Credit: Dream
If you’ve heard that Nvidia may make graphics cards just for crypto-currency miners, keep your fire. As GPU supplies remain slim, Nvidia ‘s priorities seem to lie in other directions.
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress acknowledged the company could make cards for crypto-miners, at least in theory. “If a crypto application starts or we see a significant amount, we can also use that opportunity to restart the … product line to deal with ongoing mining demand,” Kress said in a conversation with analysts at the JP Morgan Tech Conference / Auto Forum on Tuesday, rewritten by Seekingalpha.com.
However, Kress said, since the company doesn’t know how many cards miners are emptying, it sticks to where its current bread is: gamers. “Demand for games is very strong, and we think that’s greater than our current supply,” said Kress.
Nvidia cares about gamers
That’s right, gamers. You may not feel that way when you don’t get the graphics card you want for a price you can afford, but Nvidia cares about you.
“This period feels different than we saw several years ago for one reason or another,” Kress said. The Kress “period” means about four years ago, when crypto-currency miners tore up every Nvidia GPU they found. Their unstable demand was emptying store shelves and raising prices, to the despair of regular people who just wanted to play PC games.
Kress said Nvidia has a good handle on where the cards are going, if not who buys them. “Account levels are now very narrow,” Kress continued, “and we have better visibility into that channel schedule, something we monitor from time to time and frequently to ensure that our understanding of where that inventory is in the world. “
Credit: Nvidia Kress said the supply problem could stop as Nvidia increases capacity. “We are at the beginning of the product life cycle with Ampere architecture in general. We have a long runway ahead of us. And last time, if you remember, we were moving from Pascal to Turing, which made it challenging to manage both the channel schedule and the end of that production cycle, ”
Even if Nvidia decided to make cards specifically for miners, it probably wouldn’t spell hard times for gamers, Anton Shilov notes of Tom’s Hardware. Shilov says crypto mining is done with “headless cards” that do not send information to a display. Since miners only care about computer performance, not graphics performance, Nvidia could sell cards to miners who have defective texture units, or bad video encoders – products that would have gone to the dump on another way.
That’s a good idea, but some crypto mining activity expects to resell GPUs once they’re done with them. So mining-only cards may not be attractive for a fully-fledged graphics card.
Supply will remain tight
In his speech, Kress said demand for 30-row cards has been “off the record.” Supplies for the new GPUs are likely to remain “narrow” for the next two months, Kress warned, as demand continues to exceed supply. “But again, we are staying focused on this and working every day to improve our overall supply chain,” said Kress.
Kress revealed that about 10 percent of all GeForce GPU owners have an RTX card, and most of these are upgraded from 10-series, Pascal-based cards. With about 200 million GeForce GPU owners, that means about 20 million have jumped to hard ray detection.
One last Kress tidbit that fell is that about 30 percent of game revenue now comes from GeForce GPUs in laptops.
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