The Prices for GPUs are finally affordable in July 2022. At least temporarily, the high GPU prices brought on by a lack of supply and rising demand from crypto miners are behind us. It’s the perfect time to upgrade if you’ve been putting it off, and here are the reasons why.
The Bitcoin market has historically gone through cycles of boom and bust. The value of Ethereum, which is still mineable using GPUs, and the rest of the cryptocurrency market are tightly correlated with the value of Bitcoin (despite the planned switch to proof-of-stake). One of the factors contributing to the high GPU costs until recently was the massive demand for GPUs among cryptocurrency miners.
In June 2022, the crypto market crashed, and prices for both new and used GPUs plummeted precipitously in response to the decreased demand. Suddenly, GPUs became readily available in retail stores.
The boom-and-bust cycle of cryptocurrencies may continue in the future without significant government regulation in the US and other nations—possibly with even higher highs and more immense lows, assuming the cyclical pattern persists. In other words, sometimes, the demand from miners may cause GPU prices to surge again. Some think that other proof-of-work cryptos that can mine on GPUs may replace Ethereum even if it switches to proof-of-stake.
Lite Hash Rate technology, which NVIDIA introduced to lessen the demand forBuy New GPUs among miners, has since been circumvented, allowing miners to continue using those graphics cards for mining. In addition, NVIDIA also makes GPUs expressly for mining cryptocurrency, which may impact overall manufacturing output if demand for GPUs increases again in the future. As a result, the link between consumer gaming GPUs and cryptocurrency is complicated.
At the moment, all indications suggest that while there is a slowdown in the cryptocurrency market, it is better to update an older GPU in your gaming PC immediately.
Suppose crypto cycles aren’t enough to worry about for gamers. In that case, there’s also a rising trend of powerful AI creative tools on the market, like OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 and GPT-3 (together with rival software from Google and Meta), that are ready to gain mainstream acceptance in the coming years. GPUs outperform CPUs in AI and deep learning tasks because their memory bandwidth and parallelism speed up matrix multiplications, which are the basis of many machine learning algorithms.
Currently, the data centers that power many cloud-based AI products are brimming with dedicated GPU cards for deep learning—both for training (when developing a deep learning model) and execution (when consumers ask the model to complete tasks). GPU demand for AI applications is projected to skyrocket shortly across many sectors. While such data centers may not employ consumer graphics cards, rising demand may shortly impair consumer GPU production capacity due to competition for similar resources.
Furthermore, as machine learning techniques get more streamlined and economical, multifarious may run AI models locally on household PCs. Regardless of speed, your system must have a decent GPU (or some specialized neural network hardware). Topaz Labs’ GigaPixel AI picture upscaling software, for example, relies on a GPU in your system to quicken the process. Image creation and AI assistants may become crucial productivity aids soon, putting further strain on the availability of GPU chips and components.
In conclusion, what does the surge in AI mean for GPUs? As long as chip shortages persist (as many experts believe they will), the average price of consumer graphics cards may rise days from now.
Upcoming new models in GPU are always on the way, and it may persuade you to wait. Waiting could be a smart option if you paid for a recent GPU within the last year. You can probably even forego the next generation of chips in favor of a later one. Your present (current) GPU will most likely serve you well for many years.
However, suppose you have an older graphics card and have been waiting a long time to update. In that case, you’ll receive a significant performance improvement if you buy any modern graphics card today; you can feel good about the purchase while the price is around the MSRP and stock is available. For example, in one PC, we have a GTX 1060 that we recently upgraded to RTX 3060 for roughly Php23,000. It seemed like a reasonable increase, and the card will be helpful for many years.
That’s just one example: Take a peek at Amazon, Shopping Malls, or your preferred retailer, and you’ll discover several GPUs at considerably lower costs than they were only a few months ago.
Although no one can forecast the future, we can discern the indications of the present. According to past trends, GPU costs have been variable, and graphics card prices are currently reasonably acceptable. So, if you have an old GPU that has to be replaced, we feel you would not be making a mistake if you purchased a new GPU today.
The next-generation GPUs may ruin your plans horribly if a natural disaster, economic crisis, chip shortages, cryptocurrency craze, AI applications craze, scalping, or first-generation problems arise. You won’t lose if you purchase a top-notch graphics card that you can use for many years, even if others don’t.
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