GPU hasnt been profitable to mine for many years now.

People just keep parroting anti-crypto talking points for years without actually knowing what’a going on

To be clear, 99% of the crypto space is a scam. But to blame them for GPU shortages and high prices is just misinformation

Still plenty of fun to be had with new GOG mods, etc.

7900xtx is 24 gb, the 9700 pro has 32 gb as far as high end consumer/prosumer goes.

The AI Pro isn’t even availible! And 32GB is not enough anyway.

I think you underestimate how desperate ML (particularlly LLM) tinkerers are for VRAM; they’re working with ancient MI50s and weird stuff like that. If AMD had sold the 7900 with 48GB for a small markup (instead of $4000), AMD would have grassroots support everywhere because thats what devs would spend their time making work. And these are the same projects that trickle up to the MI325X and newer.

I was in this situation: I desperately wanted a non Nvidia ML card awhile back. I contribute little bugfixes and tweaks to backends all the time; but I ended up with a used 3090 because the 7900 XTX was just too expensive for ‘only’ 24GB + all the fuss.

There’s lingering bits of AMD support everywhere: vulkan backends to popular projects, unfixed rocm bugs in projects, stuff that works but isn’t optimized yet with tweaks; the problem is AMD isnt’ making it worth anyone’s while to maintain them when devs can (and do) just use 3090s or whatever.

They kind of took a baby step in this direction with the AI 395 (effectively a 110GB VRAM APU, albeit very compute light compared to a 7900/9700), but it’s still $2K, effectively mini PC only, and kinda too-little-too-late.

Profitability of Bitcoin mining is dependent on the value of Bitcoin, which has more than doubled in the last 12 months. It’s true that large scale miners have moved on from GPUs to purpose designed hardware, but GPUs and mining hardware are mutually dependent on a lot of the same limited resources, including FABs.

You are right that crypto doesn’t drive the GPU market like it used to in the crypto boom, but I think you are underestimating the lingering impact. I would also not rule out a massive Bitcoin spike driven by actions of the Trump.p administration.

I will never get another AMD card after my first one just sucked ass and didn’t ever work right.

I wanted to try a Intel card but I wasn’t even sure if I could find linux drivers for it because they weren’t on the site for download and I couldn’t find anything specifying if their newer cards even worked on linux.

So yeah, Nvidia is the only viable company for me to buy a graphics card from

Profitability of Bitcoin mining is dependent on the value of Bitcoin

No it isn’t. It’s driven by the supply of miners and demand of transactions. Value of bitcoin is almost entirely independent

ASICs, which are used to mine Bitcoin are using very different chips than modern GPUs. Ethereum is the one that affected the GPU market, and mining is no longer a thing for Ethereum

A massive Bitcoin spike would not affect the GPU market in any appreciable way

Crypto mining is pretty dumb, but misinformation helps no one

Most people are buying Nvidia because that’s what’s commonly recommended on reviews. “Want to use AI? Buy Nvidia! Want the latest DX12+ support? Buy Nvidia! Want to develop videogames or encode video? Buy Nvidia! Want to upgrade to Windows 11? Buy Nvidia!” Nonstop Nvidia adverts everywhere, with tampered benchmarks and whatnot. Other brands’ selling points aren’t well known and the general notion is that if it’s not Nvidia it sucks.

From what I can find, even though a lot of FreeSync monitors support at least partially G-Sync, the opposite seems rather rare, since G-Sync is fully proprietary and hardware-based. I’ve found a couple more modern monitors that officially support both but they seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

That kind of comment always feels a bit weird to me; are you basing AMD’s worth as a GPU manufacturer on that one bad experience? It could just as well have been the same on an Nvidia chip, would you be pro-AMD in that case?

On the Intel part, I’m not up to date but historically Intel has been very good about developing drivers for Linux, and most of the time they are actually included in the kernel (hence no download necessary).

Wait wait wait… If I push your theory a bit, it then means that Nvidia could crush AMD at any time, becoming a full fledged monopoly (and being able to rake in much more profits), but they are… Deciding not to? Out of the goodness in their hearts maybe?

That kind of comment always feels a bit weird to me; are you basing AMD’s worth as a GPU manufacturer on that one bad experience?

Absolutely, if a company I am trying for the first time gives me a bad experience, I will not go back. That’s me giving them a chance, and AMD fucked up that chance and I couldn’t even get a refund for like a $200 card. Choosing to try a different option resulted in me wasting time and money, and it pushed back my rig working for half a year until i could afford a working card again which really pissed me off.

I didn’t know that about intel cards, I’ll have to try one for my next upgrade if I can find on their site that they are supported.

No shame in that; AMD and Nvidia traded between ‘optimal buys’ forever. There were times where buying AMD was not the best idea, like with how amazing the Nvidia 900/1000 series was while AMD Vega was very expensive.

Others, it wasn’t obvious at the time. The old AMD 7000 series was pricey at launch, for instance, but aged ridiculously well. A 7950 would still function alright these days.

This market’s such a caricature now though. AMD/Intel are offering these obvious great values, yet being looked over through pure ignorance; I can’t remember things ever being like this, not all the way back to Nvidia Fermi at least.

I’m well aware. I’m one such tinkerer. Its a catch 22. No good software support means that no one really wants to use it. And since no one really wants to use it, amd doesn’t make stuff. Also amd is using much denser memory chips so an easy double in vram capacity isn’t as possible.

It took them a few months iirc to get proper support for 9070 in rocm.

At the end of the day I think it is this simple. CUDA works and developers use it so users get a tangible benefit.

AMD comes up with a better version of CUDA and you have the disruption needed to compete.

What else would a consumer base things on except their own experiences? Not like it’s a rare story either.

Hardware Lumen looks way better than only software

It’s still infinitely faster than ‘raytracing’ though.

ASICs and GPUs do share significant dependencies in the semiconductor supply chain. Building FABS fast enough to keep up with demand is difficult and resource constrained, both by expertise and high quality materials.

You are wrong about the market value of Bitcoin’s impact on the profitability of Bitcoin mining.

Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable?

Changes in technology and the creation of professional mining centers have affected profitability for individual Bitcoin miners.

Investopedia (www.investopedia.com)

Another thing to consider is that many coins still use proof of work, and an ASIC designed for one might not work for others. Some miners (especially the most scammy ones) choose the flexibility to switch coins at will. That doesn’t change the fact that ASIC now dominates, but GPUs do still have a share, especially for some of the newer scam coins.

I know it’s not indicative of the industry as a whole, but the Steam hardware survey has Nvidia at 75%. So while they’re still selling strong, as others have indicated, I’m not confident they’re getting used for gaming.

I don’t know, real world data maybe? Your one, or 2, or even 10 experiences are very insignificant statistically speaking. And of course it’s not a rare story, people who talk online about a product are most usually people with a bad experience, complaining about it, it kinda introduces a bias that you have to ignore. So you go for things like failure rates, which you can find online.

By the way, it’s almost never actually a fault from AMD or Nvidia, but the actual manufacturer of the card.

Edit: Not that I care about Internet points, but downvoting without a rebuttal is… Not very convincing