What goes up must come down!
PC gaming will forever be in our hearts!
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Something will change and prices of RAM and GPUs will become reasonable again.
Some possibilities off the top of my head:
-Someone develops a digital currency mining specialized product differentiated from GPUs for PCs. The market splits to the betterment of both portions.
-More RAM suppliers will enter the market, since demand seems likely to keep up.
-VR will fail (again) as a widely marketable product, thus lowering the demand for the highest tier GPUs in the PC market.
-PC gaming will not change very much, just as it hasn't changed very much this past year, because the shortages of RAM and the overpriced GPUs only affect the top tier of PC gamers. While significant, this tier remains a niche market and does not control the direction of the home PC market, or even the gaming PC market as a whole.
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VR can fail, of course, but remember there is also big need of powerful GPU's because resolutions bigger than 1080p. 4K is going to be new standard in few years.
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I interested in VR I even VR capable PC but is hard to find cheap second hand :)
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- There are mining specialized products, yet they don't deter people from buying GPUs for mining simply because they are great profit/price.
- How easy do you think it is to enter the market? There currently are 3 companies manufacturing chips and those are Micron, Hynix and Samsung. The R&D cost for stuff like that is massive, let alone the cost for the required facilities.
- You are pretty naive if you really think that people are into top tier GPUs simply due to VR. Someone who is willing to spend that amount of money for a GPU probably games in 4K and that won't go away even if VR does. There were top tier GPUs before VR and there will be after it fails (in case it does). Those cards were sold at the same rate before, if not at a higher. Let alone that you don't necessary need a top tier GPU for VR.
- It has an impact. The person willing to spend 2000$ or more to get enthusiast grade hardware will probably spend those couple bucks more in order to get it, however, someone new who is going for lower tier hardware may just opt for a console due to the higher cost than before. For reference, DDR4 Ram today costs the same as at launch which is twice or more compared to 2-3 years ago. Moreover, GPUs' lack of quantity, drives the prices up. The price for a GTX 1060 6GB, which in no way is close to a top tier GPU, is 400$ on Amazon, 500$+ on Newegg, 350$+ on Best Buy while the MSRP of the card is 299$. So depending on your region and the demand, it may end up being extremely expensive.
Only way for the prices to stabilize would be if the manufacturers of DRAM chips would increase the produced volume, which Samsung said will, and the mining craze to die out which at this point seems impossible (at least for now). The phone manufacturers and the massive amounts of RAM implemented in their devices don't help either as that's what caused the initial spike in prices.
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yeah, i just bought a PC at work last week. i actually paid twice as much as i paid for DDR4-3200 RAM for my personal PC redundant, i know ^^ 1.5 years ago. i originally wanted to go for 64GB. but that would have been like 700€ just for RAM. so, nope...
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It's really frustrating especially when building low budget PCs. I recently built one for my gf for ~350€, of which 90€ went for the RAM. And that's 8GB of the lowest frequency and the cheapest one. That's ridiculous.
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The first one is the most reasonable. Specializing GPUs for market requests would be a smart solution
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No they don't only affect only high end systems, ALL RAM is overpriced, and most GPUs have become insanely ovepriced. Even mid range cards have doubled or more.
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Even the mid-tier GPUs are overpriced and out of stock.
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Go back to the nineties and buy a pentium with dvd player, printer etc, you'd pay a few month salaries for it.
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As a miner (GPU and ASIC miner) I don't agree. Gaming will not change, and it's future is brighter than my bitcoins.
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I can still wait * My cheap second PC cost me around 500$
I5-3470 @ 4Ghz
16Gb RAM
GPU GTX 970
Storage SSD 240 + 60GB + HDD 500GB + 3TB
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The future is bright! Manufacturers will adapt to this and will produce more. I am pretty sure. They want more money of course.
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I don't think they will. They would probably prefer selling 4 cards at 2K USD each than selling 20 cards at $200 each (I know that those aren't the regular prices and stuff, but this is hyperbole) since even though it's the same amount of money they are making less profit by having to produce 5x the amount of cards for the same price. I feel GPU manufacturers will enjoy this boon while it's here and rake in and love the profits. It's only going to stop if something else comes out that can mine things better than GPU's or at least until Cryptocurrency takes a dive for a while, but by then the doomsday miners will just sell out their burned cards for close to $300 for a card that probably won't last a month (I know a guy who mines and he sells his cards, but he waits until after he's had them for 6 months to a year before selling them and it makes me feel that other miners would do that too so they can maximize their profits as well.
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manufacturers haven't raised prices, retailers have and reap benefits
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Semiconductors plants aren't exactly cheap, in multi billion range. Adding capacity isn't cheap and takes long time.
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Still got a decent i7 6600 as well as a GTX 980. The only thing I'd like to upgrade is the monitor which isn't affected by the miners.
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When decent gaming hardware becomes more and more expensive, games with lower requirements have a higher chance to be successful.
So indie games that don't have the cash for realistic graphics and cinematic video sequences can score with a good story and creative ideas.
It also can make developing VR titles much riskier, because those often require high specs.
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Prices will drop if them stop to sell, so don't buy if it's too expensive.
But someday bitcoin will drop too and I believe that won't take longer.
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The "Death of PC Gaming" has been heralded many times before, and yet we're all still here.
It is currently more expensive to build a gaming PC, that's for sure, but PC gaming isn't going anywhere. People will hold onto video cards longer and wait longer before upgrading. Pre-built systems become more competitive, and people go that route rather than building themselves. People will buy GPUs on release at MSRP rather than wait for a sale.
By their very nature, mining crypto-currencies becomes more difficult with time, so we should start to see fewer people looking to get into mining or add to their existing setup.
So it's currently more expensive to build a gaming PC, but on the other hand the need to upgrade over time has been greatly diminished. A 6-year-old i5-3550 is still great for just about every game. A 3+ year-old GTX 970 is still great for 1080p gaming. This kind of longevity was unheard of 10-20 years ago, when you were buying a new GPU every 2 years just to keep up with the games' required specs.
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Maybe one day developers will be forced to make games that actually have gameplay and story and not just ads for the $$$$ GPUs.
Edit: also GPU mining isn't anywhere near the peak any more, that was when Radeon 7000 series was globally sold out for months.
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Mining as something any random can do on their PC will die over the next couple of years and memory production will have ramped up by this time next year. We're heading back to reality but Christ, am really not looking forward to building a PC in the meantime.
Indies will keep on keeping on and AAA companies will do what they do everytime there's a dip - milk established franchises even harder.
PC gaming will die the day the mouse does, not before :)
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Hopefully the end will be slightly less graphic :)
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"Mining as something any random can do on their PC" is already dead. At least for Bitcoin. (Other cryptocoins may be less impacted by that.)
Electiricy bills alone are currently enough to put it out of hobbyist's reach. Mining a single bitcoin currently takes enough power to keep a country like Ireland running for a year. And that's set to increase exponentially, due to how the Proof-of-Work is designed for that currency (other cryptocoins might take a different approach. but bitcoin's delaying every transaction to 10 minutes no matter how much hardware people throw at it has some weird and probably unwanted side effects.)
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Electricity bills in the US at least, will be cheaper when the tax cuts are in full force.
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I saw they are now finally limiting GPU purchases to 2 units per buyer.
That will help...a tiny bit...until Bob sends his mom to the shop to buy him 2 of them "GUP things for computer stuff" :P
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Yeah even limiting it to 1 per person won't stop miners. They will just ask someone to make the purchase for them.
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they don't limit, they force every gamer out there to mine because they had put 33% GPU fee by inflating cards' prices.
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I'm actually more concerned about RAM rising in price by like 50-70% in just a year. Given that new games started to require more and more memory for smooth and vivid gameplay, it might be necessary to update to 32GB sooner than expected, and that's gonna cost at least 400 EUR if you are getting something decent (not even great, just decent).
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me too, considering that we never go above 8 gb (99 % of the time) what are we going to do, is it the start of the end for us ???
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This whole thing is being blown way out of proportion and the problem is not miners, the problem is that people need to learn about this thing called patience. It's supply and demand. The demand shot through the roof at an extreme level while the supply has stayed the same. The GPU manufacturers are not going to take a billion dollar risk to increase supply if they think there is a chance that the crypto mining craze will crash and then they will be out a billions dollars. There is a good chance that the market will crash and all those miners will unload their GPUs on the used market.
How long have GPU prices been inflated because of this, like 6 months? Does everyone need to have the latest and greatest GPU right now so they can play games? Do you have to play the latest AAA games at the highest settings right now? I am still running a GTX 580 (over 7 years old) and was about to upgrade right before this happened, but now I am stuck with it until the prices drop because I am not going to pay twice the price. Yeah it sucks, but that's how supply and demand works and things will come back to normal at some point, whether that is another 6 months, a year, or maybe longer.
Most people here probably have a backlog of great classic and indie games that do not require a high end GPU to play and are probably better than a lot of the rehashed AAA games that are released anyway. Why not take this time to enjoy some of those great games?
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I couldn´t believe when somebody said that crypto miners were renting airplanes for all the stock they were buying, but yeah...
http://www.pcgamer.com/cryptocurrency-miners-are-renting-boeing-747s-to-ship-graphics-cards/
Also, Steve from Hardware Unboxed did a 3 part video about "Why Building a Gaming PC Right Now is a Bad Idea".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymIhSnBOrEA
Maybe for 2019...
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Can't believe my eyes! With Oculus Rift finally affordable and friends going to America soon I was thrilled. Guessed the GPU cards I looked at 9 months ago were half price by now. Not so much :( .
This whole mining thing is absurd. Now I can finally affort a Oculus but not the card to make it work. Seeing this does not give me much hope for the near future.
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I don't think crypto currencies have that many years of life ahead of them, the rising amount of electricity they need will eventually cause a few countries to just outright ban them and from them it will just be a domino effect.
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Just because prices drop a bit slower than before doesn't mean we can't get decent computers.
The global shortage of everything, aka overpopulation, is another story though, and gaming on overpowered computers will be the least of our concerns at some point...
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Due to mining and rams shortage, the future of pc gaming seems uncertain.What is your opinion?
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