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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

I woke up early back on launch day in October 2020 to buy a 3080 when they said it would be available. Couldn't get one. Periodically I'd check newegg and other sites to see if the shortage is gone. Nope, on 05/18 it's still out of stock everywhere. Throwing $750 on a piece of hardware to play games shouldn't be this horrendous of an experience. I for one am glad nVidia is doing something about it.

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They should just raise the prices. Supply and demand, you know?

I don't think PC gaming should require you to be part of the top 10% in order to fairly price computer hardware between mostly foreign miners buying scores of chips whose primary contribution to society is using 129 TW hours annually and individual users buying a single GPU.

As a selfish American I would rather we arrange for GPUs to be useless to a small number of users buying a large number of GPUS for mining in order for the much larger group of users to be able to afford one GPU.

If this strategy is successful and AMD doesn't follow suit nvidia GPUs will basically be the only ones most people can afford and if mining collapses years later AMD wont have any marketshare left to lose in the consumer space.

The only other way to still get their hardware in front of people who they want to keep a relationship going with will be via privileging OEMs over selling individual GPUs but in fact people are actually buying machines for the GPU and turning over the remaining GPU less machine in the consumer market.

As it stands the whole situation is broken for the only buyers that are sure to be here in 10 years and I would rather it move towards sanity sooner rather than later.

Who knows about 10 years in the future; Perhaps crypto '10x's, and gamers move to cloud platforms. If the prices should be raised, after some years, the added margin will add competitors and increase the efficiency, thus making chips cheaper in the long-term. Anyhow, makes more sense to advocate for silicon subsidies, which helps with national geopolitics as well.

Cloud gaming suffers from inherent issues having to do with latency that are unsolvable. If you place a lot of expensive machines very close to users its not economical and if you put the machines further away from users the latency sucks.

It's likely that PC gaming will spend the next 40 years the same way it spent the last 40 years. It's also immaterial anyway. We need to not kill the PC gaming industry this decade not try to bring it back from the dead like lazarus with tech that may never come through. The same thing is true of using tax payer money to incentivize production of silicon. It may make sense for a number of reasons but its not a solution to I can't buy a GPU now. Making it uneconomical for miners to use gamer cards solves the issue this year. Meanwhile we can subsidize production of silicon in the states and work going "to the cloud" with the gaming industry if it makes sense. It's not an either or.

I don't want cloud gaming. A NES still works fourty years later, a cloud platform can disappear tomorrow with all your games.

Prices have been raised.

You can buy an RTX 3080 right now if you want. It's just going to cost you $2500 or so because vendors and scalpers are capturing that markup.

Sounds like Nvidia hasn't actually raised the price. They could just auction this off from their website directly and cut out the middle man.

They do sell cards on their website and they also direct users to websites of other manufacturers (like eVGA). The problem is nVidia had no protection against orders being placed by bots at the first second the cards go on sale, so it was virtually impossible for a human to order the cards, so the middle men got all the cards.

Between the high demand with gamers, scalpers with bots, and crypto farms gobbling up _graphics_ cards, the prices went up by an insane amount, and some people did pay double to get their hands on it.

I don't know with certainty, but I believe NVidia has raised prices. I base this on the prices that appear on the sites of custom system vendors. Until recently you could get a complete machine from many builders with a GPU at something close to MSRP. Now you can't. These builders (the larger ones anyhow) don't buy from scalpers, so that means the device manufactures have raise their prices.

Anyhow, that's my theory. Anyone have actual recent price lists for NVidia GPUs? Otherwise we're all just guessing.

That is essentially what they are doing, but in a way that doesn't burn their long-term customers (PC gamers). There will be crypto ready SKUs of these cards sold at a considerably higher margin.

So, you think poor people shouldn't be allowed to play games?

I haven't had a good GPU myself once in my life. I still could play plenty of older games. You're just selfish and entitled.

While I understand why you were downvoted, I think this is a good point.

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