Finally and after a long drought it seems that there is an end to the problem of graphics cards for gamers. In fact, the unprecedented crash of cryptocurrencies yesterday is making many rethink things given the inflationary bubble and the possible recession in which we are going to be involved if everything continues like this.
ASUS is optimistic: the demand for graphics cards has dropped
It was the company’s co-executive director, SY Hsu, who made a fairly accurate and somewhat catastrophic comment after presenting the company’s earnings data for this quarter. He was asked by a journalist about how the graphics card market is doing and what is expected of it. The answer is quite Solomonic:
“Because the demand for cryptocurrency mining in GPU shipments has slowly decreasedthe demand for graphics cards in the entire market is normalizing”
In addition to these statements, he said that cryptocurrency mining with GPU was in the doldrums due to the passage of Ethereum to the new work mode, but… This is perhaps an understatement.
Given this data from yesterday and after the Coinbase controversy, it was to be expected that panic would spread throughout the Internet, where in forums such as reddit there have been really serious cases with desperate people commenting, where moderators have had to intervene and facilitate the “phone of hope”.
The GPU market has exploded
And it is literally like that, it has exploded. Apparently NVIDIA has such a stock of graphics cards that it is really worrying and what has been experienced with the launch of the RTX 30 and RTX 2o on the shelves can be little known. AMD has released an (unconfirmed) game bundle to try to boost sales of the RX 6000, but both companies seem to be running into something unusual: the second-hand market teeming with GPUs.
The miners are flooding forums and second-hand websites with increasingly lower prices, knowing that the good times are over, and furthermore, the RTX 40 and the RX 7000 they are just around the corner, so everything gets complicated.
For this reason, in the US and according to reports, graphics cards already cost in many cases less than the MSRP, since in that country this market is even more competitive at the moment. How are they going to sell the new graphics if the second-hand market is offering really competitive prices and the new models are about to see the light?
Therefore, the opinions from ASUS seem to fall far short of the scenario that is presented to us.
