According to a recent report, Nvidia is increasing the supply of GTX 1650 cards to the consumer desktop market after prioritizing the notebook GPU. This is good news. The GPU market is so overheated that we currently recommend readers to look at cards like the eight-year-old R9 290 or R9 290X if they need to buy one. Any improvement in this situation, including greater availability of low-cost cards for people to have something buying, is a positive development.
The increased availability of a state-of-the-art Turing without lightning tracking capability or a relaunched GTX 1050 Ti, however, is not exactly what PC games should offer. Supplies of Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs remain extremely tight, with recent reports from MDGs like Asus and MSI saying the situation has worsened. Some of these problems are allegedly caused by performance problems at Samsung, some by the scarcity of semiconductors driven by the pandemic and some by new demand in cryptocurrency mining. It is unclear how much responsibility should be assigned to each, but reports now indicate that the lack of GPU may not improve until 2022.
Shortages are tolerable in the short term. As long as your GPU doesn’t die all at once, it will continue to offer acceptable performance on older titles, and many people have a backlog of old games that have never played. In the short term, cryptocurrency mining is an annoyance. In the long run, it can be an existential threat to PC games as we know them since the invention of the GPU. I’m not arguing that PC games would die – I don’t see that happening – but it could change a lot, and not for the better.
When prices for a good or service rise above what the market can handle, people look for alternatives. In that case, the alternatives to PC games are consoles like the Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and cloud game services like Stadia or GeForce Now. The three consoles are suffering from their own shortages and scheduling problems, but the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are now much cheaper than a video card on eBay.
An RTX 3070 should be a $ 500 GPU. They are selling on eBay for between $ 1,200 and $ 1,700. An Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 will cost $ 750 to $ 850 based on a search for recently sold listings on eBay. As long as console prices continue to fall and GPUs do not, the gap will only widen.
This problem is somewhat aggravated by the radius tracking problem. At the moment, enabling ray tracing on an AMD or Nvidia GPU has a strong performance impact that is not always mitigated by 1080p. Both Ampere and RDNA2 offer more lightning tracking performance at a lower price than Nvidia debuted with Turing in 2018, but players who specifically want lightning tracking cards have to buy a higher price point if they also want one. acceptable performance. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X support out-of-the-box ray tracing at a much lower price than you would pay for Ampere or RDNA2.
These results from our analysis of the 6700 XT show how strong the beat can be. Enabling lightning tracking on an RTX 2080 or 6700 XT can decrease the frame rate depending on the game. Players who want lightning tracing, even at 1080p, need to buy a state-of-the-art GPU that can handle it.
What happens when PC gamers are unable to purchase new GPUs in the long run?
Not all PC players build their own hardware and not all builder games. But there is considerable overlap between players and the DIY market, especially if you include people who can buy an OEM PC, but upgrade the GPU. If the PC add-on card market continues this way, we’re looking to a future where paying OEM prices for component upgrades looks like the are option. This does not bode well for the DIY game market or for the CPU retail channel. If a sufficient number of players are prevented from purchasing updates, developers will respond by targeting the features that PCs have, not those they do not have.
It is tempting to say that this is a short-term problem that will solve itself, but this is the third lack of cryptocurrency in seven years. When we get to Pascal’s five-year anniversary in May, the GPU market will be overheated and overpriced for 29 of the 60 months. AMD and Nvidia may end up rolling out replacements for RDNA2 and Ampere without the current generation being widely and regularly available on the MSRP.
The high prices of the GPU do not end with PC games, but the sustained loss of access to cutting-edge 3D hardware would fundamentally change the types of games that we can play. One reason desktop GTX 1650 cards have a hell of a chance to stay around is that their 4 GB VRAM buffers and small core counts make them less likely targets for mining. PC games have driven the GPU market for decades, and now players are forced to hunt around their edges in search of junk that the cryptocurrency market doesn’t want.
In the worst case, where GPU prices remain high and players stay out of the market, we would see changes in the types of games that people release on the PC. There would be fewer AAA titles, but probably a thriving indie scene. One can even imagine AMD and Intel upgrading their integrated GPUs in an attempt to partially compensate.
The persistently high GPU prices for consumers can also push players to cloud services in large scale. That would still count as a destroyer of “PC games as we know them”, but it’s not the same thing as literally destroying PC games. There have been several events “as we knew it” in the past, including the invention of 3D acceleration itself.
I believe that GPU prices will fall. Pandemic scarcity will decrease. The crypto market will almost certainly implode again. But if the next five years look like 2016-2021, we’ll be writing about how GPUs spent less than half an entire decade available for sale on the MSRP in 2026. The best result, if cryptocurrency mining remains high and an irregular source of demand is that PC update cycles also become highly irregular and start when crypto mining is unprofitable, with at least some players switching to various cloud services for AAA titles. The worst case is that people completely abandon the hobby in favor of other devices.
In any case, we are facing a situation in which uncontrolled demand further slows down the pace of progression in PC games, stifling sales of new hardware to real players. Nobody wants to be holding the bag when the bubble pops and all that extra capacity is not needed. This leaves foundries concerned that it will be able to meet the needs of a cryptocurrency market that could shrink by 50-75 percent by next year or the following year.
The kind of damage I am referring to happens over the course of several years. It appears over time and will be illustrated by people who hold on to the cards for much longer than before. The most sinister aspect of our current situation is the implication that GPU prices can remain high for at least 15 months (counting from the launch of Ampere in September 2020). It is a longer period of time than any of the previous cryptocurrency bubbles lasted. It is enough time for people to get tired of waiting and buy something else.
Companies like Nvidia, AMD and Intel are earning huge amounts of money thanks to continued high demand, but don’t be fooled. AMD reported strong results for its Radeon business when the first cryptocurrency bubble inflated, but its market share was falling like a rock at the same time. In the case of crypto mining, what is good for GPU manufacturers and what is good for players seems to be two different things. Nothing that is happening on the market right now is good for PC games, if you like the way it works now.
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