The rumor going around right now is that NVIDIA is planning two different lines of GPUs; one for gaming and one for mining. And the gaming GPUs would have mining functionality blocked, both on the software and hardware levels. I've already mentioned a couple of times in my Tech News/Q&A/Joey's Totally Tech streams that I think that blocking mining functionality on graphics cards would hurt gaming performance. But admittedly I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who just uses GPUs. I don't know the ins and outs of them.
So I'm asking to open up the discussion; can blocking mining functionality help hurt gaming performance?
I refuse to believe NVIDIA would even sell a GPU that blocked mining if it hurt gaming performance. To me, it doesn't make sense. So my thinking is if this is true, NVIDIA has done it in a way to not impact the gaming performance of the card.
Also, I have to ask are the mining cards going to be good for gaming as well? Many miners currently go for the gaming cards over the miner-specific card, because once they're done, they have resale value. A gamer would be wiling to buy it if the cards were optimized for mining, which would increase the remaining life of the gaming card. If the mining cards can't game and the gaming cards can't mine, then what do you think about losing all resale value when the cryptocurrencies you mine are too difficult to mine on the card?
My thoughts: Rather than come out with two separate lines of cards, maybe have lower-end cards with mining blocked. I'm talking your GTX 1050 TI and RX 560 level and below cards. Maybe do the same with the RX 570 and 4GB RX 580. And then your upper-mid-range card to high end cards could have mining features enabled. That way, people who want to game on a budget on current hardware can. Higher end hardware is going to be expensive anyway. Some people on a budget probably would have gone for an RX 580 card to so that's why I listed the 4GB model as having it disabled, but the 8 GB being enabled.
OR
If we're going to do two lines of cards, the gaming cards should be single-GPU, and the mining cards should be multi-GPU yet still capable of gaming. Once you're done mining with it, you can game on the single GPU.
What are your thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Let me know!
Nvidia is already dabbling with mining cards. The P104 100 is essentially a 1070 with only 4gbs of vram, no display output and some with no fans and only heat sinks. i dont think that mining only cards will solve the shortage problems though. like you stated they will have a worse resale value and miners will probably find a way to mine on the gaming cards anyway even if the do try to stop it with hardware/software solutions.
I know that. But I'm not sure you entirely read my post here. Consider if NVIDIA has created gaming cards that they have blocked mining on, meaning you cannot mine on them either way? Now miners won't have the resale value with cards that they can actually mine on regardless unless the newer mining cards I'm talking about can still be gamed on. (Basically, Ampere is believed to be the gaming cards and to have mining blocked on both a software and hardware level, and Turing would be cards that can be used for mining. I don't know if they'll be useful gaming at all). Doing it this way will take the resale factor out completely since you won't be able to mine on a newer gaming card, if the rumors are true.
I know what your saying and i think any reduction to gaming performance in an effort to stop mining is a bad idea because I am sure miners will just circumvent any measure used to stop them, whether it be any kind of hardware mods, software mods and new algorithms. I also heard that ASIC miners will be coming out this year to also disrupt GPU mining but people will just create new Algorithims to mine on that there are no ASICs for. As far as AMD is concerned they seem to have embraced miners more but that has bit them in the ass in the past when the used market got flooded with GPUs that were being used for mining now being sold to gamers at a discount. If the difficulty of Ethereum and other cryptos gets too high there might be another bust coming soon and the used market will get flooded again which might be the only thing that can drive prices down at this point.
But what if NVIDIA found a way to block the mining without gaming performance? That's what I'm saying here.
Also, Ethereum is the big one being mined right now, and that's supposed to switch to Proof of Stake soon. When that happens, you won't be able to mine it anymore anyway.
If Nvidia can making gaming cards that nerf mining without any loss in gaming performance then they defiantly should. but people are still going to be mad they are devoting resources to the mining cards that could be going into the gaming cards, if they are planing on making a separate mining line.
Ethereum is where it does get pretty interesting. So the POS model is going to roll out in a hybridized model, probably to avoid forking, where the first 99 out of 100 blocks are POW and the last block is POS. People holding enough Ethereum to stake it are going to be making money off of the stake amount so anyone mining it and staking it will get even more. i think the idea is to incremently make more blocks POS and less POW until there are no more POW blocks left. However, there is also the difficulty bomb/ice age that seems to be ramping up the difficulty right now leaving all the small time miners in the dust. Making it only profitable for the mining farms to stay in the game. This is probably why people are suspecting Samsung of making ASIC miner chips, paired with there ram, that will make Ether Asics that will be able to hash the higher difficulty. It is going to continue being a roller coaster and as of now we can only speculate what will happen.
It should definitely be interesting when Samsung released their chips.
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