NVIDIA Coin Mining Performance Increases With Maxwell

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Everyone knows that, to get the most out of your *coin mining experience, you need to use an AMD powered GPU. Well, as PC Perspective tells it, that might not be the case anymore.

The biggest performance change we've seen yet has come with a new version of cudaMiner released yesterday. This new version (2014-02-18) brings initial support for the Maxwell architecture, which was just released yesterday in the GTX 750 and 750 Ti. With support for Maxwell, mining starts to become a more compelling option with this new NVIDIA GPU.
 
I still don't understand mining. Doesn't it cost more money to buy the hardware and run the rigs (electricity bill increases) than the currency eventually generates for the miner?
 
I'm intrigued to see what's going to happen when the ARMv8 cores get included on-die. In theory it should eliminate almost all of the CPU work being done in cudaminer, etc. Which should reduce total platform power usage.
 
The math is pretty easy for that, and you can nail that determination down pretty accurately based on your initial cost, Mhash/W, electricity $/kW, difficulty, currency price, and conversion rate.The main unknown variable is currency price fluctuations.That part is speculation. There's probably some late adopters getting pinched right now.

*edit* btw that was directed at Terpfan, had to walk away from the comp and bunch of replies came in in the meantime
 
The math is pretty easy for that, and you can nail that determination down pretty accurately based on your initial cost, Mhash/W, electricity $/kW, difficulty, currency price, and conversion rate.The main unknown variable is currency price fluctuations.That part is speculation. There's probably some late adopters getting pinched right now.

*edit* btw that was directed at Terpfan, had to walk away from the comp and bunch of replies came in in the meantime

I've never seen much in the way of good math on *coins, given how long it takes to mine just one.
 
I've never seen much in the way of good math on *coins, given how long it takes to mine just one.

You don't solo mine, but join a pool. With a few thousand people helping, the randomness of the coin generation rate normalizes out quickly, so the pool will provide a modestly consistent pay-out (which it divides up by contributed work).
 
The card is efficient, but you need a whole lot of them to be worthwhile.

Interesting to see how this developes...
 
But with a whole lot of them your overhead for motherboards, CPU, DRAM, connectors, etc. increase. The cost and mining rate of 1 x R9 290X is equivalent to 4 x 750 Ti. It's also dependent on how many 750 Ti GPUs Nvidia driver will recognize in the OS which is unknown at this time.
 
You don't solo mine, but join a pool. With a few thousand people helping, the randomness of the coin generation rate normalizes out quickly, so the pool will provide a modestly consistent pay-out (which it divides up by contributed work).

This. Solo mining is generally something only the very powerful or very uninitiated do. Almost everyone mines in a pool. The only people that really fail badly are the ones that don't do the math to figure out if it's going to work for them, or hit the bad side of a market fluctuation.
 
You know, as only being focused on the gaming side of this, I see the mining side as a good thing. We all know games these days are mainly focused on the lowest common denominator, that being the consoles. At 1080p there's 3-4 year old cards that are keeping up with the next gen titles. Going forward there's not much pressure for the video card market to advance technologies, except the people wanting to push higher resolutions.

The mining market on the other hand is going to keep the card manufactures pushing for more performance. We now have a budget card able to play most games at 1080p. So, until 4k becomes commonplace I see mining as being one of the major drivers in advancement going forward. Not to mention it's helping AMD's and now maybe Nvidia's bottom line.
 
well I cant see how the mining market can do a gamer any good, they're just pushing up the prices of the cards and flooding the 2nd hand market with a lot of nearly dead cards.
 
if the "best" mining card jumps between brands

in 1/2 to 1.5 years

I'll just pick up used mining cards that are within warranty then...

win win for miners and gamers!!
 
Care to elaborate?

1) Buy GPU(s)
2) Mine with GPU(s)
3) After X amount of time (where X is between weeks and months) you have mined enough coins to sell and pay for cost of the parts and electricity

then either
4) Keep mining and anything mined is pure profit (minus cost of electricity)
or
5) Stop mining and enjoy your free GPU
or
6) Sell GPU @ inflated prices to someone trying to do the same thing

Most folks are doing 4 right now. When spring/summer comes around and A/C season starts you'll likely see more of 5/6 assuming the market doesn't tank.

There's the whole speculation ("to the moon") stuff to. People will mine even when its not profitable if they think their coins will be worth more in the future. What's scary is the mess of folks mining dogecoin right now on CPUs alone- which actually ends up costing them money - simply because they can.
 
you really don't have to worry about 750 and 750 ti being bought up for mining. it doesn't make any sense in large volumes, 270x, 280x, 290 and 290x are still much better in that sense for mining farms.

For the individual who already has a box to throw one in as an HTPC, it makes sense, but that won't drive the price up, people buying 70-100 at a time will, which won't happen with this card since they will end up having to spend more on other hardware to get equivalent performance.

Big maxwell will be more appealing if it scales up.
 
An easy way to not kill the GPU market would be to have AMD and Nvidia release "mining" versions of their GPU's. That offer modest gaming performance but amazing mining performance or performance in the areas that are beneficial to things like mining.

That way us gamers get the gaming cards at normal prices while the crazies deal with that crazy shit and everyone wins. :)
 
An interesting point i read was that the 750/Ti's don't have 6pin connectors, and can not get power from a riser alone, so would be limited to only a few cards per board, loosing any advantage they had.
 
told u that maxwell spells doom for amd, now the last bastion of amd, the minimg, is taken as well.
 
This operates under the assumption the mining will be profitable for an indefinite period. I don't think this is the case, and for proof simply look at what happened to BTC itself. Now, initially, BTC mining was profitable via GPU; however what happened was ASICs were developed. Now. Let's be clear that an ASIC in the hand of an individual is generally worthless. However, what happened with BTC is that data centers were created in energy cheap countries such as China (by their Gov't, no less), Iceland, and various other countries - many of these data centers were solar or hydro powered depending on the country, in other words corporations got creative in terms of maximizing their output. And these were data centers housing over 10,000 ASICs that simply mined 24/7, and these data centers continually upgraded their hardware as to have the best ASICs possible. When these data centers were created on a wide scale, BTC mining via GPU became completely and utterly worthless.

Similarly, we know that scrypt mining ASICs are in the works. Some are even completed but they are not in mass production just yet. Just like BTC, it is impossible for an individual regular use to buy a scrypt ASIC and recover their investment. However, just like BTC, the real worry is when data centers are created in energy cheap countries specifically for scrypt mining. It happened with BTC and i'm sure it will happen with scrypt. There will be data centers with 10,000+ ASICs dedicated to doing nothing but hasing scrypt 24/7, and when that happens, GPU mining for scrypt will go bust.

Now the real question is WHEN This happens. I don't know. 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, 1 year, no idea. Personally, I hope it happens sooner rather than later so we can get back to using consumer level Radeons and Geforce cards for their design intent. PC gaming. That's what these cards were created for, and that is what their marketing is geared towards. PC gaming. Fuck this mining shit. The sooner it ends, the better.
 
An easy way to not kill the GPU market would be to have AMD and Nvidia release "mining" versions of their GPU's. That offer modest gaming performance but amazing mining performance or performance in the areas that are beneficial to things like mining.

That way us gamers get the gaming cards at normal prices while the crazies deal with that crazy shit and everyone wins. :)

Mining does not kill the GPU market. Do you think AMD or Nvidia cares who buys their GPUs? All they care about is that their GPUs are being purchased regardless of the reason and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
 
An easy way to not kill the GPU market would be to have AMD and Nvidia release "mining" versions of their GPU's. That offer modest gaming performance but amazing mining performance or performance in the areas that are beneficial to things like mining.

That way us gamers get the gaming cards at normal prices while the crazies deal with that crazy shit and everyone wins. :)

I think this might do the opposite. It would be like the opengl cad cards. Basically a gaming card with a different firmware, but the price is 5X higher.
 
Mining does not kill the GPU market. Do you think AMD or Nvidia cares who buys their GPUs? All they care about is that their GPUs are being purchased regardless of the reason and they are laughing all the way to the bank.

I don't necessarily agree. AMD isn't seeing the profits as you can still buy from sites like ShopBLT for close to MSRP. Most of the markup is going to the resellers and perhaps card makers. I'm of the opinion that this could kill PC gaming by making it cost prohibitive to get into PC gaming. It becomes problematic if people decide to stay with their old cards, move to consoles or simply buy used. If suddenly the new card market dried up due to either a huge used card inventory if mining is no longer profitable or ongoing prices rises on both sides(now that Maxwell returns may improve slightly), these companies could bow out completely, or at least move more manufacturing capability into other component markets. I can't imagine AMD not realizing it's not prudent to sacrifice long term security for short term explosive sales growth. Especially now that we were seeing a slight uptick in quality PC games.
 
you really don't have to worry about 750 and 750 ti being bought up for mining. it doesn't make any sense in large volumes, 270x, 280x, 290 and 290x are still much better in that sense for mining farms.

For the individual who already has a box to throw one in as an HTPC, it makes sense, but that won't drive the price up, people buying 70-100 at a time will, which won't happen with this card since they will end up having to spend more on other hardware to get equivalent performance.

Big maxwell will be more appealing if it scales up.

Unfortunately I think you underestimate the fanatical nature of bitcoin mining. Sense goes out the window when perceived easy money is concerned. :(
 
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It's a win-win situation for AMD as the prices on the mid to high end dGPUs will steer people into buying APUs or APUs cross fired with low end dGPUs. I'm a good example of that as my three newest boxes ended up being AMD GPU, APU and even CPU. :D
 
With fear that maybe Nvidia may end up having shortages (and price increases) themselves come higher end Maxwells later this year because of cryptocurrency mining, I am curious though on two things (primarily):

  1. Why aren't there other fabrication companies besides TSMC for AMD and Nvidia GPUs? Perhaps Global Foundries or someone on that level?

    My reasoning is this: If production can't keep up with demand, why not open another fabrication facility or add another company to help with production?
  2. If the Geforce and Radeon series are for gaming and the Quadro and Firepro are for compute and 3D rendering, and as others have asked in other threads in the last two weeks-- why not a dedicated mining card from both Nvidia and AMD?

    If you think about it, it does sound logical to go down this path. It'd seriously challenge ASIC manufacturers to keep up. Put a single dual-link DVI on the card, offer specifically tuned and binned GPUs, offer a BIOS editor that can be adjusted via Windows or Linux or the UEFI-equivalent for a GPU that one can select before booting into an OS, remove video encoding features and Crossfire/SLI support, remove the HDMI HDCP and onboard audio, and offer at most two GPUs per card that are not Crossfire/SLI-ed linked via a PLX PCI-Express bus since the mining software doesn't need them to be connected by Crossfire/SLI anyway.

    Also, it'd be a way to cash in on this because regardless what we think about cryptocurrency, even if one dies out, another will take its place no matter what. We're already seeing other encryption algorithms being used here-- adaptive n-factor, SHA-3, kecca, and possibly others I can't remember. People will mine for cryptocurrency no what you or I think about them, and there will be those that will be willing to make a market for them.
 
An easy way to not kill the GPU market would be to have AMD and Nvidia release "mining" versions of their GPU's. That offer modest gaming performance but amazing mining performance or performance in the areas that are beneficial to things like mining.

That way us gamers get the gaming cards at normal prices while the crazies deal with that crazy shit and everyone wins. :)

They'll run into the same problem that all of the companies making dedicated ASICs do: if you can make a product that plugs into the wall on one end and money comes out the other end, how much do you sell it for?

If all gaming cards become unavailable to gamers for gaming for a long enough time, then both AMD and Nvidia will be in an awkward position of marketing products for doing things that nobody uses them for, AND the PC gaming industry will crash because gamers can't get the hardware they need to game.

It would be like the North American video game crash of 1983, in which revenues dropped by 97 percent, except that it would be the fault of the video card makers for making the hardware unavailable, not the game makers for making lousy games. Yes, I'm pointing out the 1983 crash for those who believe the PC gaming market can't possibly crash and die; it most certainly can, if Nvidia and AMD allow it.
 
I think that CUDA mining, Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc are just the tip of the iceberg. Both Nvidia and AMD know they can produce a product that can beat a CPU at certain functions. In the future there will be more applications that can run on your video card. Heck I've been rendering video for youtube for years with my 7950's. Glad to see Nvidia finally taking notice and making a product that is going to push applications on the GPU even more. HSA from AMD is going to open this market even more.

Best thing that ever happened to PC gaming as we're destined to get more powerful cards in the future. This could push Intel and AMD to release more powerful CPUs to feed those cards as it's evident with Mantle that they are the weakest link.
 
The biggest threat facing PC gaming is the lack of any good games. Just retreads being walked out time and again. Most of the creativity is in the indie market and the GPU requirements there are practically nil.

Looking at the Steam survey, one would think there are hardly any high-end cards being used by gamers at all.
 
Coming Q4 2014 the GTX 880, $599 MSRP, $899 off the shelf. Only three available every 2 months.
 
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