Are there actually gamers out there that are still struggling to source GPUs? Even at the height of the mining craze, it was still possible to backorder cards at MSRP if you're patient.
The serious crypto and AI nuts are all using custom hardware. Crypto moved onto ASICs for anything power-efficient, and Nvidia's DGX systems aren't being cannibalized from the gaming market.
But Nvidia doesn't want to make consumer compute cards because those might steal market share from the datacenter compute cards they are selling at 5x markup.
Nvidia's approach to software certainly deserves scrutiny, but their hardware lineup is so robust that I find it hard to complain. Jetson already exists for low-wattage solutions, and gaming cards can run Nvidia datacenter drivers on headless Linux without issue. The consumer compute cards are already here, you just aren't using them.
What we need is more real competition for NVidia cards at all levels, so rather than avoiding competing with themselves, they are worried about actually competing with the competition.
But capital doesn't want to invest in competition when it can instead invest in a chance at a moat that allows charging monopoly rents.
The serious crypto and AI nuts are all using custom hardware. Crypto moved onto ASICs for anything power-efficient, and Nvidia's DGX systems aren't being cannibalized from the gaming market.