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Gamer at Gamescom: If you want to play at the front, you need expensive hardware
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Michael Gottschalk/ Getty Images
If you want to play games like "Assassin's Creed", "Battlefield", "Grand Theft Auto" or "Microsoft Flight Simulator" in full resolution and with maximum details, you can currently stock up on hardware.
High-end graphics cards such as Nvidia's "GeForce RTX 3070" or a "Radeon RX 6800" from competitor AMD currently only cost a good half of what they cost at the beginning of the year - in some cases even significantly less.
Even those who buy an off-the-shelf gaming PC can look forward to constant new special offers.
Prices drop by 50 euros every few weeks, sometimes by as much as 200 euros.
A major reason for the price slide is the crash of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
He had it all.
Last November, the quasi-currency reached its all-time high of over $67,000.
It's now under $22,000.
Other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, also almost halved their price.
The result: The energy consumption of the Bitcoin network has already decreased by a third, as Alex de Vries reported when asked by SPIEGEL.
"This saving alone corresponds to the entire energy consumption of Switzerland," explains the Dutchman, who has been tracking the energy and resource consumption of cryptocurrencies for years.
And a second consequence: Suddenly the market for graphics cards is flooded.
Graphics chips calculate the blockchain
How are cryptocurrencies related to graphics cards?
Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are not printed from a central location like real currencies, but are created in a complex process called mining.
Computers have to carry out complex arithmetic operations.
It is a kind of race or lottery: whoever is the first to calculate a so-called block that can be attached to the blockchain before all other participants in the Bitcoin network receives a reward.
In the early days of Bitcoin history, enthusiasts quickly discovered that graphics chips were far better suited for this type of calculation than the main processors of a PC.
Sophisticated PCs then mined Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero or the fun currency Dogecoin around the clock with several graphics cards.
The higher the prices rose, the higher the demand for graphics cards - until the market was finally bought completely empty.
Although the Bitcoin miners have now switched to special computers, other projects such as Ethereum are still being calculated on graphics cards.
Nvidia fails because of the miners
With the constantly rising high prices of 2021, the demand increased so much that industry giant Nvidia felt compelled to apply an emergency brake: At the beginning of 2021, the graphics card manufacturer released separate product lines: The normal PC graphics cards were to be throttled in a targeted manner so that they were no longer suitable for mining .
For crypto calculations, on the other hand, Nvidia put special graphics cards on the market that no longer had a monitor connection and were therefore unsuitable for gaming.
In this way, the company wanted to capitalize on the boom in the crypto market without alienating its long-term clientele.
But the plan went wrong.
Tinkerers were able to bypass the software lock in a short time, so that the miners were not dependent on the more expensive cards that Nvdia released explicitly only for this clientele.
The ebb in graphics cards continued unabated.
On Ebay, suppliers could achieve crazy prices of over a thousand euros, and rip-offs also made a fortune with fake offers.
Even the crypto scene looked around for other mining methods.
In 2021, the cryptocurrency Chia experienced a brief high because it does not require a lot of computing power to create it, but relies on used storage space.
When the price of a Chia exceeded the thousand euro mark, hard drives and SSD drives were briefly sold out in some countries.
But the hype died down quickly, so there was no permanent bottleneck in storage media.
Today chia has disappeared into insignificance.
Second Christmas shop
Many benefited from the crypto hype.
"During the time when there was a lack of graphics cards, many people filled their pockets - from the manufacturer to the middleman and the end customer shops," says Kai Janssen, managing director of the PC dealer Dubaro.
In addition, there were the corona restrictions, which fueled the demand from bored children and adult gamers: "April 2020 was like a second Christmas sale for us," says Janssen today.
This boom has now been followed by disillusionment.
Given the modest economic prospects, global demand for new PCs has shrunk.
Firms are reluctant to invest, and consumers are wary of non-essential spending.
There are also many other factors, such as the collapse of the large Russian market.
The result: "The prices for graphics cards are currently falling almost every week," says Janssen.
If there is no new crisis such as further supply chain disruptions, the trend is likely to continue.
Some miners have not just switched off their computers because the energy costs exceed the expected returns.
Some are also trying to sell off their hardware.
Therefore, one should be careful when buying used goods.
If a graphics card has been in continuous use for two years, its durability should only be short.
Meanwhile, there are slight signs of recovery in the crypto markets again.
De Vries warns that even a Bitcoin price of 30,000 euros could be enough to reignite the market's resource consumption.
“So the environmental gains could be very short-lived,” explains the crypto critic.
And if other currencies follow the uptrend, graphics cards could soon be sold out again.
