I find myself needing, for the first time ever, a high-end video card for some heavy video encoding, and when I look, they're all gone, apparently in a tug of war between gamers and crypto miners.
At the exact same time, I am throwing out a box of old video cards from the mid-nineties (Trident, Diamond Stealth) and from the looks of it you can list them on eBay but they don't even sell.
Now Intel is about to leap into the fray and I am imagining trying to explain all of this to the me of twenty-five years back.
"apparently in a tug of war between gamers and crypto miners"
That, and the oligopoly of AMD and NVidia. Their grip is so tight they dictate terms to card makers. For example; you can't build an NVidia GPU card unless you source the GDDR from NVidia. Between them the world supply of high end GDDR is monopolized.
Intel is going to deliver some badly needed competition. They don't even have to approach the top of the GPU high end; just deliver something that will play current games at 1080p at modest settings and they'll have an instant hit. Continuing the tradition of open source support Intel has had with (most) of their GPU technology is something else we can hope for.
At the exact same time, I am throwing out a box of old video cards from the mid-nineties (Trident, Diamond Stealth) and from the looks of it you can list them on eBay but they don't even sell.
Now Intel is about to leap into the fray and I am imagining trying to explain all of this to the me of twenty-five years back.