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Back in 2022, during the pinnacle of the GPU bitcoin mining craze and earlier ASICs had taken over the market, prices for video cards reached absurd levels. This primarily impacted AMD, since GCN-based cards were vastly amend at Bitcoin and Litecoin mining than their Nvidia counterparts, but the end consequence was awful for enthusiast gamers. GPUs that commonly would've sold for $200 to $300 were, in some cases, commanding $600 to $800 cost tags. Eventually the market cooled downwardly as more than customers shifted to ASICs, which both outperformed GPUs and offered a performance-per-watt metric no graphics carte du jour could friction match.

At present we're seeing the same thing happen again — only this time, it'due south hitting both AMD and Nvidia cards. The GTX 1070 should be selling for around $330, and I tin ostend I've seen it effectually this toll in the not-so-distant past. Today, Newegg shows the cheapest GTX 1070 at $459, equally shown below:

GTX1070
Simply this isn't just an Nvidia trouble; AMD is taking a beating as well. UpgradeYourTech keeps track of product SKUs over time, and maps how they change over weeks and months. Check out what's happened to the RX 580 since that carte launched simply a few months ago.

RX580

On June 6 of this year, the Asus ROG Strix RX 580 topped out at a whopping $849.99. Today, it's a steal at just $658.ninety. At starting time glance, this might seem like a corking thing for both AMD and Nvidia, since subsequently all, higher GPU prices ways more than money, right?

Wrong.

Dorsum in 2022 when Hawaii launched, cryptocurrency miners sent the price of AMD's entire GCN family into the stratosphere. AMD, nevertheless, hadn't changed its prices, which ways AMD wasn't making a cent of the additional revenue that OEMs like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac were raking in. At present, if yous were a serious cryptocurrency miner at the time, ownership an expensive AMD GPU instead of an NV card might have made sense, given the enormous performance disparity between the 2. One departure between so and now is that people are mining Etherium, non Bitcoin. My admittedly crude understanding is that NV cards are far more than competitive now than they were at BTC mining back in 2022.

It may take fabricated sense for miners to pay huge cost. But it fabricated no sense at all for gamers. At the fourth dimension, I theorized this could cause AMD trouble down the road. While it took several years to get concrete information on what happened to AMD's GPU sales, I was absolutely right.

JPR-QuarterlyShipments

AMD's graphics sales have begun to rebound, but the company has fallen hard the by five years. Figures like these fabricated a deal with Intel easier to imagine.

If you get back and compare the peaks in AMD's sales with the visitor's product launches, yous'll find there'south a relationship between the two. (Higher sales figures sometimes lag production launch dates, depending on when a GPU debuted within the quarter.) Just look at what happened in Q3 2022. The launch of Hawaii and the splendid R9 290 and R9 290X barely budged AMD's sales. In fact, sales went into a steep turn down thereafter.

Truthful, Nvidia responded with the GTX 780 Ti to counter the R9 290X, and yes, the reference R9 200 cards had loud default blowers. But third-party fan designs afterward solved that problem. Information technology didn't matter. The cryptocurrency market had blown out AMD's addressable market, and by the fourth dimension BTC mining had moved to ASICs, Nvidia had launched its GTX 900 series (Maxwell).

If y'all want to strike it rich mining Etherium, new GPUs may be a cracking investment — but neither Nvidia nor AMD is likely to be happy nigh the long-term bear on on their own businesses.