Get that new video card before the crypto currency people buy them all

[Art Blade]

yes, me. For gaming, though

[LowPolyOWG]

  Well, I'll invest about 20K+ NOK into my Ryzen build. Need to hold out until November (Going to buy everything in a bulk during Black Friday)

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, that stuff is way too volatile, I guess the trick is to get in early with a small-ish investment and bail as soon as the price tanks. Then buy gold or diamonds, right? 

[Art Blade]

or ice cream, perhaps

[LowPolyOWG]

 

[LowPolyOWG]

Retail staff reports high levels of mining performance with AMD's RX Vega


In other words, gamers will probably not get their hands on Vega at launch Expect the market being flooded with used Rx 480/580s. I'm holding out for November (Black Friday deals) and I hope the Norwegian retailers have Vegas in stock by that time... The mining craze have affected availability of the RX 580s here, Komplett expects new stock next month

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting. Is AMD specifically making cards that are good for mining, as in, they are designing for it? Or is it just a byproduct of the design they use to make a good video card? And, are the bitcoin people increasing the difficulty of the mining procedure to compensate for the new cards which according to that article, are now 2-3 times faster?

[LowPolyOWG]

AMD's card are quite over engineered from a technical standpoint. They have a distinct "ACE" block (Asynchronous Compute Engine) reserved for computing tasks. No games utilized it due to DX11's poor multithreading and it is a high-level API, which relies on GPU vendor driver optimization, rather than developer optimization. To answer your question: Yes, most likely a byproduct by AMD's way to make GPUs.





Doom using the "ACEs" under Vulkan. Note the performance on the AMD GPUs

Yes, when you mine a block, the next blocks will be much harder to mine. Which means, you need a better GPU. The algorithms increase the difficulty depending on the amouth of blocks being mined. Today, there are no reason to mine Bitcoins, the difficulty is too much for an average PC to handle. Algorithms might be coded to take advantage of the memory bandwidth of a GPU

[LowPolyOWG]

Wow, looks like the cryptomarket is going upwards 

[Dweller_Benthos]

I don't really know what that page is saying, but it looks like you have to run a couple 480 cards at least to make any money.

[LowPolyOWG]

If you look at the top of the page, the BTC, Zcash and ETH had a price increase

[Dweller_Benthos]

lol, I still don't know what it's trying to tell me. But I did find CAPS

http://whattomine.com/coins/120-cap-scrypt

now there's one I can get behind, gotta get those caps to survive in the wasteland!

[LowPolyOWG]

 

The page I shared is a nice guide for what cryptocurrency you can mine. I'm limited to 1 GPU, but I have managed to make about 20$ in Zcash (I have 0.1216 zcash when I write this, 1 ZEC = 208.10$). Will not cash out yet, I will build a new PC in November. Not for mining, but for game development. The mining activity is something I do because I'm curious about it and it might pay out long term. I'm aware about the risks so I don't expect being a millionaire. Heck, the market might even collapse tomorrow