In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.
Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value.
Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose.
More power to Nvidia. If I could make the decision the hashrate of any cryptomining on gaming cards would be 0. Let the crypto-bros buy the crypto cards and leave the gaming cards for people who are actually going to enjoy them.
We shouldn't need to limit hardware for specific usages, but we already see that people won't stop themselves from wasting energy and accelerating world climate if this gives you more wealth and power.
I'd also be up for limiting all military weapons from being so destructive across the globe for example. It's mind blowing how we managed to create so many harmful tools in such a small time span of our history.
But I agree with you when the use case is actually useful for humanity.
Likening Crypto Mining to military weapons is ridiculous. Not to mention you as those taking your position on crypto often to have painfully failed Chesterton's Fence.
Woah there. I don’t like the crypto culture and mindset as the next guy, but there are plenty of other options to preventing use case you presented. If systems aren’t closed enough already…
And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.
I've noticed a lot of directed outrage as a result of people unable to find a MSRP graphics card that I would almost treat as funny if it wasn't so scary to see how the internet culture changes. I can't speak to the motivations of grandparent or other single individuals, but I have noticed in other communities a lot of moral arguments being used very selectively that reminds me of my sociology class on the origin of the drug war and how moral outrage at drug use and the harms of drugs were pushed as the reasons for banning drugs, yet such logic was not consistently applied to drugs based on their actual harm to a community.
I think I get what you are saying, but I think it’s less of a social problem, and more of a resource scarcity problem that humanity isn’t used to solving.
As much as people are aware of resources being limited on our planet, rarely anybody actively thinks that it’s already becoming a reality, yet it seems like extreme addiction to technology has only just started.
"I'm just gonna artificially raise price of this limited resource even though there already exists hardware specifically made for me, but after the next generation comes out I can re-sell this one to some sucker"
If you don't see anything wrong with that then that's about it. I really hope US or China or someone is going to regulate cryptocurrencies to shit so cryto-bros can stop destroying the planet and normal people can again afford GPUs.
I am probably not that informed on who does what artificially and intentionally, but I still don’t see a point in justifying gaming usage over crypto usage. As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes.
Apart from the ability to check the GPU health, GPU providers could easily implement some hardware “calculation counter” or design specific solution so resell value could be more easily evaluated.
> As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes.
gamers frequently are, you just described a console.
Yes, I did. Intentionally. If you forbid consumer GPUs for both sides, limit or cripple the gaming tech development in a sense it offers lower variety of products, you are going to see a lower demand for gaming in general. Thus, “saving the planet”.
It’s not something I propose, but giving hypothetical example of what would really be fair for both sides
If video games are that important to you buy a video game console. The availability there is also bunk and has nothing to do with mining - claiming something which uses energy is automatically 'bad' is silly and relies on common ignorance and frustration. Cars use energy, lights use energy, video games use energy - crypto is new and you don't understand it past that fact that it uses energy so you can't tolerate it. If you don't want to get rid of everything which uses considerable energy then you need to determine the value of each thing individually, and if you say crypto is worthless, you should have a non-circular reason for that claim. Clearly the market disagrees with you.
Conversely miners aren't entitled to cheaper video cards just because they built a business around consumer hardware.
Companies seeking to maximize their revenue is very much the nature of the free market. It's their business, you don't get to tell them how to run it. You're a customer in a market, if you don't find the product acceptable then you can go elsewhere. There are competitors offering products as well, and as a whole this determines a market rate.
If your business is no longer profitable (or profitable enough) paying the market rate, then you go out of business. That is also how the market works. Many, many businesses would be far more profitable if they could force their suppliers to cut their revenue streams.
Miners have responded to the shift in the power dynamic by throwing a tantrum and attacking and blackmailing their suppliers. Bioshock nailed it: laissez-faire is great when you're the one on top, but as soon as someone else out-competes you, or exerts their own market leverage, it's an unfair and ridiculous imposition on your own right to profit, and it's time to shout and flip the game board.
This is exactly what you see with the whole "gamers aren't entitled to cheap cards" thing you said, that was great when miners had more market power than gamers, but everyone leaves off the whole "and miners aren't entitled to cheap cards either", which is equally true. Suppliers are taking note of that market power and moving to take a cut of the revenue for themselves. Customers are free to re-shuffle to new suppliers if they no longer find the terms acceptable. And that's how the free market works.
As always - businesses that are not agile enough to adapt, will "exit the market", and create room for newer, healthier businesses.
And remember, this has been status quo for a long time. If your business depended on CAD, it probably sucked when ATI and NVIDIA started releasing workstation products and artificially limiting CAD performance on gaming cards. The world moved on though.
> Miners have responded to the shift in the power dynamic by throwing a tantrum and attacking and blackmailing their suppliers. Bioshock nailed it: laissez-faire is great when you're the one on top, but as soon as someone else out-competes you, or exerts their own market leverage, it's an unfair and ridiculous imposition on your own right to profit, and it's time to shout and flip the game board.
#notAllMiners
All you're saying is that businesses should sell to whoever makes them the most profit - so how does that explain Nvidia cutting value and lowering the price of their cards to sell to gamers rather than miners?
Seeing as Nvidia agrees with me, I think you are wrong. In any case the sales have started to drop so if Nvidia doesn't do anything after crypto fad ends they'll be out of business since people aren't buying their GPUs anymore.
> And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.
As usual the gaming crowd is utterly lacking in self-awareness.
"Hey, those crypto guys need to stop doing dumb things with GPUs so me and my friends can use that fancy hardware to waste hours of our lives pretending to be soldiers and race-car drivers on our computers in the basement"
Say what you will about the crypto crowd, at least they know people think they're ridiculous.
That's how the market works though. Your AMD 290X had artificial performance bottlenecks created (gimped FP64, driver performance limiter for enterprise software, etc) so that AMD could sell more Radeon WX cards. Your AMD APU has ECC artificially disabled so that AMD can sell more Ryzen Pro APUs. Your Epyc has its overclocking controls artificially disabled. etc etc. Those are accepted and normal practices to determine "what you can do with the hardware you paid for" in the industry.
Miners are just mad that they got a free ride for a lot of years and are now being shifted to their own segment to try and control the infinite demand they tend to periodically create. But they are a money-making asset in a business, nobody cried a tear when AMD and NVIDIA forced Raytheon to pay a premium to buy Quadros to run their CAD software at the full performance levels the hardware is capable of.
Also, generally speaking this arrangement is beneficial for consumers: if you outlawed artificial segmentation tomorrow, companies aren't going to hugely lower their prices and give up all that revenue from the enterprise market, they are going to raise prices in the consumer market. The alternative to gimped Celeron chips isn't that you get Xeon capability for Celeron prices, it's that you pay much closer to Xeon prices for your celeron. Which is like, several times as much.
That R&D has to be paid for somewhere, and margins are not all that huge considering the total lifecycle (the chips are cheap once you make them, but the R&D for the first chip costs billions). You can't just give up 80% of your enterprise revenue and make a go of it. If we really did have Xeon for Celeron prices, the alternative would be much longer product cycles and other belt-tightening in the R&D department. The beige box market has a huge business component too and they won’t have any qualms about an extra $200 on every cpu if that’s what it costs. It’s just gonna suck personally for you as a consumer.
Consumers are the “price sensitive” market that benefits from price discrimination, in this instance, and product segmentation is how you allow that. Take that away and those price-sensitive markets are the ones that will pay more, because business pricing is very inelastic and quantities are very large. They don’t care about you buying one celeron every 5 years as much as the business who buys 1000 office desktops every 3 years.
Wouldn't that just end up increasing the difficulty of mining in the long term since it would all be opensource? I feel like any advantage they get by patching the software would be short lived with many people following suit, but I could 100% be wrong about that.
