If you are currently looking to upgrade your graphics card, then you might have good reason to grumble or lament at the prices some of them are being sold for. While the cryptocurrency boom in 2017 certainly placed huge demands on the market, it is, at best, a bit debatable whether prices were increased in demand or just out of opportunity. The truth is, it was probably a bit of both.
What is clear, however, is that since the mining craze, graphics card prices are quite notably higher than before. This has led many to speculate that based on the hype, Nvidia themselves were considering taking a more active role in the market. Namely, by potentially creating their own currency.
In a report via PCGamesN, however, CEO Jensen Huang has categorically denied that the company ever had plans for this.
Jensen Huang has insisted that the company “never had plans for cryptocurrency”. Instead, they believe that the reverse is actually more true. Namely, that the cryptocurrency mining boom itself affected the company.
This does, of course, back up long held rumours that Nvidia went into overdrive creating 10XX series graphics cards to meet the demand. Graphics cards which they, incidentally, may be struggling now to actually sell.
In fairness, Nvidia is probably right. Practically nobody predicted the way that cryptocurrency mining was going to explode in 2017. If they had, then we’d certainly have a lot more Bitcoin millionaires when it was less than $1,000 a coin at the start of the year.
We do, however, think it would be fair to say that consumers got caught in the crossfires of corporate greed here. Not even just from Nvidia. AMD (to a lesser extent perhaps) were equally guilty of summarily upping prices.
Fortunately, things do appear to be calming down a little now. The trend, however, did set a new ‘standard’ for graphics card prices which doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
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