AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing GPU shortage, caused in part by cryptocurrency miners and scalpers who are snapping up every card they can get, has made it mostly impossible to get any graphics card at its list price over the past year.
Whether the 6500 XT will be any different depends partly on supply, but AMD has also apparently designed the card to make it deliberately less appealing to miners while retaining its usefulness as an entry-level graphics card. Speaking to journalists in a press roundtable earlier this week, AMD Radeon VP Laura Smith talked about how the 6500 XT had been âoptimizedâ for games (a transcript from a now-apparently-deleted PCWorld article is preserved here).
âWe have really optimized this one to be gaming-first at that target market,â Smith said. "And you can see that with the way that we configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer. Thatâs a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of AAA games, but itâs not particularly attractive if youâre doing blockchain-type activities or mining activities.â
Why it matters: Cryptocurrency transfers from wallets to exchanges is typically a bearish signal. Most high networth cryptocurrency traders hold their funds on a hardware wallet, as these devices offer better security than cryptocurrency exchanges. Hardware wallets store investorsâ private keys offline, securing their digital assets from online hacks.
What remains to be seen is whether the design decisions that make the 6500 XT sub-optimal for mining also make it sub-optimal for gaming.
They lowered memory but upped clock speed to make up for it. Not sure how 4Gb GDDR6 is gonna play out for displaying advanced visual settings though.
If intent is on replacing RX 570/580 or GTX 1650/1650S with minor upgrade, that means decent 1080p gaming but not much more. Thatâs a large enough market for sure considering the current state. But weâll see if their plan works. MSRP price of $200 sounds attractive until you see pre-orders retailing at 70% over MSRP. $350 seems rather expensive for the meh specs.
Dunno if it was mentioned before but Nviida had made changes to their cards a while ago to discourage crypto mining as well.
But you do have to question Nvidia & AMDs willingness to stop mining since they profit greatly from crypto miner sales and the current shortage fo their products.
âITâ is way too big to really be called an âITâ anymore. Bitcoin is a more of a legitimate investment and methody of financial exchange transactions than any precious metal.
They donât really profit that much more because they havenât chosen to sell their cards to retailers for the price they fetch on the secondary market.
Anecdote: my gamer friend finally cannibalized his mining rig to put the card he was using for mining into his gaming computer because he canât get his hands on a good card for a price he thinks is fair. He made a couple thousand over the past year or so mining with it, so after the cost of building the mining rig and electricity, probably a few hundred bucks. He sees more value in the card doing what it was intended to do (play games) than mining. He also says there are some technical things about what he was mining that he believes would have decreased his return in the near future as well. So for those considering this hobby, this is not exactly the best time to get into it.
They may want to differentiate products with their mining-specific processors but their duty is to their shareholders and thus should only care for their bottom line.
I think itâs entirely PR. If they make mining processors, that still uses silicon thatâd otherwise be used to make GPUs. So as long as they provide processors for miners, thereâll be a shortage of silicon chips. The proof is that GPUs that shouldnât be attractive to miners like the 5500 XT 4 GB or the GTX 1650 are still selling at nearly double MSRP just due to demand not being met by supply across the board.
They arenât gouging everyone at least yeah but they are profiting greaatly and the crypto mining sales are absolutely helping them.
Nvidias revenue has more than doubled in the past 1-2 year and their profits are like tripled. More important as a company their stock is up like 400%.
A lot of that is the âchip shortageâ but for Nvidia that ship shortage is partiually fueled by crypto miners adding to demand. that continued out of whack supply/demand keeps Nvidia rolling in money.
THeyâve been able to keep selling the same 2 year old chips for the same full retail price for nearly 2 full eyars now. Normally that 2 year old stuff would have dropped in price and demand and everyone would want the new stuff. And normally they wouldnât be able to sell 100% of everything they can make for 100% of full retail. It all adds up to very good profits for them. Of course the situation is more due to the pandemic and chip shortages but the crypto miners are a part of their sales and have been boosting their bottom line and now that marginal differeence is all just 100% fat profit for Nvidia / AMD.
And honestly 3 years ago if they tried to sell us 2 year old parts for 100% retail then people would have viewed that as essentially gougingâŚ
The Russian government indicating potential policy changes on crypto is probably a large part of this considering how much mining happens there. If they go the way the Chinese government has gone on crypto, and other countries follow suit with similar legislation, itâs definitely gonna impact value.
But 40% swing is not that much for Bitcoin. Volatility is the norm, not the exception.
This isnât really news. Most crypto follows the market these days, just with larger gains and losses comparatively. You can look at them side by side and see the main jumps and dips overlap. A lot of the reason that crypto goes up a little more during bull runs and down a little more during bear runs is because itâs traded 24/7, so the runs continue overnight while the market sleeps.
Bitcoin (BTC) Heads towards sub-$30,000 as the FEDâs January Policy Decision Nears
Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader market were back in the deep red on Saturday. A 4th consecutive day in the red saw Bitcoin visit sub-$35,000 levels for the first time since 25th July.
The crypto market cap fell by a further $85bn on Saturday, after having given up $200bn on Friday. At the time of writing, the total market cap stood at $1,611bn. In November, the total market cap had risen to an ATH $3,009bn before stumbling to a current month low $1,514bn.
Market sentiment towards FED monetary policy and regulatory chatter and activity remain the key drivers.
While the U.S markets are closed on the weekend, there has been no positive chatter to shift market sentiment. With the FED in action this coming Wednesday, dip buyers could sit on the sidelines.