Good luck building a VR PC: Ethereum miners are buying all the GPUs Last month, one of my friends noted he’d been having enormous trouble trying to buy the components to assemble a virtual-reality-ready PC. Motherboards, memory, CPUs and solid state drives were easy to find, but the one absolutely essential component - a beefy GPU to drive a head-mounted display at a vomit-preventing 90 Hz - he …
SLI?
Anyway, while GPUs can compute faster some tasks, they can't still replace a CPU for other tasks. They are not designed, for example, to understand the difference between kernel code and user code.
Yet, it is true x86 can't simply go faster shrinking the chip.
Precisely. GPUs are great for SIMD-like parallelism, but it can be very difficult to harness when the task at hand does not allow such parallelism. In those cases, fewer, more complex and more independent compute cores can do a better job. Horses for courses, as ever. Many compute loads show a mixture of these SIMD and MIMD type parallel tasks, and for those the key factor in current designs is the fact that GPU and CPU memory is generally separate, and the speed of the bus linking the two is too low.
So, yes, GPUs are here to stay, but my (multi-core) CPU has this little piece of cardboard saying "I aten't dead!", and I think that is true.
Until comparatively recently, GPUs had their own private memory space, and moving data between the main memory and the GPU memory (and back) was often the biggest problem when using GPUs for parallel computation streams.
Nowadays, the PCIe3 variants have sufficient bandwidth so that it makes some sense to expose the main memory to the GPU processors, reducing the need for some complicated I/O system to shunt data around. This should make it easier to write vector type code to use the multiple processors in the GPU, but there probably needs to be a common API defined so that code can be made a little more portable.
I'm still expecting many and more powerful GPU stream processors to appear on the CPU die with full memory access and DDR4 or DDR5 main memory, so that they can just be considered as additional processing units in a massively superscaler system, but not the poor performance GPUs that AMD put on their APU, or what Intel build in to some of their chips.
"so that it makes some sense to expose the main memory to the GPU processors, "
Until some OEM has a flashback and recalls that they can just dump all the GPU memory entirely and use main memory for the card instead, thus allowing them to sell a cheap-GPU machine while fiddling the specs.
It may make some sense, however it can savage CPU performance because of contention for memory access, not just access to memory in the same block but memory on the same physical component (chip/stick depending on implementation). This is particularly complicated by caching which for performance reasons takes place within the CPU core and therefore won't be shared with a GPU accessing the same memory block.
The graphics hardware, computer and display device, are looking to be a big barrier, but some VR concepts also seem to depend on fast internet connections, not just bandwidth but round-trip-times to servers. I have seen a figure of 40ms quoted before there start to be problems with people sharing an environment, but it hasn't been clear whether that includes the transmission time across the internet.
Maybe it's enough to wait for the 3D world model to download, and then a user can walk around the new building to see what it looks like, but as soon as you have somebody else in view, not in the next office, there will be problems.
You can cope with these problems with a monitor screen as a window on a virtual world. It's the new VR element, the head mounted display feeding each eye and overwhelming the other senses, which make any sluggishness a problem.
40ms? That's barely big enough to cover California. Bandwidth has increased enormously, but the round-trip times have hardly changed since I started using dial-up.
And I have not seen a convincing explanation of why I might be wrong. But it looks from here as if the VR-hype comes from a geographically localised cluster of enthusiasts around San Francisco Bay.
The problem with round trip times is that they run into a HARD limit: the speed of light. It's physically impossible for data to run a round trip from New York to Los Angeles and back faster than c, and usually some fraction of c (the speed of electricity in copper is about half c).
It used to be that every device in the path added 10ms as well, but that's more like 2ms these days.
I think you'll find that with optimised code it is possible for people to share the same space and be represented by simplistic avatars with a reasonable response time. Obviously a high latency link would suffer, but that's no different than any other online experience with many people.
PSVR seems to do it ok, shouldn't be any different for PC.
There isn't much (if any) VR content that relies on direct video streaming like that.
Generally the "40 ms" issue in internal to the VR system, and doesn't touch the network. Interactions between players by pass that, for the most part, and don't impact play any more than any other online game.
If you have a long delay (40ms+) between the time you move your head and the time the display updates, that's a problem, and people start to get "VR sickness."
If you have a long (300 ms+) delay in person-t-person game interactions, it just makes play seem clunky.
I doubt the Ethereum miners are going to create enough demand for PCs with GPUs to suddenly rescue the failing PC market. All it takes it someone hackets to set up a bot net mining Ethereum with 1000s of machines and then in another years time the price of Ethereum will then fall to a level that makes it uneconomical to mine them that way
Shortage? I dunno what theyre talking about , I got mysel a luverly nvidea gtx750ti ofov the ebay the other day for about £50, must've quadrupled my gfx capability . And can run that shadowplay thingy too.
In a rare fit of generosity to my pc I also treated it to a (128gb £50) SSD and Fallout 4 (argos £16).
and re "AMD vs. Nvidia???"
I've always had AMD , this is my first nvidea . The support and software seems much better - i realised I now have the hardware* and software to start playing games in 3d! Nvidea has a long list of supported games including 80's sci fi parody fps - "Blood Dragon"
(except a mini hdmi adaptor)
"A GTX 750ti is nowhere near fast enough to run VR unfortunately!"
I know its an old comment / story an no one will ever read it but ....what?
They did VR in the early 90s .
my phone in a cardbox does VR.
surely you dont need much resolution if two little screens are right near your eyes?
if I can play a 3D game at 1080p surely you can put it on 2 lttle screens at 480x640 or whatever.
Basically - It depends what quality u want yes?
" The prices of second hand 980tis (for instance) have gone up considerably recently "
Yeah - looks like i picked the wrong time to upgrade. I shopped around I started out thinking I might get an secondhand 8 or a 9 . Did loads of reseach , looked at performance graphs etc
https://www.geforce.com/Active/en_US/shared/images/products/shared/lineup.png
My conclucsion: "Blimey these things never lose any value! - I'll just get the bottom end 750 , thats nearly falling off the bottom of this chart - its still better than an AMD EAH5570"
> It still makes me cry.
Once I felt the same way. When I originally got into bitcoin I ended up mining 300 coins, I sold them at £25 a pop after a while to help with my first flat deposit.
Fast forward to present day, a bitcoin is worth almost £2000. Had I known I could have bought two flats outright with extra spending money on top.
A friend of mine who works in trading however, gave me a piece of advice "Any profit you can walk away from is a good result. Bitcoin has hit highs now, but it could just as easily have become worthless. There was no way to be sure of either future outcome".
And he is right. BTC could have floundered just as easily as it rallied. Makes me feel a bit better when I think of it that way. If you bought at £10 and sold at £30, then you made a very good return. ETH could have just as easily collapsed and you could have lost it all.
Saying that, I did get out of the cryptocurrency mining. I just can't compete with people in Asia who have stupidly cheap electricity costs compared to the UK/EU, not to mention they tend to get the newest hardware first due to proximity of hardware manufacture to them.
Years ago I bought one bitcoin for about £70, intending to see if I could buy anything 'fun' on Silkroad. Completely forgot about it until they hit £700, so I sold a chunk to buy a new GPU, and then forgot about it all over again.
Last month I decided to see if I still had access to the wallet, and how much was left in there. Turns out I had enough to buy a brand new monitor :)
Sure, if I'd held onto the BTC I could have sold it now for £2000, but from my point of view, I spent £70, and have so far got about £700 of goods.
(I've still got about 0.02 left, so maybe in a few years that'll pay for another GPU upgrade).
This just means that a few months down the line, the 2nd hand market will be flooded by these things and knock-down prices as the Eretheum miners have all moved on to ponzi-scheme ASIC suppliers after GPUs have had their day and are too slow to compete. It's almost like this happened before with bitcoin...
And the end result is that VR capable hardware is affordable for a (graphics card) generation.
Within a few years, every computing device of consequence - supercomputer, desktop or smartphone - will be driven by architectures and operating systems that center around the GPU.
GPU or a highly parallel vector processor?
I think you'll still need a general purpose CPU to glue everything together, but you'll undoubtedly have various special purpose chips to assist.
This article is misguided...the only cards which aren't in stock are those which are best for crypto mining.
So low end and high end stock is unaffected still though the GTX 1080 Ti is getting more and more popular.
VR doesn't need that much grunt and the GTX 1080 is easily good enough and no one wants them for mining as there is a problem with DDR5X memory still.
I'm glad I got my 1070 when I did - I just glanced at Amazon and just about everyone is "Not in stock" "Delivery in 2-4 weeks" or similar - and the price has rocketed.
Daft, imo. I think (and I'll admit that I'm normally wrong when I think) that just like when BitCoin was the cryptocurrency de jour and ASICs rapidly outstripped GPUs as the mining engine of choice, the same will happen with Ethereum, and the gamers and both VR freaks will get their hands on the GPUs again.
Actually, thinking about it, Ephemerum might be a better choice of name.
This is a big problem, especially for AMD cards at the moment, however, due to the price point NVIDIA's 1080 and 1080Ti should be available. For high end gaming and VR they'll give better performance than any AMD card at the moment, the 1080Ti is hands down the best card available for those uses. Cryptocurrency miners generally don't use them because the diminishing returns for mining make buying slightly cheaper AMD cards a better investment. Obviously this won't help if the 1080 series is outside of his budget but if not those are the cards he should be buying anyway.
nVidia have been selling 'headless' versions of their GPUs for a few years now, for use in servers. See their "Tesla" range. They are not cheap.
AMD have been at it for a while too.
A 1070 is currently $525 to $600+ - the one in my VR machine cost me $399 last year, but is going for $649 now...
A new 970 (up to $450) is more expensive than a 1070 was in January.
(I had a lightning strike kill this computer last week, and I was panicking at the thought of replacing the graphics card - luckily, it survived.)
Eth is ASIC resistant. It'll be a whike at least before we see ASIC miners on Eth, if at all because...
Eth is moving to a proof of stake model rather than proof of work. Meaning grunt will be less important. The idea is to save electricity.
All these people that rushed out to buy GPUs are morons. They would have been better off just buying Eth as the amount of Eth you hold will affect the return on mining in the future.
As a counter balance to this, if too many Whales start pissing in the pool the return on mining will drop as the network is geared up to provide high returns to many smaller stakeholders not fewer massive stakeholders.
All the big dicked high rollers thinking they can pay to dominate the Eth network are in for a surprise I think.
These aspects are why Eth has become so popular because other crypto currencies are plagued with whales and are biased towards those that have significant resources. Eth was designed to resist this kind of activity as best it can.
Currently the breakeven point for GPU mining is approx 9 months, but the proof of stake will likely kick in before then. Which means its highly likely that most peple that rushed out to buy a load of GPUs won't get their money back in the short term.
Currency hasn't been physical for a long time.
You think your money is real because it comes in little bits of paper or coins of negligible metallic value? That's not money. It's just a convenient way of counting it. Money is an abstraction - it's valuable because there is a widespread agreement that it is valuable, which lets you spend it to buy things of actual utility. Or because the tax collector will send men to arrest you if you can't supply enough of it.
If you look at a bank note you'll find a notice on there: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of x pounds." That's a relic of where notes come from: They used to be an indicator of debt. You'd give the bank your bag-of-gold and they'd give you notes for it. Very handy things, as gold is bulky and heavy. The notes were as valuable as the gold because you could always take them back to the bank and have a legal guarantee that they would return said gold, and you could trade the notes in lieu of the gold. Then over time the actual piles of gold in the vaults were accessed less and less often, until it was possible to do away with them altogether. That's where we are today: Money is a shared fiction, but simply having enough people act as if it's real can make it real.
I really don't think mining is going away any time soon, and the GPU manufacturers are going to be wary of pandering to a bubble, so I can't see supply increasing to meet demand.
Has anyone actually seen one of these "mining specific" cards yet - again they are going to be wary of retooling only to suffer a glut in the market. Overall they'd prefer loyal gaming customers that buy a card every two or three years.
In related news, I did just make £50 profit selling two USB Antminer U2 ASIC cards that I bought three years ago - more than I earned mining with them :)
Ethereum mining with GPUs is no longer profitable. You certainly won't make money buying GPUs and shortly it won't even be worth buying electricity for GPUs you already have. So good news for gamers the second hand market will soon be flooded.
That or maybe miners will hang on to them for the next invented crypto currency bubble.
Here's my Spanish Inquisition:
1) What is the point of a 'Cryptocurrency'?
2) Isn't it more like a CryptoCommodity? ("Pack of gum please, here's a $2000 Bitcoin...")
3) Isn't mining these a tremendous waste of GPUs and electricity - why not do something useful with the resources...?
"3) Isn't mining these a tremendous waste of GPUs and electricity - why not do something useful with the resources...?"
There are a number of worthwhile mathematical challenges which would fit the bill as worthwhile, but they tend not to scale well to cyrptographically strong challenges. (EG: The OGR project)
1) Cryptocurrency was born of the crypto-anarchist community. They don't trust banks, and they certainly don't trust governments. Crypto-currency provides a means to do away with the middle-men who take their cut and play games with your money to their benefit. This does make it especially appealing to the criminal underground, and to people who object to any government regulation of finances for ideological reasons.
2) When something is that easily moved around and so interchangable with others of itsself, currency and commodity are really the same thing.
3) Certainly. But people are selfish bastards. They'll happily burn up power if it brings them money. If you wish to be better than that, please go ahead and donate your idle processor time (and thus electricity bill) to a worthy distributed computing project.
I ran into this as well when trying to put together 16 PCs for my new VR Arcade. My frustration in June was the 1-2 per household limit, which was attributable to those cards being marked as "loss-leaders". Now in July, the cards I like are marked by Amazon as 4 weeks backordered. Some of the pricing of the non-TI 1080s is ridiculous. Fortunately, if you are patient, and willing to buy cards from different manufacturers, it's possible to get what you need, eventually.
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