In these darkish days of graphics card price hikes and crypto mining this and forex mining that, it’s simple to assume that the powers that be have forgotten about us gaming people and are merely regarding with ensuring these pesky coin plunderers proceed to line their respective pockets.
As it seems, a new report from US knowledge and advertising and marketing agency Jon Peddie Research suggests that gaming, not mining, continues to be the largest market for the graphics card bigwigs, giving them loads of incentive to fulfill the ever rising demand for extra GPUs.
“Gaming has been and will continue to be the primary driver for GPU sales, augmented by the demand from cryptocurrency miners,” stated Dr Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. “We expect demand to slacken from the miners as margins drop in response increasingly utilities costs and supply and demand forces that drive up AIB (add-in-board) prices.”
Nvidia’s newest earnings report would appear to mirror this as properly, with gaming being listed first of their high income drivers and cryptocurrency mining listed final. AMD additionally reported similarly strong growth of their graphics card division over the past three months of 2017, however has been a lot much less clear about what all these playing cards are literally getting used for.
Sadly, as a lot as Dr Peddie predicts a drop in demand over the coming months, it seems like common graphics card costs will take loads longer to begin falling. “Gamers can offset those costs by mining when not gaming, but prices will not drop in the near future,” he added. Well, thanks, Dr Peddie, how very useful.
The worth of assorted cryptocurrencies has been all around the store not too long ago, with bitcoin specifically dropping decrease and decrease over the previous two months. Much to our persevering with dismay, nevertheless, graphics card costs haven’t moved an inch, with playing cards just like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti nonetheless demanding not less than £840, making selecting the best graphics card on your price range more durable than ever.
Admittedly, the report doesn’t state simply what number of graphics playing cards had been offered for gaming functions in 2017, nevertheless it does reveal that cryptocurrency miners purchased simply over three million of them final yr, spending a complete of $776 million. Surprisingly, AMD was the first benefactor of these gross sales, not Nvidia.
In truth, AMD managed to extend its market share by 8.1% within the final three months of 2017, taking its complete to 14.2%, whereas Nvidia shrunk by 6% to 18.4%. The different 67.4%, in the meantime, is occupied by Intel. Year-on-year graphics card shipments additionally fell by 4.8%, not doubt resulting from ever dwindling inventory numbers. Here’s hoping that costs begin falling a lot faster than Dr Peddie predicts.
