Cryptocurrency Nosedive Means Steep Graphics Card Discounts Ahead For Gamers

To the delight of anyone who's been eying a new graphics card for a while, there seems to be a definitive end in sight to the price-gouging supply/demand effect in the GPU market. In recent months, mining has seemingly died down quite a bit, as a result of cryptocurrency values likewise taking a major turn for the worse.

Currently, crypto values are low enough that for the vast majority of people, mining is much less lucrative than it was even just a few months ago, with the most ardent miners continuing along in hopes that the value of their coins of choice increase over time. Some of those miners may not even be using GPUs, but instead dedicated ASICs, lifting even more load off of the GPU demand.

NVIDIA's high-end Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1080 Ti should soon be displaced

According to Taipei industry publication DigiTimes, there has been a definite "mining chill" that's going to positively affect GPU pricing, with its sources claiming a drop of "around 20%" in July. That's significant, and should hopefully mean that more GPUs can be had at their actual MSRP, or perhaps even a bit under soon enough (remember when sub-MSRP prices were common?).

Admittedly, this price drop comes at a bit of a rough time, because NVIDIA has been rumored for months to be launching its new GeForce series this summer, so those who should be excited for Pascal price drops will now have to wonder about whether or not the 2-year-old architecture is worth investing in now, for basically full price. At the same time, NVIDIA has been rumored to have excess Pascal stock, so it might choose to wait for some of those to sell off before launching the new series.

Prototype NVIDIA Turing graphics card

Fueling speculation for the new series is a prototype Turing card that leaked last week, interestingly with three 8-pin power connectors (extremely likely to be exclusive to the tester card). This came around the same time that we learned Micron is ramping up GDDR6 memory production.

One thing's for sure: mining has dramatically impacted the current-generation of GPUs, but we're finally near the point where something new is going to release, and by all appearances, miners have no significant urgency to jump on them right now.