Multiple signs in the industry indicate that interest in cryptomining-specific GPUs is waning as mining profitability plummets. Nvidia reported that its revenue from crypto mining plunged 77% in the last quarter of the year, and now we're seeing signs that AMD-based cryptomining GPUs are also beginning to lose value. For instance, the Sapphire GPRO Radeon's price tag has fallen nearly 40% over the last month.
Sapphire secretly launched its GPRO series of cryptocurrency-specific graphics cards last November. Based on Navi 22 and Navi 23 silicon, the Sapphire GPRO Radeon X080 and X060 accelerators proved themselves impossible to find in mainstream outlets - and even the manufacturer's website. However, the cards have been listed on the price comparison website Geizhals (via VideoCardz) for a month now, giving us a glimpse at the GPU's pricing evolution in that time-frame.
The data is eye-opening: the cards have seen their value plummet closer towards their purported $846 MSRP, falling by almost $600 from $1415 down to $867 — a 38% decrease.
Since December, the overall cryptocurrency market has been on a downtrend, making it more difficult for miners and cryptocurrency-minded gamers to recoup their investment in the improving but still hotly expensive GPU market. This comes as the transition to Proof of Stake draws closer for the Ethereum blockchain, which in itself is likely the single most pressing element gatekeeping miners from further graphics cards acquisitions.
Yes, other Dagger-Hashimoto-based cryptocurrencies can be mined after Ethereum transitions to Proof of Stake - but none of them are nearly as profitable as Ethereum mining, owing to their low overall price per coin.
As we've recently seen, mainstream GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD have been dropping in pricing since December 12th as well, owing to the cooling demand, increasing stock levels, and highly inflated pricing. This is likely putting off users still looking to upgrade their graphics cards to the latest AMD and Nvidia products.
This seems to have naturally extended to cryptocurrency-specific products, such as the Sapphire GPRO X080 - and the writing is likely on the wall for Nvidia's Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) products as well. For example, the price comparison platform Geizhals currently has a single, top-of-the-line Nvidia CMP170HX card currently listed for pre-sale, at an eye-watering €4,699 (~$5,332).
Interestingly, the price reduction of around 38% seems to fall within the same decline levels witnessed for the mainstream RX 6000 series and RTX 3000-series from both AMD and Nvidia. One would expect cryptocurrency-specific graphics card pricing to fall quicker, however, considering how their headless design (meaning there are no video outputs) renders these cards useless as main system drivers.
