Game On: The rise of GPU demand and fall of cryptocurrency

By Aditya Deshbandhu The last three years have been extremely challenging to gaming fans as they have struggled to find the graphic card they desire owing to the manufacturers’ inability to keep up with the demand. A demand that was constantly rising and impossible to meet owing to the now omnipresent global chip shortage. As […]

By Aditya Deshbandhu

The last three years have been extremely challenging to gaming fans as they have struggled to find the graphic card they desire owing to the manufacturers’ inability to keep up with the demand. A demand that was constantly rising and impossible to meet owing to the now omnipresent global chip shortage. As more and more people sought leisure activities that were digitally remediated, gaming presented itself as a viable option and GPU demands rose, on the other side crypto currencies were booming and spawning new money-making activities like NFTs while trying to herald an era of Web3.

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As digital and decentralised finance seemed to be an indicative norm, graphic cards were vanishing faster than they could get off the assembly line, requiring prospective buyers to pay significantly over list prices to acquire one. To put matters in perspective, Nvidia’s RTX30 series may be the first line of discrete graphic cards that was nearly always unavailable as a product to gamers. People for whom the cards were arguably designed but also people who couldn’t justify paying the immense overhead that owning such a piece of hardware required.

The crypto miners, on the other hand, were running organised businesses and with every card that was promising an increase in yield rates, paying inflated prices was both a return on investment and a move to remain competitive in a market that was exploding at the time. However, things seemed to have hit the proverbial fan in the case of crypto currencies in the last six months as Bitcoin, Ethereum and others have hit lows that have wiped out trillions from the global economy. Similarly, cryptocurrencies like Tether and its stable variant USDT nearly bankrupted themselves as their holders and regulators have struggled to make sense of a continuous ongoing crash.

As values of cryptos continue to fall, the cost of mining them albeit continues to rise as electricity and fuel have never been pricier; forcing miners to cut losses and sell their inventory of GPUs. The market has subsequently been filled with several high-powered GPUs.

The Nvidia 3080 Ti, an always unavailable card, is a great example of this trend. Its unavailability had forced the card maker to launch a 12 GB variant of the stock 3080 that was priced at a list price very similar to the Ti variant, now the Ti is suddenly available in great supply and is priced lower than the 12 Gb stock card making the latter’s requirement redundant. If one were to check online platforms most GPUs are now available for lower than their list prices as supply suddenly seems to far exceed a diminishing demand.

Does this sudden supply make things easier for gamers is a question that’s difficult to answer. Most of the hardware at this moment is nearly two years old and I think it makes little sense to purchase a card now when new iterations are just round the corner (RTX 40 series, RDNA3). Secondly, if cryptos and its many extensions continue to fizzle in a time where people choose to prioritize living expenses over investments based on intangible foundations, new GPUs might be both easily available and realistically priced.

I would hedge my bets on a continuing decline of Cryptos as oil prices rise, thereby making the purchase of a sensibly priced RTX4080 a possibility. Finance and FinTech’s newfound “dudebros” might be hurt in the process but high-end gaming would suddenly be a bit more affordable and achievable. My allegiances lie there, as always.