Nvidia RTX 3000 series graphics cards offer high performance at a very competitive price. Nvidia was forced to somehow improve the quality-price ratio of its cards because its competitor AMD is quite formidable with its new generation RX 6000 XT . Is this one of the causes that caused Nvidia RTX cards to be out of stock a few minutes after their launch?
Cryptocurrency miners also involved
Customers were somewhat frustrated that GeForce RTX 3000 series cards sold out within hours of hitting the market. The manufacturer Nvidia has explained many times that this comes from too much unusual demand from its customers. According to analyst Mitch Steves of RBC Capital Markets, cryptocurrency miners have a few things to do with it. Nvidia reportedly sold a large quantity of the 3000 series cards to cryptocurrency miners. Nearly $175 million in sales are attributable to cryptocurrency miner buyers. This craze has caused GPU stock shortages in recent weeks. Nvidia confirms that this stock shortage will continue in the first quarter of 2021.
Analysis of sales and requests for RTX 3000 cards
Quarterly sales data from Nvidia in the gaming sector shows a record turnover $2.27 billion , an increase of around 37% compared to 2020 over the same period. period. This increase concerns, among other things, sales relating to GPUs, SoCs for game consoles and computers equipped with RTX 3000 series . According to analysts, if we do not consider the $175 million associated with card sales for miners, Nvidia would present an increase in turnover of more than $500 million. The sale of cards to cryptocurrency miners thus represents more than 30%. This sum could increase exponentially if there was enough stock to meet all purchasing requests.
It should be noted that the Ethereum blockchain will change to version 2.0 from December. The new algorithm will highlight the challenge test and no longer the work test in its operation. Which will put the minors out of the game. This new algorithm will take approximately 1 year to fully apply. Thus, Ethereum miners took advantage of Nvidia's new cards to quickly accelerate mining before the stake change. Once this scalability is implemented, this system could be applied to other cryptocurrencies such as Ethash algorithms. Mitch Steves estimates that profitability with an Nvidia RTX 3080 would be there after 233 days of mining with an average profitability of $3 per day.
It should be noted that Nvidia is the subject of several lawsuits currently issued by its shareholders for not having been transparent about previous sales of mining cards. We therefore await the continuation of these proceedings.
The mining capabilities of GeForce 3000 series cards
The RTX 3080 card is benchmarked at 73-74 MH/s with the DaggerHashimoto algorithm. In overclock, this card can process 84-89 MH/s . In this case, the card uses 100% of its power.
Radeon RX 5700 card can do hash work of 50-54 MH/s in Ethereum mining. Which roughly corresponds to the performance of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (at 54 MH/s). Historically, Dagger-Hashimoto is the initial version of Ethereum Ethash, an ASIC-resistant algorithm.
The characteristics of the RTX 3080
This craze for mining comes, among other things, from the performance of these Nvidia 3000 series cards. The RTX 3000 series cards are very popular, because they display fairly increased mining capacities. These graphics cards are designed based on the Ampere architecture, moving from an engraving technique from 12 to 8 nanometers. The RTX 3080 costs 719 euros in MSRP (manufacturer's recommended retail price) but since it is continually out of stock, its price is increasing more and more online. Its MSRP price which was relatively competitive, despite doubling the performance compared to its predecessor Nvidia RTX 2080 , ensured that this card quickly disappeared from the market just hours after its launch.
The GeForce RTX 3080 has 8704 CUDA cores 10 GB GDDR6X memory running at 19 GHz . The memory passes data over the 320-bit bus with a bandwidth of 760 Gbps. In boost frequency, the GPU reaches the frequency of 1.71 GHz . In normal mode, the card operates at 1.44 GHz. The GPU has 28.3 billion transistors . In terms of performance, this card is 93% of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT .
The RTX 3080 graphics card measures 28.5 cm in length and has 4 video outputs including 1 HDMI and 3 DisplayPort. The card consumes a TDP power of 320 Watts . It is therefore recommended to use a power supply with a minimum power of 750 Watts.
On Fortnite, in 720p resolution, the RTX 3080 provides a frame rate of 285 FPS, in QHD 1440p, we obtain an average frame rate of 125 FPS and in 4K 2160p resolution, the card delivers images at 28.5 FPS.
Comparing the performance of the RTX 3080 with cards in the same category, the Radeon RX 6800 is +5.08% while the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is -8.8%.
In short, Nvidia 3000 series cards, particularly the RTX 3080 cards, have been popular with cryptocurrency miners. They alone purchased cards worth $175 million. This enthusiasm was accentuated by the fact that these cards were sold at a very attractive price. Nvidia therefore announces a stock shortage until the first quarter of 2021.
