Hardware & Technical Good news from the GPU market

Iskariot

Iskariot
My current GTX980 seems to be able to run everything with great ease.
The current, already waning, seasonal VR hype has left me cold.
I do not expect to need a new card in the coming few years.
I think I will skip a few more generations and buy the GTX 3090 when it gets discounted. :)
 
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Pville_Piper

Pville_Piper
I kinda find it funny that you single out NVidia... Their FE series price was never raised...

I hope the OP is correct, I'm seeing more availability, but the price is holding high on most GPUs.
 
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GJ51

GJ51
It's still early, but it looks like we're past peak prices for the current cycle.

If new production of the next models are ready for Q3-4 release and inventories of current models are higher than anticipated, there's a good chance there will be a lot of downward price pressure probably sometime around the end of Q2. Crypto-mining will likely make a bit of a rebound at some point, but even so it may come too late for miners to invest in current models in stock knowing that more bang for the buck is close to release.

Add that to the current state of CPU confusion and it still looks like it's a bit early to buy new hardware until things clarify a bit more. Intel has hinted new designs in gen 9 that address Spectre/Meltdown and as much as I like what I see with the recent Ryzen upgrades, it's not Zen 2 which may arrive late 2018.

We should have a much clearer picture of the hardware landscape toward the end of this year. For now, I'll keep my powder dry in anticipation of getting more value from my next hardware investment later.

I'm looking to build 2 new high end systems when the time is right.
 

Zak Gordon

Zak Gordon
Patrick_68000 said:
It's great news that the GPU shipments fall by 40%
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Indeed it is. Does that mean the bitcoin craze is levelling out/dropping? As that seemed to be the main fuel for the crazy price hikes. I'm glad that gamers have hunkered down and decided to wait out the storm, it seems the message has been received :)
 

Necronaught

Necronaught
With 7 year old systems rocking Intel's gen 2 still banging out high fps in modern games and mediocre GPU's rinsing games at 1080. Add to that gamer's that are used to getting their music and movies for free. Did Nvidea and AMD not predict gamers would hold off? Perhaps that is what they were hoping that once the trend wears off then gamers will return to pick up the slump in sales, albeit at lower prices.
 

Pville_Piper

Pville_Piper
MickyG1982 said:
40% off a GTX 1060 would be a nice upgrade for my aging rig - Oh the wishful thinking!
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Maybe it will then be at "list" price? [sour]

Zak Gordon said:
Indeed it is. Does that mean the bitcoin craze is levelling out/dropping? As that seemed to be the main fuel for the crazy price hikes. I'm glad that gamers have hunkered down and decided to wait out the storm, it seems the message has been received
Click to expand...


There is a new bitcoin mining machine coming out that will outperform GPU mining by a considerable margin.
​
 
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Morbad

Morbad
MickyG1982 said:
40% off a GTX 1060 would be a nice upgrade for my aging rig - Oh the wishful thinking!
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40% reduction in demand isn't likely to result in a 40% reduction in price at least not in the short term.

Pville_Piper said:
I kinda find it funny that you single out NVidia... Their FE series price was never raised...
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Neither AMD, NVIDIA, nor the majority of their board partners have ever raised prices.

It's distributors and retailers further down the chain that have been responding to, and profiting from, increased demand.

Zak Gordon said:
Does that mean the bitcoin craze is levelling out/dropping?
Click to expand...

A significant portion of the elevated demand was for Ether mining operations and Bitmain is taking pre-orders for an ETH mining ASIC that should match the very best GPU setups in performance per watt and have an initial cost of about 20% of a GPU setup of equivalent hashrate. This is making miners hesitant to layout elevated prices for GPUs.

Crypto prices have also been depressed for the last month or two and there is a new GPU product cycle upcoming.

Anyway, since GPU manufacturers seem to have an inordinate amount of difficulty predicting and reacting to demand, it would probably be wise to jump on a new card as soon as you see prices fail, as they could easily become scarce again.
 

Pville_Piper

Pville_Piper
Morbad said:
Neither AMD, NVIDIA, nor the majority of their board partners have ever raised prices.

It's distributors and retailers further down the chain that have been responding to, and profiting from, increased demand.
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No, that 's demonstrably incorrect. EVGA, which I think about the only manufacture to sell directly to the public, raised their prices considerably. Several distributers have also stated that card manufactures raised their prices as well. Also, though secondary, ram shortages and prices also affected the price of GPUs. I think somewhere late last year that they expected the price to rise about $40 due to the shortages. Those early reports also said that they expected NVidia to absorb most of the cost but AMD couldn't afford to. How much mining exacerbated this is not known or I haven't seen anything about it.

Edit: As far as the difficulty in reacting to the sudden increase demand there is 3 factors at play here...


  1. Modern manufacturing estimates demand and sets production goals and the purchasing of parts based on these assumptions. The suppliers, based on this, allot production time for the parts. The issue comes from the fact that component manufactures produce parts for many manufactures to fill up the available production capacity of the plant to keep it profitable and maximize production. As a result, there is very little excess capacity that a manufacture can allocate to increased demands by one of it's customers.
  2. Ram is in short supply and getting a large increase would be problematical.
  3. Both NVidia and AMD are getting ready to come out with new products, increasing production on existing products is difficult to do when you are trying to switch production over to new products.
 
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Morbad

Morbad
Pville_Piper said:
No, that 's demonstrably incorrect. EVGA, which I think about the only manufacture to sell directly to the public, raised their prices considerably. Several distributers have also stated that card manufactures raised their prices as well. Also, though secondary, ram shortages and prices also affected the price of GPUs. I think somewhere late last year that they expected the price to rise about $40 due to the shortages. Those early reports also said that they expected NVidia to absorb most of the cost but AMD couldn't afford to.
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NVIDIA sell cards direct to consumers and their prices have remained fixed. Most cards are out of stock, but I never saw any price increases, and it was possible to get Titan Xps for less than what many places were trying to get for 1080Tis until very recently. DRAM prices have increased, but even adding $40 dollars to the BoM of a high-end card doesn't come close to explaining 50-100% increases over MSRP/release prices.

Maybe AIBs have raised prices to compensate for DRAM shortages, but I'd still be very surprised if more than a small fraction of the increase consumers are seeing is coming from that far up the supply chain.

Pville_Piper said:
How much mining exacerbated this is not known or I haven't seen anything about it.
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Probably not as much as some people would claim, but it's definitely had a significant impact on demand, especially since it seems supply hasn't grown at all.

https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-rel...-in-q4-cryptocurrency-provides-smaller-offset

Something like 10% of AMD's entire Q4 17 revenue was from cryptomining.

Pville_Piper said:
  1. Modern manufacturing estimates demand and sets production goals and the purchasing of parts based on these assumptions. The suppliers, based on this, allot production time for the parts. The issue comes from the fact that component manufactures produce parts for many manufactures to fill up the available production capacity of the plant to keep it profitable and maximize production. As a result, there is very little excess capacity that a manufacture can allocate to increased demands by one of it's customers.
  2. Ram is in short supply and getting a large increase would be problematical.
  3. Both NVidia and AMD are getting ready to come out with new products, increasing production on existing products is difficult to do when you are trying to switch production over to new products.
Click to expand...

All true, but I can't help but feel that they've been overly conservative with demand estimates and that this is a large part of the supply issue. Hopefully, they'll have some analysts pay a bit more attention to emerging markets this upcoming generation.
 
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