PC Gamers might be happier

The graphics card market has been crazy. While sales for Nvidia and AMD cards are up, it also means that the best graphics cards are in high demand and nearly impossible to buy at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), due to cryptocurrency mining.For those who don't a lot of people are buying GPUs in bulk to try to make easy money by mining Bitcoin, Ethereum or even Dogecoin. But if you've shopped for a gaming card in the last few months you already noticed the high cost. Prices have swung wildly on a daily basis, driven by the mining demand and memory shortages. 

I randomly went over to Newegg to check on prices lately and noticed a few eye-catching drops. In fact, a few midrange and high-end Radeon and GeForce cards are at a 40-day low. Are they back at MSRP? No, they're not. Bitmain has already developed an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit for mining Ethereum, and three other companies working on Ethereum ASICs, all at various stages of development. Ethereum ASIC miner should stop the demand for graphics cards. The new products are expected to hit the supply chain in the next few months. If they prove to be winners at Etherum and other POW cryptos, then we may finally see video card prices deflate to pre-2017 levels. Anyone remember a PNY GeForce GTX 1060 6GB  at $250? 

I will say that I am not a PC gamer. I game on the console about 80 to 90% of the time. The most powerful card I own is a GTX 1050. The type of game you play is always relevant. For Deus Ex: Mankind Divided 40 frames per second should be your minimum. You'll need a graphics card at the level of Nvidia GTX 970/1060 or an AMD R9 390/RX 470 or better to consistently break 60fps at 1080p low. For 1080p ultra, those same cards would ok too, but if you want to stay at 60fps, you'll need a RX Vega 56/R9 Fury or GTX 1070/980 Ti. And if your aim is to break 60fps at 4k ultra you need to run two GPUs in SLI or CrossFire. You would also need a 144Hz monitor and powerful CPUs like a Ryzen 7 2700x or an Intel Core i7-8700K.

Lots of PC gamers are waiting for the bubble to burst, but considering cryptocurrencies have been around since 2009, that crash is not going to come any time soon. Many see consoles, as game boxes with very limited functionality.  A PC can always be updated with the latest and greatest hardware, but that is not the case with a console. However at this time a PNY GeForce GTX 1060/1070 cost more than an Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo.