[GTALUG] Has the graphics-card world gone mad?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| [GTALUG] Has the graphics-card world gone mad?

Yes.

For example, I've bought a couple ofAMD rx570-class video cards over the 
last two or three years.  Each with 8G of RAM.  $200 each, roughly.

I recently saw a used one being offered for $500! These are obsolete!  I 
ask the vendor if he was serious; he replied "yes, look at other folks 
prices."

Insanity.

The common wisdom (until the chip shortage became a meme) was that a lot 
of people in the US took their covid stimulus cheques and spent them on 
upgrading their rigs.  I have no idea if this is a too-good-to-fact-check 
story or it is reality.

There did seem to be a disruption in the shipping between Asia and North 
America, but video cards are so high price / mass ratio that that should 
not be a problem.

Mining has gone crazy again.  It's so crazy that apparently even 
less-than-optimal cards are being grabbed.  But I don't actually know if 
this is just a myth.

Perceived shortage brings on hoarding.  That's going on for sure.

Everyone building video cards wants to use TSMC's 7nm process.  There's 
a bottleneck for sure.  It should be possible to build mid-range GPUs with 
10nm, 12nm or 14nm, I would think.


| I made the mistake that I might want to upgrade my video card. I have a
| Radeon RX 550 that is struggling to drive two 4K screens. It works, but
| plenty of flickering under both Linux and Windows.

Do you really mean flickering?  Or to you mean laggy image updates.

I would have thought that the card could do rock-solid 60Hz refresh
but might have trouble updating the contents of the frame buffer in a
timely fashion.

My desktop use of a monitor has mostly static stuff so frame buffer
updates need not be very quick.

My use of a TV set to view streaming contents would get very annoying
if the frame buffer updates were laggy.  I use an AndroidTV box for 
streaming TV.

Processor iGPUs are getting better.  Perhaps a new processor's iGPU
would be good enough and might not be bid up as much.

Intel Xe seems really impressive (in 11th gen Core chips).
AMD APUs might be good enough.

It all depends on what you are really trying to do.

You have the floor tomorrow.  Perhaps a discussion on this would be
interesting.

| These don't strike me as cards powerful enough to do coin mining. Why are
| they so rare and expensive? Is it the global chip shortage or something
| else? And does anyone have an idea how long we'll have to wait this out ...
| or how I can tune my card to support the screens?

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
 -- John Maynard Keynes

Nobody knows.

I've often found panics have been used to set people's expectation of
pricing.  I.e.  prices will stick higher.  Perhaps not at peak prices,
but higher than previous prices.
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