[MereInterest]

Remember about ten years ago, how there was a fad to raise money, then use it to buy every single item on the shelves of a small convenience store? The intention was to keep small locally-owned stores in business by buying more from them. However, even though it brought a lot of profit on that one day, it meant that the shelves were empty for the next few weeks. The regulars saw that, and needed to find somewhere else to shop. The regulars left, and some never came back, leaving the store in worse financial position as before.

Cryptocurrency miners are driving up the prices of GPUs. NVIDIA wants to make sure that they have stock available for their regular customers, because that is where the long-term profit comes from. Ramping up production is not feasible on the short time scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it known whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough to recover such an investment.

TL;DR: Cryptocurrency miners are messing up the long-term GPU market, and NVIDIA is trying to maintain that market.

[madamelic]

>Ramping up production is not feasible on the short time scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it known whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough to recover such an investment.

Bitcoin has been around since 2010. They've had plenty of time to realize this was coming. Even the thickest person could've spotted this wave coming in 2013, in addition to the continued rise of computer and console gaming.

[bonestamp2]

Hard to say. I started mining bitcoin in 2013 and it had already moved past GPUs. Bitcoin wasn't taken very seriously back then, and the alt coins were taken even less seriously, so I can see NVidia not taking it seriously too.

[Rule35]

But they didn't want to think about it for even five minutes and figure out a friendly way to do this. They should have given gaming sites purchase invites to hand out to members.

There are other ideas too, higher prices on raw hardware but cash-back incentives if bought with games or gaming hardware.

Now everyone hates them. AMD couldn't have paid for such marketing. AMD gives everyone ECC support, unlocked cards. They're (currently) the anti Intel/Nvidia, and the market darling.