Despite claims by retailers that they have practices in place to stop cryptocurrency miners from buying up all the graphics cards, and Nvidia introducing hash-limited versions of its newer cards, it turns out that none of it is having much of an effect. According to a new analysis of the industry, some 25% of all new graphics cards sold in 2021 went to crypto miners.
According to John Peddie research reports, via PCGamer, the quarter of all GPU sales equates to around 700,000 cards, most of them Nvidia RTX series, but many of them also AMD's new RX series of 6000 cards. To make matters worse, it could only be part of the equation. It only factors in professional mining outfits buying many cards at once. For hobby miners or those who buy a couple of extra cards for mining on the side, that could raise the number of mining cards by a significant margin.
The report cites the lower than normal shipments of GPUs, despite the increase in overall sales, as being a good indication of how professional outfits are buying up the cards — especially since prices are often too high for gamers to pay.
While there has been a slight downturn in cryptocurrency prices in recent weeks, with Bitcoin dropping in half, Ethereum, which is the main currency mined with GPUs, has only fallen by around 20%, making it still more than viable as a currency to mine with modern GPUs.
Have you been doing any mining with your card(s)? And did you buy any to augment it?
Image source: Crypto360/Flickr/Crypto360.com