.

Seeing a ton of that right now.

But MC only serves a handful of areas, so its not entirely accurate to just judge people camping there and extrapolate that to the rest of the market. Not like people can camp out Best Buy. So anyone else looking for specific cards are sort of at the mercy of availability and bots to actually have a chance.
 
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How much is your time worth... and how much ultimately does that graphics card cost, if you camp out in front of a store for two days just to get it?
The only thing I would camp out for is food and especially water...if is was not readily available.
I saw a piece about Micro Center with two guys camping out for three days.
That's freakin' nuts.
 
How much is your time worth... and how much ultimately does that graphics card cost, if you camp out in front of a store for two days just to get it?
The only thing I would camp out for is food and especially water...if is was not readily available.
I saw a piece about Micro Center with two guys camping out for three days.
That's freakin' nuts.
Yeah, for me a graphics card was never worth camping out for. Maybe if I didn't have a job, but then my time is better served looking for one, not camping for a GPU.
 
Yeah, for me a graphics card was never worth camping out for. Maybe if I didn't have a job, but then my time is better served looking for one, not camping for a GPU.
Or even pay a bit of a scalper's "premium," if it comes to that.
 
How much is your time worth... and how much ultimately does that graphics card cost, if you camp out in front of a store for two days just to get it?
The only thing I would camp out for is food and especially water...if is was not readily available.
I saw a piece about Micro Center with two guys camping out for three days.
That's freakin' nuts.
Well cards are selling for 2-3x MSRP on the secondhand market so for most of them that's a price difference of $500+ minimum (in savings or scalping profit).
Let's say you camp out overnight for 8 hours to get an RTX 3080 TUF for $900 at MicroCenter, the going rate for that card on the market is $2,200... That price difference is $162/hr.

It would take ~180 hours, or 7.5 days, of waiting to reach minimum wage of $7.25. To reach the proposed minimum wage of $15/hr, it's 86 hours or 3.6 days. If you procure one 3080 per week, that's a yearly income of $67,000.

In other words it's a full time job.
 
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Months ago I was mildly interested in attempting to get a 3060Ti / 3070 / 6700XT but I'm not willing to put in so much effort just to pay extremely high prices, especially considering the rest of my desktop is so outdated that getting a new GPU would basically force me to replace the whole system, limiting my GPU budget. I was going to do a rebuild with Ryzen 5000 keeping my GPU & drives but Instead I ended up going for a Microcenter deal on a Powerspec-branded Clevo laptop with a 2070 Super that's a very modest upgrade from my Vega 64 (it's got them RT corez tho) but a huge platform & CPU upgrade from the rest of my system (FX CPU + DDR3, yikes) and it has Thunderbolt 3 so an eGPU is an option when/if used 3070s and 2080Tis drop to ok prices. I have a feeling a lot of people with older platforms are going to go this route with how expensive/unobtainable desktop GPUs are and how good affordable dGPU laptops have gotten. Now I'm not entirely saying the GPU shortage is accelerating the fall of desktops and rise of laptops but yeah I am saying that a little bit. I'm actually surprised that laptop prices haven't gone thru the roof yet... I halfway expected RTX 3060 laptops to be introduced at like $2000 because the hardware industry collectively has such a hostage captive market right now.
 
So basically graphics cards are the new toilet paper & lysol wipes...
If people bought them and then shoved them in the closet and didn't use or re-sell them I suppose. Otherwise it's not very likely to apply.
How much is your time worth... and how much ultimately does that graphics card cost, if you camp out in front of a store for two days just to get it?
I mean yah, at some point you could've just worked some overtime and bought the thing at a premium price vs. sitting around in front of the store hoping for your chance to get one at a lower price.
 
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Here is what is up with GPUs - parts lead times are astronomical. I don't make GPUs but the company I work for uses some of the same parts that are used on gpu pcbs, and we are being quoted 52wks lead time on things like memory ICs. These used to be 8-10 wks.
That's amazing. One of the things I read about the bicycle industry is that some business managers refuse to believe it's worth it to spend money to build more plants. So, they continue to manufacture around the clock. And even if they did add to capacity, it would take months, years to build those new plants anyway.
 
Here is what is up with GPUs - parts lead times are astronomical. I don't make GPUs but the company I work for uses some of the same parts that are used on gpu pcbs, and we are being quoted 52wks lead time on things like memory ICs. These used to be 8-10 wks.
I don't know much about semi-conductor manufacture, except that different parts use different processes. Also, only one or two foundries or manufacturers can make the most advanced parts. So my question is, are other foundries and manufacturers also quoting longer lead times?
 
This has turned into an absolute mess. I still can't buy a 3090. By the time I get my hands on one, this generation is going to be a year old, and then what's the point? I might as well wait for the next generation.
 
Yeah, for me a graphics card was never worth camping out for. Maybe if I didn't have a job, but then my time is better served looking for one, not camping for a GPU.
A job, or a family, or any other hobbies like exercise, hiking, gardening, woodworking, movie watching, reading...

These are all the things I’ve done instead of worrying about being unable to get a gpu 😂

It’s a bubble. It’ll burst. They always do. Just gotta wait it out doing something other than playing the newest games at the highest settings.
 
A job, or a family, or any other hobbies like exercise, hiking, gardening, woodworking, movie watching, reading...

These are all the things I’ve done instead of worrying about being unable to get a gpu 😂

It’s a bubble. It’ll burst. They always do. Just gotta wait it out doing something other than playing the newest games at the highest settings.
What she said. ^ ^ ^
 
Someone brought the open box rx570 4b for $300 at my MC today. It was marked down from $350... Seem there was a huge drop of low end GPUs at MC today. Mine had a lot of 710, 730 and 1030. They are normal prices it looks.
 
This has turned into an absolute mess. I still can't buy a 3090. By the time I get my hands on one, this generation is going to be a year old, and then what's the point? I might as well wait for the next generation.
I agree. I do 3d rendering. I am on a slow 2080. I am just going to set all my scenes up for render maybe render out a few of the fast easy ones but for the most part I am just going to wait for the 4080. Better still if it fits in a Dan A4 case I can take that bitch with me offshore and blast that 24/7 Fuck the 3080. No one is getting one this year and shit maybe 1/2 way into NEXT YEAR.
 
I've been thinking about how Intel might enter the market. In a way, they are already in the market, with both feet. The thing is, you have to get one of their CPUs with integrated graphics. I'm sure that market segment is a lot bigger than the markets for separate GPU cards. And the nice thing is, they own that market (as long as they can compete with AMD).

About AMD. What's to stop them from using their chiplet architecture to combine CPU and GPU on one chip, once the current production bottlenecks are behind us. That could be killer.
 
Someone brought the open box rx570 4b for $300 at my MC today. It was marked down from $350... Seem there was a huge drop of low end GPUs at MC today. Mine had a lot of 710, 730 and 1030. They are normal prices it looks.
You know what I don't get? This card has been available for 4 years, at LOWER prices than that. Why did someone decide at this exact moment, after all these years, they absolutely need this GPU for $300?
It's like every person on the planet has been mind controlled and given the immediate and insatiable urge to buy every GPU in existence. Where the hell are these people coming from.
 
I agree. I do 3d rendering. I am on a slow 2080. I am just going to set all my scenes up for render maybe render out a few of the fast easy ones but for the most part I am just going to wait for the 4080. Better still if it fits in a Dan A4 case I can take that bitch with me offshore and blast that 24/7 Fuck the 3080. No one is getting one this year and shit maybe 1/2 way into NEXT YEAR.
How much slow is that ? You won't get more than the double on a 3090. The main interest is 24GB, but a Titan RTX has got them too. My best bet, for rendering, people should get a 3060 RTX if they still have something slower, but 2080 is not slow. A scene that renders as fast on a 2080 and at better quality on a 3090 are so close in quality that the 3090 doesn't really count, but more the guy on the keyboard, but some scenes and some render engines need the Vram and 24GB is much better.
 
How much slow is that ? You won't get more than the double on a 3090. The main interest is 24GB, but a Titan RTX has got them too. My best bet, for rendering, people should get a 3060 RTX if they still have something slower, but 2080 is not slow. A scene that renders as fast on a 2080 and at better quality on a 3090 are so close in quality that the 3090 doesn't really count, but more the guy on the keyboard, but some scenes and some render engines need the Vram and 24GB is much better.
When you are rendering grains of sand or any doing any animations in houdini like fire or water forget about it. It just take hours on hours. How ever looking at the blender tests the 3080 is 50% faster. Yes 50%. Now I do have octane render and RS render and RS is faster and it can get shit done but is still slow on some things. You can optimize it way better to be faster and I do but shit man. I render stuff out at a resolution of 3840x2160 sometimes higher on stills and the time just goes through the roof.
 
When you are rendering grains of sand or any doing any animations in houdini like fire or water forget about it. It just take hours on hours. How ever looking at the blender tests the 3080 is 50% faster. Yes 50%. Now I do have octane render and RS render and RS is faster and it can get shit done but is still slow on some things. You can optimize it way better to be faster and I do but shit man. I render stuff out at a resolution of 3840x2160 sometimes higher on stills and the time just goes through the roof.
Maybe you need a "render farm." :rolleyes:
 
Wait, can you do that? Maybe I should "loan" out my "render" farms?

Wasn't Jim from Adored trying to start a distributed computing service that would essentially let gamers rent time on their hardware for render work? I thought that seemed like a great idea, but it's been at least a year and I haven't heard anything else become of it.

I'd happily sell shares to creatives.
 
Wasn't Jim from Adored trying to start a distributed computing service that would essentially let gamers rent time on their hardware for render work? I thought that seemed like a great idea, but it's been at least a year and I haven't heard anything else become of it.

I'd happily sell shares to creatives.
Difficult to do; the software that currently exists for that has extensive licensing fees, and some control and management issues outside of the DC.
 
Out of curiosity - do you ever notice some textures taking a while to show up as hi-res? I definitely see texture popping from low-res to hi-res depending on the game (it was very obvious in Gears 5). You only have .5 GB more of usable memory at full speed than my 1060 3GB, so either that half a gig just makes enough difference - which I doubt, considering Pascal's better memory compression, we probably have similar usable amounts of VRAM - or it's your 256bit bus vs my 192bit one. 232gbsp may actually make the difference vs 192gbps for memory, perhaps your card clears the bar just barely, whereas mine is a tad too slow and is dragged down enough to become noticeable.
It would either be the game engine that has issues with pop in textures, or possibly that the card is just struggling to keep up. You would have to compare with someone that has one of your games that you're experiencing issues in that could validate wether or not the pop in is an issue. Send me a direct message with a list of games you have that pop in is noticeable and I'll run some of them with my 3090.
I wouldn't trust the information from Tomshardware anymore. If anything it is going to be a repeat of something a week old from another website. They just 2 days ago started discussing the HDMI dummy plug for the 3060 for example.
Yeah, Toms has been questionable for a long time, but when one of their writers penned the 2080 article, and said that you should just buy the card, even though there were no games to use RTX in at launch, and the card was significantly more expensive than the 1080, people wanted to riot. A lot of what the article said actually showed the case that it wasn't a significant improvement from the previous gen, and that you couldn't even use the RTX part of it. His summary pretty much went against what was pointed out in the article. Nvidia tends to get the response they want by either buying out the website and giving them paid ads, premium access to hardware, and notoriety, however if you pen something against them, they cut you off completely, and black list you.
I got the latest sale email from Bestbuy, of course nothing in stock, but the cust rep said they are expecting nvidias Apr 5 - 10, no specifics on vendors quantities, I was asking about the evga gforce 3080 FTW for $899. not a great price, but not silly like the 3090's. They may be getting more than just evga 3080's, but the cust rep wouldn't get specific.
Was the rep talking about online purchases? I haven't seen that they were selling any in the stores yet.
Not really, because there is a sizable crowd wanting 3080's and 3080's are apparently the rarest ones to ever see. At my local MC in Denver you see plenty of people camp out hoping to get one, and oh they only got 3070's today and a few 3090's. Guess we'll try again tomorrow. And so on and so forth it repeats. I think most people who wanted a 3070 and camped for one, got it. 3090's, same deal.

Seeing a ton of that right now.

But MC only serves a handful of areas, so its not entirely accurate to just judge people camping there and extrapolate that to the rest of the market. Not like people can camp out Best Buy. So anyone else looking for specific cards are sort of at the mercy of availability and bots to actually have a chance.
I've been thinking that Nvidia must be producing as many 3090s as they can, because if you can't find a 3080, you might as well buy a 3090 as it's about the same as scalper 3080 prices. The card is significantly more expensive and I'm sure they'd rather get the increased sales volume from the halo product. They've also been holding a LOT of 3080 chips from what i've heard around the net, in anticipation of the 3080ti launch that got delayed from November all the way to may.
I don't know much about semi-conductor manufacture, except that different parts use different processes. Also, only one or two foundries or manufacturers can make the most advanced parts. So my question is, are other foundries and manufacturers also quoting longer lead times?
Pretty much all chip makers are getting slammed with orders right now. Older nodes like 14 and higher are used in various appliances and other goods, and are in demand as much as the 7nm chips.
This has turned into an absolute mess. I still can't buy a 3090. By the time I get my hands on one, this generation is going to be a year old, and then what's the point? I might as well wait for the next generation.
I was in the same boat till I found one locally on craigslist at MSRP. If you keep looking eventually you'll get lucky, but the wait is depressing beyond comprehension. Check out some of the bot scrapers on discord, I see a lot of people landing cards when they drop there. Here's a pretty good one:
https://discord.gg/atr
When you are rendering grains of sand or any doing any animations in houdini like fire or water forget about it. It just take hours on hours. How ever looking at the blender tests the 3080 is 50% faster. Yes 50%. Now I do have octane render and RS render and RS is faster and it can get shit done but is still slow on some things. You can optimize it way better to be faster and I do but shit man. I render stuff out at a resolution of 3840x2160 sometimes higher on stills and the time just goes through the roof.
I moved from a 5700xt to a 3090 and the drop in render times is really impressive. Some programs prefer amd cards, but Nvidia seems to lead in most areas. The extra memory is also extremely useful for large projects.
 
The BestBuy rep was an online rep in a chat window, I was looking at the email and was asking when any would be in stock, they said 5 Apr at the earliest, I was assuming online. No idea about in-store.
 
I've been thinking that Nvidia must be producing as many 3090s as they can, because if you can't find a 3080, you might as well buy a 3090 as it's about the same as scalper 3080 prices. The card is significantly more expensive and I'm sure they'd rather get the increased sales volume from the halo product. They've also been holding a LOT of 3080 chips from what i've heard around the net, in anticipation of the 3080ti launch that got delayed from November all the way to may.
Yeah I got that impression too. 3080's were also what all the miners were buying up.
 
Mining profits are back up again today after a little slump the last few days.
 
I'm excited for the price creep/jump after all this is over </sarcasm>

marketing is surely taking notice of what people are willing to pay.
 
without knowing all the fine print, i say that this a good thing for the crypto space in the perspective of adoption. a big player like PayPal making it "easier" for the common person to buy/spend crypto will only boost and push us closer to mainstream acceptance.

i remember someone saying "bitcoin should be spent and not bought/sold". hang on to your bitcoins until the time comes when we can start to openly spend them instead of trading them.

as for GPUs, i say it's all each other's fault. we are the ones who made the market what it is. if everyone would stop buying at these absurd prices then the price will come down. if people will continue to pay these prices then the market will continue to meet people's demands. if you don't like the prices at the store, quit shopping there, and the store will either go out of business or lower their prices to move inventory.
 
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I'm not sure if I would trust PayPal with my crypto data.
PayPal doesn’t let you send your crypto you buy in it’s system to your own external wallet. For small amounts I trust PayPal. For big amounts of crypto I want to safeguard my own private keys on a hardware wallet. I don’t have my long term savings account money in PayPal. Nor do I want my long term crypto holdings in paypal.
 
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I'm sure most recall my posts here back in Nov / Dec when I was building both my kids thier very first computers each, as well as upgrading mine.

Bought the kids 2 RTX 3070's and myself 1 RTX 3080 plus all the other misc. parts needed for the builds. Got all that at my local Microcenter just walking in bought them at normal price. No waiting in line or dealing with scalpers.

My point, I recall reading so many articles back then where all these hardware sites were practically promising come late Feb / early March stock should be plenty and much easier to pick up a new high end card and by April total availability.

I have not paid attention to hardware stuff since I built my computers back now four months ago, so it seems like the situation hasn’t gotten better like they expected? Is it still just as bad as it was in the Fall?
 
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