Gaming hardware: The cryptocurrency intersection

Analysing what makes GPUs ideal for mining blocks and hashes

We live in an increasingly digital lives and the last decade has seen the emergence of several digital currencies that are based on online encryption and a de-centralised system of ledgers to maintain their authenticity and credibility. Branded with the moniker ‘crypto,’ the last couple of years have seen them permeate mainstream culture as ads on television and self-styled financial/wealth influencers on SNS platforms have tried to make the practice of owning the decentralised finance currencies an acceptable and normal act.

Cryptocurrencies though aren’t new to gaming as the two communities have often crossed paths in recent years and this week Game-On analyses what makes people on the crypto side covet hardware that is specifically made to play games.

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The magic’s in the mining

Cryptocurrencies unlike other currencies aren’t regulated by central banks and are generated by the amount of effort that goes into creating a chain of value. The chain often called a ‘blockchain’ is a veritable repository of the ledgers of a particular currency. Each link in the chain (called a block in the case of Bitcoin or a Hash in the case of Ethereum) is a ledger entry – a transaction id/address of sorts for a corresponding amount of value, the longer a block-chain gets, more value is generated for the currency; almost like, the more you mine a resource the more you extract.

However, the mining in this context is innately linked to the popularity of the currency and it fuels a continuous cycle – the more popular a currency, a greater number of transactions, longer blockchains and thus, more value. Thus, as a currency finds more takers there is the need for more miners to maintain more ledgers for its decentralised functioning. Mining crypto currency consumes a lot of electricity and power, the act of mining needs dedicated hardware.

Enter the GPU

Mining needs power but power means several things in the case of computations. Power can be measured both in the ability to perform one very detailed complex task or several similarly complex tasks. In the case of mining, the tasks that are complex are similar and ledger entries are same but it is for corresponding transaction ids. Conventional CPUs (i7, i9, Ryzen) struggle here as they have been designed to multitask on several different kinds of tasks; GPUs though are specifically made for this kind of computing. Designed to render game worlds and virtual environments, GPUs lay and re-lay the same polygons and triangles several times over; something very similar to mining crypto. GPUs thus are very efficient at updating multiple ledgers in computational times that CPUs can’t just match. This obviously makes the best of graphic cards as rare as unicorns.

What’s next

Most crypto currencies have an efficiency rate — right now Ethereum is considered the most efficient to mine. As miners stack-up multiple GPUs in their rigs, gamers can’t get hold of the best gaming cards as they are being re-purposed — an unwelcome predicament which has allowed GPU makers to cash in as they take unique measures to address the issue. Nvidia for instance has halved the yield rate on its new cards and bottle-necked their performance when “mining like” tasks are performed and also offered unique crypto-mining processors (CMP). Despite possible fixes and future remedies, it looks like miners and gamers are going to be entangled for a while. With unprecedented demand it looks like owning a high-powered GPU will be a challenge for the foreseeable future. There’s money riding on it after-all!

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