Bitcoin , GPU costs and future Rendering

[Rectro 831]

Im not fully up on the bitcoin mining thing, but what got my attention was the increase price of GPUs.  It was at one point looking that GPU rendering was the way to go, but with the cost of high end GPUs some GTX 1080 close to £700 new, and selling second hand for £500 and higher I do wonder how things are going to turn out for Maxons implementation for Pro render.  Iv always got my GPU seconds hand in order to get a higher end one at a reasonable price, but whats to say that now I wouldn't get a over used bitcoin used GPU thats been  run all day long leaving it with a short life span.

 

I cant even use Pro Render at all because my GPU is a old generation, and at the current prices its a very bad time to upgrade my GPU.

 

Whats your views on this?

 

http://uk.businessinsider.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-gpu-impossible-to-find-buy-because-of-bitcoin-2018-1

 

Dan

[Rectro 831]

Just going on toms hardware, I noticed when I went on this article, it appears the price of the cards in their test from amazon are updated live, and within a few seconds are updated, does this reflect the price increase from the time the article was posted Sep 2017 to now?

 

Notice how the top gtx 1060 jumps from $281 to $392.

 

Dan

[VECTOR 591]

People are buying up Gtx 1080's like a fat kid in a sweet shop, anywhere from the pretty standard rebranded vendor cards like the Asus, all the way up to the heavily modified versions, makes sense that anywhere selling these cards would increase the prices to capitalise on this, as for buying second hand, the answer is you won't, if you pick one up on ebay theres no way of telling if this is a mining card being used constantly for however long or if it's just a reasonably used card, if it's not a massive requirement to jump up to gpu rendering now, i'd wait on the next generation cards, ( which i have a feeling will be quite soon)  once these hit it should drop the prices of the 10 series to something atleast half reasonable 

[Visionnext 94]

Just wait a bit. Bitcoins and Co. are under serious pressure and when the hype is gone, the price of the GPUs will drop again.

I decided to delay the investment in a new rig to next year. AMD promised to provide a secure CPU with the Zen 2 architecture and GPUs will also be cheaper by then. This is an assumption of course.

[Rectro 831]

5 minutes ago, VECTOR said:

i'd wait on the next generation cards, ( which i have a feeling will be quite soon)  once these hit it should drop the prices of the 10 series to something atleast half reasonable 

If the next gen retails at the correct price, how long will it take till bit minners grab all these and push their prices up, and if that does happen then wouldnt the 1080 cards be in even higher demand if they did drop in price which would then put the demand back up, and the price to follow.  Im fine with Vray, but the price increase of C4D and with the attention on its own GPU render engine I do wonder where my money is going.

 

Dan

[VECTOR 591]

Yea it's a never ending cycle, i think there will be quite a substantial jump in performance for with the new cards, although the price will be pretty heavy id imagine when they drop, i remember paying over 900 when i got my old gtx 690 years ago id wait probably 6 months anyway rather than buying any new one straight away, might be worth looking at a 1070, still a good card, cheapest i could find it was £399

[everfresh 413]

6 hours ago, Rectro said:

I cant even use Pro Render at all because my GPU is a old generation, and at the current prices its a very bad time to upgrade my GPU.

 

well the good (or bad, depending on how you see it) news here is you also couldn't use prorender (at least not seriously) if you had an up to date gpu :D

 

but i feel you, i was planning on building a hackintosh with a bunch of 1080ti's in it, but i think i will have to delay that endeavour a little until the bitcoin bubble bursts. i don't think it will take that long anymore until people notice the train has left the station a long time ago and it costs them more money than they can make with it. it's a hype, and hypes usually have a rather short lifespan.

 

on the other hand, if i'm wrong and it's not a hype and it's becoming a long term thing, gpu manufacturers will develop more cards perfectly suited for miners and gaming cards will become available again. and if that's also a wrong assumption and the demand of gamer cards stays that high, manufacturers will produce more and more of them, and they will also become available again to everyone at normal prices. it's just a matter of time until everything pans out again, the market just needs some time to adjust to new and unexpected situations.

 

 

[ZChristian 11]

Interesting points here. Personally, GPU is still new to me, but I have recently started with Redshift and a single GTX980Ti and I am blown away by the speed increase in contrast to the standard or physical render engine. Now, there are the first reviews of the Volta-generation of Nvidia cards (Titan V) appearing and this may be well worth the wait.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2017/12/12/A-quick-look-at-Titan-V-rendering-performance-1083/

 

[Rectro 831]

30 minutes ago, ZChristian said:

Interesting points here. Personally, GPU is still new to me, but I have recently started with Redshift and a single GTX980Ti and I am blown away by the speed increase in contrast to the standard or physical render engine. Now, there are the first reviews of the Volta-generation of Nvidia cards (Titan V) appearing and this may be well worth the wait.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2017/12/12/A-quick-look-at-Titan-V-rendering-performance-1083/

 

Iv seen some awesome renders done in Redshift, but as of yet iv seen no decent skin shading which most render engines other than Arnold and Vray just cant do , but thats a small thing for majority of CG artists needs.  Im still on a GTX 780 6GB card, getting old now but its still very good card.

 

Dan

[DeCarlo 75]

I'm in a similar boat. I'm still running a 660 ti and was about to upgrade to a 1070 when the prices spiked. I've since been considering a 1050, which hasn't inflated as much as the newer models.

Cryptocurrencies are absolutely in a bubble right now. They seem to have gotten enough positive press throughout 2017 to go "mainstream," and suddenly a ton of amateur investors jumped on the bandwagon, driving up prices as well as the speculation.  Put simply, they are being treated as an investment commodity, rather than an evolving technology designed to democratize the finance industry. The same thing happened to the U.S. housing market: for decades, consumers were told to treat houses as investment vehicles rather than a place to live, which eventually produced a massive bubble and the crash of 2008.  That's what I see coming for cryptocurrencies.  It's hard to predict what will happen with graphics cards, though. If the bubble bursts quickly, we'll probably lose a whole generation of graphics cards and the recovery will come with the introduction of newer cards (at a hefty price). If the bubble bursts later, we might see plummeting graphics card prices - manufacturers will ramp up production to meet the demands of miners, only to have the demand evaporate and the market flooded with extra cards.

[arail 25]

The investment bubble and the expanding use of cryptos are two different things. The investment bubble could burst without affecting the expansion of cryptos as financial vehicles. Sort of like the Internet stock bubble - because that burst doesn't mean the Internet went down with it. Cryptos are probably here to stay.

[DeCarlo 75]

 

13 hours ago, arail said:

The investment bubble could burst without affecting the expansion of cryptos as financial vehicles.

Agreed. There will probably be miners for many years to come, but the sudden frenzy to buy up graphics cards is due to this temporary investment bubble driving up coin value. It will burst, cyroptocurrency prices will fall, and the mining rush will subside. Long-term, miners needing GPUs can only help drive innovation and bring costs down. They are only a problem for us when there are big price swings and buying frenzies that disrupt the GPU market.