Miners bought up all modern video cards, and those that remained on store shelves are now very expensive. Therefore, NVIDIA took a desperate step.
Video card manufacturers are going through a difficult time. Firstly, the coronavirus interfered with supplies, and now there is an increased interest in cryptocurrencies. Therefore, all over the world, all video cards have disappeared from the sale. And if any remain, they are sold at exorbitant prices.
To somehow meet the demand, NVIDIA announced the return of two popular video cards – the previous generation RTX 2060 and a very old GTX 1050 Ti from four years ago.
These old video cards are still sold even in the USA. But these are rather remnants of previous batches, and they are also very expensive. For example, if even before the New Year, the RTX 2060 cost no more than $ 400. Now in some stores, it is sold for 500 and even 800 Dollars. The same story with the 1050 GTX Ti, the old graphics card performance level is below average. It is sold for 200 Dollars.
The choice for the RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti is easy to explain. As reported by PCWorld, these are legacy graphics cards that are easy to produce in large quantities. The pipelines for the production of video cards with the modern Ampere architecture are overloaded. The factories cannot cope with the production. And besides this, there is significant competing demand in the chip market: next-generation game consoles (PS5, Xbox Series X), smartphones, and other devices for which chips also need to be produced. Therefore, the entire market is now experiencing problems.
At the same time, old video cards may turn out to be unprofitable for miners who buy up all modern video cards in general – even expensive laptops are used. Therefore, the same GTX 1050 Ti can become a temporary choice for those who are just assembling a computer for games or work at home and will buy a more powerful video card later when the market returns to normal.