[HN Gopher] Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on...
___________________________________________________________________
Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD
says
Author : Shank
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-01-10 07:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| noyeastguy wrote:
| This will be an interesting experiment to see what happens when
| these companies spurn the customers that created the conditions
| for this market to exist. I hope Apple or another company is
| smart enough to use this opportunity to scoop up disenfranchised
| customers and let AMD and NVIDEA waste more time serving the
| Ponzi industrial complex.
| hartator wrote:
| > What remains to be seen is whether the design decisions that
| make the 6500 XT sub-optimal for mining also make it sub-optimal
| for gaming.
|
| Yes, I would be worried that for certain games; performance will
| be oddly super bad.
| yob22 wrote:
| taspeotis wrote:
| > We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke.
| vlunkr wrote:
| That's a deep cut that I really appreciate.
| redisman wrote:
| My 3070 has a "low hashrate" sticker on it. I'm sure it's a
| fairly trivial firmware flag but I haven't tried mining on it
| Tenoke wrote:
| I have a 3070 and it mines Ethereum pretty efficiently (not
| that I currently mine with it).
| rdtwo wrote:
| It's not but there are algorithms that are less sensitive to
| lhr games
| snicker7 wrote:
| AMD consumer cards are unusable for GPGPU. Utter garbage. It's
| not just mining. I would not have bought them if it weren't for
| their open source driver. I hope Intel Arc fares better.
| torginus wrote:
| Isn't it because of CUDA?
| qayxc wrote:
| Yes and no. AMD uses different architectures for their
| consumer grade hardware and their HPC stuff as well (i.e.
| RDNA vs. CDNA).
|
| CUDA support (or rather lack thereof, which isn't AMD's
| fault) plays a major role w.r.t. software support, but AMD's
| compute architecture isn't DL-focused either.
|
| The MI250X compute part for example has a FP16 to FP32 ratio
| of 8:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:1; in other words it's
| an absolute beast at GPGPU compute.
|
| The 6900XT on the other hand has a FP16 to FP32 ratio of just
| 2:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:16 (i.e. it's severely
| restricted at high precision workloads and OK at half-
| precision).
|
| Comparing this to the specs of NVIDIA cards, they're still
| _vastly_ superior on paper. The consumer versions of Ampere
| only get 1:1 (FP16:FP32) and 1:64(!!! FP32:FP64)
| respectively. But then again, NVIDIA cards feature dedicated
| "tensor cores", which have no equivalent on AMD consumer
| grade hardware.
|
| The main selling point for NVIDIA, however, is software
| support and mindshare. They started to buy themselves into
| academia in the late 2000s by sponsoring labs and providing a
| vast ecosystem of software libraries for deep learning and
| GPGPU support in general. This not only helped kickstarting
| the deep learning revolution but also tied their hardware and
| brand name to GPGPU, which basically became synonymous with
| CUDA at that point.
| torginus wrote:
| Ah I see. But wouldn't that mean that hardware-wise,
| consumer grade AMD stuff is better than for GPGPU, than
| consumer grade NVIDIA stuff? With the exception of AI and
| software support, of course.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The higher-end cards are inherently very very usable for GPGPU,
| it's just the tooling around them that sucks. As for lower end
| cards, that's because they are low-end.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Yes, they have the Radeon Open Compute project (ROCM) but
| they seem to be intent on following the tensorflow from a few
| stable versions behind. Additionally, and likely this is not
| something they can do anything about, but if you are using a
| Linux VM instead of running it natively, ROCM does not work.
| I had attempted to do this to get some use of the AMD GPU
| that was in my Mac -- no dice.
|
| The holy grail would be a direct replacement backend that
| could be fed into TF, like CUDA.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If you are using a VM, you can never use your GPU unless
| you have a very expensive one or a spare GPU to
| passthrough.
|
| ROCm has a direct replacement backend that can even take
| CUDA code (it's designed to be incredibly similar). It's
| called HIP. It's just that no one wants to support it. That
| is actually how TensorFlow on AMD works (mostly), and you
| can compile the latest stable release that way.
| tim-- wrote:
| 6600XT pass through works fine on QEMU/virtd. There is no
| need to have multiple GPUs in your machine to have a
| passable setup.
|
| I can boot into Linux, and swap into Windows in 2 seconds
| with this setup. I have a dirty 20 line Bash script that
| deals with detaching the console, and passing the right
| things to the right place, but it all works.
|
| ROCm on consumer cards does not work well. The tooling
| sucks. Massively. I don't understand why AMD doesn't have
| an extra team of 20 devs working just on the tooling.
|
| Using DirectML with Windows Subsystem for Linux gives you
| better ML GPGPU support then AMDs native tooling.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| >I can boot into Linux, and swap into Windows in 2
| seconds with this setup. I have a dirty 20 line Bash
| script that deals with detaching the console, and passing
| the right things to the right place, but it all works.
|
| That's a matter of opinion I suppose, but I don't
| personally find that passable.
|
| >Using DirectML with Windows Subsystem for Linux gives
| you better ML GPGPU support then AMDs native tooling.
|
| DirectML sucks even more than ROCm, IMO. Also, WSL sucks
| more than a normal VM.
| willis936 wrote:
| The 6500 XT is bad at everything. I haven't bought a dGPU with 4
| GB of VRAM in a decade. This is just PR.
| mrfinn wrote:
| World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one
| side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make
| some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in
| power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban
| any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon
| as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive
| life threatening issue.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a
| nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your
| clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems
| frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might
| consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else
| equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily
| on the potential chopping block even if this one thing you hear
| a lot about might be a waste?
|
| Now if PoW was using 10% of the world power maybe it'd worth it
| but I just don't see how you can justify such a ban but only
| apply it to this one thing.
| cedilla wrote:
| You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work
| blockchains. It's on the scale of nations.
|
| But the main difference is that whatever you compare with
| those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the
| automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't
| periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more
| people are interested in tumble drying.
| jhasse wrote:
| Difficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also
| decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when
| energy prices go up).
| newbie789 wrote:
| samwillis wrote:
| There is literal legislation about energy efficiency of
| consumer goods (such as dryers), our houses have to be built
| to be environmentally friendly with good insulation to stop
| wasted energy, governments are banning plastic packaging. But
| crypto should be except? No, crypto should be legislated so
| that it's energy usage is limited. To think otherwise is an
| enormous step backwards.
|
| I cannot understand how this is not a bigger issue being
| talked about in the media. Right now in the UK we are going
| through an energy crisis where people can't afford to heat
| their own homes (I'm not blaming crypto for this). It's
| absolutely maddening that in a world where climate change and
| energy scarcity is such an issue this would be a
| controversial topic.
| IanCal wrote:
| Those are very different things.
|
| My dishwasher is rated based on specific cycles, but I'm
| legally allowed to use it as frivolously as I want. I can
| run an A+++ rated dryer with a single sock in and send the
| photo to the police.
|
| We don't limit energy use but inefficiencies. The
| equivalent in crypto would be to rate hardware by hashes
| per joule.
|
| Crypto things are different because the incentives are
| different. I'm incentivised to use my appliances
| efficiently as the energy cost is just a cost.
|
| On the other hand with PoW, I'm incentivised to mine
| efficiently but _as much as possible_ because I can buy a
| thing that turns electricity into cash.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| You can wash your clothes in a bucket if you want to save
| even more energy. But I like the convenience of washers and
| dryers.
| endisneigh wrote:
| There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be
| limited as well.
|
| Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison
| makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use.
| What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging
| your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New
| York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less
| energy. And so forth.
|
| For every conceivable use case there exists alternatives that
| use orders of magnitude less energy. NFTs, sending money,
| federated computing, you name it, something already exists.
|
| The only reason blockchain is a thing is because
| cryptocurrencies are booming in terms of how much they're
| sold for. The end.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York?
|
| Large swathes of Europe have winters as bad or even worse
| than New York's. I've grown up in one of those countries
| and had never seen a home clothes dryer before visiting the
| US. I've also almost never seen them in London or Berlin
| where I lived after that and those have at most marginally
| warmer winters than New York.
| ericd wrote:
| Then you can use a drying rack indoors, as Europeans do...
| They look like this:
| https://alittlelifeineurope.com/2017/09/10/in-praise-of-
| the-...
|
| Electrical resistive heating clothes dryers are an
| _enormous_ energy hog.
| jrockway wrote:
| > Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York?
|
| I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's
| below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity
| inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was
| already being heated, because I live in it, and it's
| against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature
| to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more
| like 80-90 all winter.)
| beloch wrote:
| Governments could apply a carbon and electronic waste offset
| tax to declared cryptocurrency income. The people making
| money from cryptocurrencies should pay enough to fund
| projects that will fully offset their environmental costs.
|
| Of course, those taxes will probably just disappear into
| general tax revenues and wind up paying for other things, but
| it would encourage crypto miners to pursue green energy
| sources and, perhaps, find better uses for obsolete graphics
| cards.
| nix0n wrote:
| > Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US
|
| Fine, yes. Ban both.
| Justin_K wrote:
| Would you support Visa and Amex if their next generation
| networks required you to burn x minutes of natural gas or x
| pounds of coal to complete a transaction? Why is this an
| acceptable architecture for Blockchain? It is a race to the
| bottom.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| That's absurd comparison. No energy user (be it miners or
| the visa network) requires unclean power. Electricity is
| fungible.
|
| We all want power to be cleanly generated. This demand side
| bullying needs to stop. Give us clean energy!
| 300bps wrote:
| This comes up every single time banning cryptocurrency for
| wasting electricity comes up. Using a clothes drying machine
| and just about anything else that you can think of that uses
| electricity is fundamentally different than PoW
| cryptocurrency.
|
| If I want to use a machine to dry my clothes, I pay for that
| electricity. This puts a limit on the amount of electricity I
| can consume to do it.
|
| Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn,
| the more money you make. I know this first hand - the
| computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on
| flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH
| in the past 10 months.
|
| Something that most people don't understand is that there is
| a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate
| determines the size of the slice of that pie you get.
| Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity!
| Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e.
| GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and
| electricity isn't infinite.
|
| But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that
| do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing
| the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out
| the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU
| manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever
| they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even
| subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It
| is nothing like anything else you spoke of.
| mdoms wrote:
| Machine drying clothes unnecessarily is right up there in the
| wastefulness stakes.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Machine washing too.
| gmac wrote:
| Ha ha. But clothes dry themselves. Clothes do not wash
| themselves.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| You would be amazed what can be accomplished when you
| roll up your sleeves.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Maybe they meant people wash their clothes too often?
|
| https://www.prima.co.uk/fashion-and-beauty/fashion-
| tips/a269...
| javagram wrote:
| Machine washing is a significant labor and time saver.
|
| People are usually opposed to line drying clothes because
| of aesthetics and feeling like it makes their
| neighborhood look "poor". Luckily quite a few states have
| passed laws making it illegal for landlords or HOAs to
| ban putting up clotheslines.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Significant? Who doesn't have 20 minutes to soak and wash
| their clothes in a bucket? If the goal is to reduce
| energy usage one should start at the top with large
| appliances.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The typical drying machine pulls about 2-6 KW while running.
| A cryptomining rig pulls about ~1.2 KW while mining. A drying
| machine runs for an hour a week. Let's say 2 hours a week.
| That's 12kWh per week at the high end for drying. A
| cryptomining rig running 24/7 ends up using 201 KWh for the
| same time period. That's 16x more taking the most pessimistic
| clothes drying usage, so I'm not sure how you're concluding
| "uses as much if not more energy".
| [deleted]
| pph wrote:
| A household dryer is very unlikely to get anywhere near 6
| kW even at peak. In Europe it's common to have 16 A at
| 220-240 V which gives you a maximum of roughly 3.5 kW.
| politician wrote:
| Most people living in the suburbs in the US have a drying
| machine while not everyone has a cryptomining rig running
| 24/7, so we could _easily_ be in a situation where drying
| machines in a region use more power than cryptomining rigs.
| And a lot of things are like that: Netflix, furnaces, AC,
| freezers.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| You forgot to account for the cost of the damage a dryer
| does to clothing. And how much conditioned air it pumps
| outside that needs to get sucked back in through my home's
| cracks and re-conditioned.
|
| And the fires!
| xhrpost wrote:
| OP is probably talking cumulative energy. The vast majority
| of households probably have dryers in the US. The vast
| majority of households also DO NOT have crypto mining rigs.
| mrfinn wrote:
| Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that
| everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the
| need of power is steadily bigger each year. Where would be
| the limit of that? When that requires the energy of a big
| country? (We are quite away from that as far as I know [1] )
| A heavily industrialized continent? More than the whole
| world?
|
| It's absolutely crazy. I know that there's a big lobby behind
| mining, I absolutely respect what they have being doing
| protecting Bitcoin i.e. and making the project survive...
| even if it somehow completely lost it's original purpose. But
| FFS guys what's the purpose of having cryptocurrencies if the
| cost of that is aiming to destroy the world, or much more
| probably, to win a last minute complete cryptocurrency ban
| from all governments with the handy climate change as an
| excuse?
|
| [1] https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-
| bitcoin-n...
| palebluedot wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if we'll discover a Kardashev Type II
| civilization, harnessing the power of their sun via a Dyson
| sphere. And then, upon first-contact, realize they are
| using all that power to mine Bitcoin.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that
| everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the
| need of power is steadily bigger each year.
|
| They don't really require more power, they are just getting
| more valuable so it's been profitable for more people to
| increase their mining investments. The limit is that they
| are not infinitely valuable, and if anything mining rewards
| are decreasing.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that
| everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the
| need of power is steadily bigger each year
|
| PoW is wasteful by design. The more hash power you throw at
| the network, the more difficult the PoW becomes. Any
| efficiency gains necessarily have to go towards more
| hashing, instead of maintaining the same level of work at a
| lower power draw.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That
| is 218,400Wh for a week.
|
| A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That
| assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is
| < 100W.
|
| If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour,
| you are using about 38,400Wh.
|
| You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the
| week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single
| miner node. About 50% less!
|
| Bitcoin is a huge waste of electricity, and it is WAY worse
| than anything else you listed.
| pph wrote:
| A modern dryer uses less than 2 kWh for an 8kg run [0].
| That means for those 38 kWh you need to run it daily for
| almost 3 weeks. Normal usage (let's say twice per week)
| would lead to ~3 kWh energy consumption.
|
| [0] Siemens WT47R400: 176 kWh / year for 160 cycles by
| energy label, 1.4 kWh for a full run.
| WatchDog wrote:
| 1000W+ power supplies are pretty common on the high end of
| gaming PC's, I've got a 1200W psu in my machine, as my old
| 750W PSU was shutting off when I upgraded my GPU. I don't
| know how many watts it's drawing during a resource
| intensive game, but it's gotta be a lot more than 400. I
| think I'll look into getting a wall plug power meter.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| RTX 3060 + 5950x CPU under load is like 400 to 450 watts,
| based on my power meter. That includes power to monitor
| and other peripherals as well.
|
| I agree with OP though, we're within an order of
| magnitude of other legit uses, so let people be free.
| Increase electricity costs or taxes if you want.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to compare 1 person gaming or clothes
| drying to a specific mining machine. The consideration was
| about global bans and total outputs from those activities.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Bitcoin mining uses more power than the country of
| Sweden.
|
| [1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-
| bitcoin-n...
| dazeandconfuse wrote:
| > When you put it all together, that's a projection of
| 135.12 TWh in the year, or about as much power as is used
| annually by the country of Sweden
|
| I don't doubt that bitcoin miners use a lot of energy,
| but I hesitate to trust a source that doesn't know the
| difference between power and energy. Also, they're lying
| about the energy consumption of Sweden, which actually
| uses 645.7 TW/yr as of 2012 [0]. They number they quote
| is actually the electricity consumption of Sweden [1],
| which is like 5x lower.
|
| [0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consump
| tion+of+...
|
| [1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consump
| tion+of+...
| Xylakant wrote:
| I have no love for bitcoin, but I always hate this
| comparison. It's useless. Sweden uses much more energy
| than it uses power (as pretty much every country) and it
| also exports power usage by buying finished products. Why
| is the power usage not compared to something useful? The
| power or rather energy usage of the global banking
| network for example?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Yes, but the real question always is:
|
| Who will make a decision as to what is considered
| frivolous.
|
| Not to search very far, I consider trucks in US for non-
| contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around
| telling people those need to be banned.
| preommr wrote:
| > I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be
| frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those
| need to be banned.
|
| What does you not liking trucks have to do with the issue
| of putting limitations on mining crypto?
|
| Just because you don't care about this random issue
| doesn't invalidate serious concerns other people have.
|
| Also, this is a pretty bad faith argument to say 'who can
| make these decisions'. We make rules in society all the
| time. If enough people can be convinced for a particular
| regulation and the laws of the society allow it, then
| it'll be implemented.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I do not believe it is a bad faith argument.
|
| At the end of the day, trucks are there to illustrate a
| point that people may not agree what is considered
| 'good','efficient' or whatever qualifier you want to add.
| Trucks - those humongous behemoths intended for largely
| for contractors, but bought people with more money than
| sense for reasons that are not 'good','efficient' or
| whatever other qualifier you would want to add to crypto
| - are largely inefficient for a family unit. Some could
| easily argue that those should be banned for personal use
| as their gas-guzzling abilities are a MUCH greater threat
| to climate change than the entirety of crypto mining
| operation.
|
| But do I suggest people are mandated to only get one
| Prius every 5 years? No. Do you know why, because the
| concerns of the people may be real, but we have not, as a
| society, yet decided that it is ok for those concerns to
| override individual choices.
|
| You are right about society. You are wrong about the
| argument.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Trucks move people and items. Bitcoin allows us to buy
| porn, pot and run scams on a mostly centralized network.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Can you explain how it is centralized? Because... it
| isn't.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Lets say Coinbase and Paypal (both BTC processors) stop
| supporting your website. Do you think that you'll get as
| many BTC transactions if this happens?
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| I don't think you understand how cryptocurrencies work.
| There ain't much Coinbase and PayPal can do to stop
| someone sending coins to my address. I don't have a
| website, nor do I care what Coinbase or PayPal do or say.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You can't even access your wallet without an API
| provider. This includes MetaMask.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Maybe in eth land, if you don't run a fullnode. And that
| speaks to moxies recent post about centralization.
|
| I'm talking about Bitcoin, and you better believe I run a
| fullnode. No provider required. I recommend you run a
| Bitcoin full Node too, and transact without any 3rd
| parties!
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't think you understand the practical business
| realities of the internet.
|
| No typical business is going to work with BTC addresses
| on the raw. They're going to (and currently) using simple
| APIs like Coinbase API (https://developers.coinbase.com/)
| to "implement BTC receipts".
|
| As far as US business is concerned, the typical payment
| processor for bitcoin is Coinbase. They handle the
| bitcoint transfer, transaction history, and conversion
| into USD all at the same time.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| There are many business that run their own payment
| infrastructure, BTCPay is the most popular. It is better
| for the network if people DONT use centralized providers.
| We all have the power to use decentralized
| infrastructure.
|
| Bitcoin works the way it is intended, that is peer to
| peer payments. Everything else is just ecosystem, which
| can be replaced. Coinbase is important as an on-ramp for
| users for now, yes, but their importance to the network
| is peripheral.
| dragontamer wrote:
| And the Exim email-server and "bind" DNS server is
| "decentralized", except everybody uses gmail.com, or even
| centralized upon AWS.
|
| There's your theory, and there's the practice of the
| internet and business. In theory, they should be the
| same. In practice, they're different.
| ruined wrote:
| there's only one blockchain
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Only one Bitcoin blockchain, correct. There are affinity
| scams like bcash and bsv that try to steal the name.
|
| The users/miners decided, in decentralized fashion by
| contributing resources. Decentralized!
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think the issue is your concern does not really answer
| the question I posed. We can follow the use 'use'
| argument as soon as we deal with the 'who has the
| authority to tell people what to do with
| energy/money/equipment'. Is it me? Is it you? Is it
| society? Is it government? As soon as we get through that
| conundrum, we can discuss how crypto is basically evil
| and used for nefarious purposes only and cars are more
| like knives ( I disagree, but we can get to it once we
| know who can actually make the call on the behalf of
| humanity as a whole that a given technology is banned ).
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I don't understand why anyone thinks this argument is
| some kind of checkmate. This is the equivalent of
| screaming you're a sovereign citizen when the police ask
| for your name.
|
| Governments have this general monopoly on the use of
| force, which is why they tell you you can't do things
| like sell heroin. If you disobey them, they will send men
| with firearms and make you stop.
|
| Governments can obtain their consent in a bunch of
| different models and lots of people argue about which
| ones are better.
|
| A "world wide ban on crypto" probably is not going to
| happen but more and more countries are banning it. I
| suspect many more will continue.
| hartator wrote:
| > You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the
| week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient
| single miner node. About 50% less!
|
| I think OP point still stands. This is comparable in term
| of "waste".
| newbie789 wrote:
| bluecalm wrote:
| You don't need a specific ban. Just even the playing field for
| traditional finance. Either make cryptocurrencies follow normal
| banking/financial laws or make laws for traditional finance
| more liberal. Cryptocurrencies and especially PoW based ones
| are a terrible, slow, inefficient and vulnerable technology
| which wouldn't survive a day of fair competition.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| What is "fair competition"? Can you define it?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| PoW cryptocurrencies are still _way_ more energy- and carbon-
| efficient than armored vans /trucks carrying valuables around,
| which is the _other_ accepted method of decentralized,
| trustless value transfer. We shouldn 't call for stuff to be
| "banned" that we can't even be bothered to understand properly.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Ah yes, I'll never forget when I purchased my house and the
| armored truck delivered my money to the buyer. /s
|
| Most transactions don't need a decentralized trust-less value
| transfer. But bitcoin is not only attempting to displace the
| small sliver of transactions that DO need
| trustless/decentralized
| kmkemp wrote:
| I put a 20% downpayment on my house and it involved a wire
| transfer that was scheduled for days in the future that
| required my physical presence at a centralized authority
| (bank). With Bitcoin, that process takes less than an hour,
| with very little "fee", and doesn't involve any of the
| "trust", which was represented in my example by time
| delays, scheduling, and traveling.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Oddly enough making buying a house faster is not really a
| priority for me. I appreciated that mechanisms of trust
| kicked in for that transaction - my bank wouldn't release
| mortgage money to anyone but a lawyer or notary, and my
| notary would not have released money to the seller unless
| they actually owned the place and transferred ownership
| to me.
|
| Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers,
| and have to trust the seller (who stands to gain if they
| can trick me) instead of now where i trust the bank and
| the conveyancers instead.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers
|
| Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a
| mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can
| decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer
| and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared
| to other systems because it only depends on _mutual_
| trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-
| defined central authority.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I for one do not want to send hundreds of thousands of
| dollars to someone else without any kind of reversibility
| or fraud-protection guarantees. I'm willing to pay a
| token amount in terms of fee and delay in order to ensure
| that.
| teawrecks wrote:
| PoW really is the tragedy of the commons epitomized. The only
| way it could be more on the nose is if mining literally
| required a random human being to die.
| noyeastguy wrote:
| The sad reality is that people will die from the excess
| carbon and pollution put into the atmosphere by mining
| crypto.
| gjs278 wrote:
| miohtama wrote:
| There is no need to ban them unless there is a particular local
| problem, like in Kazakhstan. Because proof of stake is
| technically superior for network capacity, proof of work
| blockchains will slowly die away. Users switch to better
| solutions. For example, there will be only proof of work coin
| (bitcoin) left in top 10 market cap by the end of this year.
| friendlydog wrote:
| In 2019 the US used 18.27 billion gallons of fuel from
| airlines. If we limited flights to once a week we would save an
| amazing amount of fuel and increase flight occupancy, and
| decrease consumption as people would need to decide if the trip
| really needed a week layover if they couldn't take care of the
| problem in a 24 hour period. Much more than crypto consumption
| unless I am wrong.
| abraae wrote:
| Or a carbon tax and solve the problem at source.
| dmm wrote:
| Wouldn't all the miners(and every other carbon intensive
| industry) just move to a place without a carbon tax?
| abraae wrote:
| Yes. That's why you need big players - like the US, EU - to
| use leverage to force the rest of the world to follow suit.
| But the change has to start somewhere.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| That solves nothing, it only lines politician's pockets. The
| cost of electricity is the deterrent currently, which is why
| you don't see everyone mining. If you want to make
| electricity cost more, it'll "solve" more than crypto mining,
| it'll just make mostly poor people have a lower standard of
| life.
| DennisP wrote:
| The best carbon fee proposals refund the money to
| taxpayers, equal amount per person. If you emit less CO2
| than average, as most poor people do, then you come out
| ahead.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| It doesn't make much sense, how would money be guaranteed
| to come back after making its way to through the
| government and back? The cost of electricity already
| functions more efficiently; don't take money out of
| peoples pockets so you don't need to give it back.
|
| A pigovian tax by insurance would work better, I
| definitely think environmental protection is needed but
| politicians will just use the money they get in nefarious
| ways.
| thehappypm wrote:
| All a carbon tax does is punish consumers, while making
| crypto miners make less profit. The amount of tax it would
| take to make crypto mining less profitable basically is an
| imposition of austerity.
| acdha wrote:
| That'd only partially solve it: we don't want to waste
| renewable power which could be going to something of value.
| xvector wrote:
| You are moving the goalposts. If Bitcoin miners pay for
| renewable energy, they are no longer harming the
| environment.
|
| Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they
| pay for? Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't
| mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.
|
| There is no evidence that Bitcoin's usage of renewables is
| preventing others from paying for renewables too.
| abraae wrote:
| > Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy
| they pay for?
|
| IMO this is the strongest case for a carbon tax - it
| respects individual freedom.
|
| You want to cruise in your diesel-sucking massive launch?
| You want to take your personal 747 out for a joy ride to
| the Bahamas?
|
| Fill your boots, do what you want without any guilt -
| your environmental impact has been offset by your higher
| fuel bills.
| acdha wrote:
| No, I'm recognizing that the economy is connected. Many
| of the best renewables -- especially those which are
| available 24x7 -- are things like geothermal or
| hydropower which have finite capacity, and non-trivial
| ramp-up time.
|
| Proof-of-waste systems like Bitcoin are uniquely
| inefficient due to the way the network adjusts to
| increase the difficulty -- an aluminum smelter uses a ton
| of power but they don't build new ones in excess of
| market demand for aluminum -- and they're easy to ship
| around the world. That means that demand always goes up
| and any time some place has cheaper power for a non-
| trivial period of time someone will probably ship a bunch
| of mining hardware there.
|
| This is a problem because right now we need the entire
| global economy to electrify as soon as possible. That
| means things like industrial processes need to be
| relocated to cheap sources of clean electricity because
| you can't just plunk a coal power plant next door, etc.
| and there are also challenges with peak power demand
| requiring upgrades to electrical grids or other
| equipment. Having so much power dedicated to something
| which has never found a useful purpose is a source of
| friction we don't have time for.
| 1ris wrote:
| No, that's not moving goalposts. If Bitcoin miners waste
| renewable energy, the users of energy in general move to
| renewable later.
|
| If everybody is using renewable energy exclusivity for
| everything, is still wastage. PoW only work by adjusting
| it's consumption upwards to create scarcity, e.g. one
| block per 10 minutes. At that point we will be useless
| solar panels, covering land uselessly, etc, etc. Bitcoin
| is arbitrary scalable wastage to create arbitrary,
| artificial scarcity.
|
| The point is: Energy wasted is energy wasted. Bitcoin
| will eat everything till the point where some external
| factor prevents further expansion, e.g. how much are we
| willing to hurt the environment and ourselfs in exchange
| of the block reward. The person with the highest
| threshold wins.
|
| It's not really not complicated. This is literally the
| last scene of the hitchiker, where they plan to kill all
| trees, so they can use the leaves for currency. The
| success of bitcoin makes be loose all hope in humanity.
| politician wrote:
| "Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? Maybe
| we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those
| activities we find objectionable.
|
| Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.
| acdha wrote:
| They explained the difference for you in the second
| paragraph: unless any other system, proof-of-waste
| systems are uniquely bad because the amount of power used
| isn't linked to any sort of useful activity -- it's just
| a function of how much competing hash capacity there is
| in the network. Even something like heating your house to
| 78 is a lower category of waste because you won't
| increase that to 120 or start heating the neighborhood
| park just because your neighbors matched you at 78.
|
| This is also in keeping with tons of existing
| regulations: you can't buy a monitor which uses 2,000W
| because various governments have caps for how inefficient
| you're allowed to be. That's far from perfect -- or
| sufficient to deal with the climate change crisis -- but
| it's not like it's some sort of unprecedented imposition
| on personal freedoms to cap inefficiency.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| any infrastructure dedicated to the mining of crypto is
| opportunity cost. Even if you use renewables, that energy
| could instead replace traditional energy sources which could
| be turned off.
|
| This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases
| in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand.
| It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a
| dent when it comes to the increase of renewables as a total
| share of energy consumed despite the fact that the capacity
| has increased pretty much exponentially.
|
| This is made even worse by the fact that green infrastructure
| itself necessarily often consumes non-green sources, in
| particular during construction.
| xvector wrote:
| > that energy could instead replace traditional energy
| sources which could be turned off.
|
| This is not true. Often, renewables aren't available to
| some locations but abundantly available in others. Other
| times, some people buy electricity from renewable providers
| and others don't.
|
| With 50-75% of Bitcoin mining being renewable, one thing is
| clear - it's helped the adoption of renewables and made
| them cheaper.
| empraptor wrote:
| "...helped the adoption of renewables and made them
| cheaper." How so?
|
| Miners are chasing profit margin so they'll use
| whatever's cheapest. If that's renewable where some of
| them are, so be it. And if everyone else start reducing
| use of coal and that becomes cheap, miners who exploits
| that to derive higher profit margin will grow faster I
| imagine.
|
| I would attribute growth and economies of scale that
| renewables have achieved to renewable proponents,
| industries, government subsidies and loan prorams. Crypto
| miners are energy consumers and some of them use
| renewable energy. But how do we go from there to miners
| being some kind of force for good in this context?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It has helped the adoption of renewables in the same
| sense how polluting the local river has helped the anti-
| pollution industry. This is broken window logic. The
| reason bitcoin uses renwables in the first place is
| because much of it happens in China where misguided state
| projects and subsidies have created excess capacity. It
| makes for a pretty decent joke though, the libertarian
| currency de jure runs on the misguided state planning of
| the Communist party of China.
|
| Any excess capacity spent on crypto currency is waste. It
| could go to scientific computing projects, it could
| simply not be used. The chips for the equipment (we are
| in a global chip shortage) could go to something that
| actually contributes to the real economy.
| teawrecks wrote:
| It may not necessarily be the same as "broken window"
| logic. Consider a world where no one had ever broken a
| window. There wouldn't be any window repair people. The
| first time a window breaks, we have a new opportunity to
| fill a need. Necessity is the mother of invention. The
| exponential demand for energy creates more pressure to
| develop more efficient renewable energy generation
| methods that probably wouldn't be incentivized by a
| constant amount of energy use. It's a risky bet, but it
| might be the only way to spur humanity into action.
|
| We just need to increase carbon taxes at the same rate
| that renewables become affordable.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that
| increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases
| in demand.
|
| That is kinda the main point of a carbon tax... it is to
| make carbon usage LESS efficient, since you have to pay an
| extra tax in addition to the cost of the energy itself.
| Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then
| redistributed to everyone equally, and that money can then
| be used for whatever you want.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Banning = Authoritarian Madness. Bans are never the answer
| unless you are a fascist.
|
| This is an attack on general purpose computing. You cannot tell
| people what they can and can't do with their machines.
|
| You can try, but the smart ones will tell you to go f yourself.
|
| Deal with the supply side costs, and let people do whatever
| math they like.
| cedilla wrote:
| Poisoning the water supply to increase the margin on bottled
| water is a valid business plan. Banning that is a good
| answer, and neither authoritarian nor fascist.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Supply again. Supply!!
|
| The analogy would be you telling people they have to drink
| that water a certain way and banned from drinking it the
| way they want. That's fascism.
|
| Everybody that wants to ban PoW is an authoritarian
| fascist. Might be an eco fascist, might be a boot licking
| state loving fascist... still a fascist.
| teawrecks wrote:
| You're banned from using the word "fascist".
| cedilla wrote:
| I thought that was a simple story.
|
| No one is banned from drinking poisoned water. What is
| banned is poisoning other people's water. Really, this
| isn't that difficult.
|
| If you want to make a point about supply, please make a
| point about supply instead of just repeating the word
| randomly.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| We can all agree we want clean power, which is entirely
| in the hands of the suppliers. Rather than pushing one's
| preferences around on users and forcing them to do your
| will, why not go after the Coal and Gas producers -- the
| supply.
|
| People get upset when you want to ban things because it's
| a bully move. The bully thinks their opinion is true and
| correct and others must succumb to their will.
| teawrecks wrote:
| I agree that fossils fuels are being subsidized where they
| should be carbon taxed, and that's the only reason most
| crypto mining (and many other industries) using fossils fuels
| is still viable. But I disagree that bans are always
| authoritarian "madness". We ban things all the time. There
| are many substances and contraptions that you must hold a
| license to own or use. We have ban murder. We don't just
| disincentivize it, we actually do not allow it. And no one
| disagrees that this should be the case.
|
| And this isn't a slippery slope argument, we are now at the
| point where irresponsible care for our climate is translating
| into actual lives lost.
|
| Also, this is a perfect example of calling something
| "fascist" that categorically does not fit the definition of
| fascist. Fascism requires you to believe that one arbitrary
| group of people is superior to another, and that the
| govt/legislation should reflect this.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| The arbitrary group is nevercoiners, who read something
| years ago and did some napkin math and drew some very wrong
| conclusions. They think they are better than the
| Bitcoiners. The nevercoiners are fascists.
| xvector wrote:
| I pay for all my energy to be renewable. I don't see why my
| crypto mining needs to be banned.
|
| In fact, estimates peg Bitcoin's use of renewable energy to be
| between 50-75%. This is a fact lost on HN, which hates crypto
| at all costs.
| gambiting wrote:
| That's not how this works. Even if you pay your supplier to
| buy only renewable energy on the open market, if your house
| is supplied by a coal power plant then your mining rig is
| powered by coal, regardless who you're paying for your
| electricity. Yes it feels good to pay for renewable
| electricity but ultimately that's not how it works.
|
| And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic
| scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it.
| teawrecks wrote:
| That is how it works though. If my money is only allowed to
| be used to generate renewable energy, then it doesn't
| matter how the power that comes to my house was generated.
| Energy is energy. If everyone does what I do, then no one
| will be left to fund nonrenewable energy. But the only way
| that would happen is if the cost of nonrenewable energy
| went up proportional to the damage it causes via a carbon
| tax.
|
| And banning crypto mining is impossible. It's arbitrary
| math. You can't ban a computer from doing arbitrary math.
| At best you could discourage businesses taking crypto as
| payment, but even then people can operate 100% in crypto
| and avoid any regulations.
| gjs278 wrote:
| xvector wrote:
| > then your mining rig is powered by coal,
|
| And my emissions are offset for the fee that I pay.
|
| Carbon credits, more planted trees, whatever. My net impact
| is likely lower than anyone that doesn't pay for
| renewables, even with mining.
|
| > And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic
| scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it
|
| For PoW, it's the purest form of currency - the value of
| energy itself.
|
| For other currencies, it's no different than precious
| metals.
|
| Trust HN to call decentralized technologies enabling
| pseudonymity/anonymity scams on one hand while advocating
| for decentralized technologies enabling
| pseudonymity/anonymity on the other hand.
|
| Also, from my perspective, you should stop eating meat.
| Your eating of meat provides you nothing but selfish
| pleasure while causing a ton of carbon emissions - and
| _actual tangible suffering_ on scales never before seen on
| this planet. The magnitude of suffering caused is tens
| billions of times worse than crypto. Let 's ban meat first.
| ls15 wrote:
| > And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic
| scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it.
|
| Is it worse than, let's say, Christmas in this regard?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Yes
| ls15 wrote:
| How so? Christmas lights, plastic trash, food waste and
| transportation combined?
| acdha wrote:
| Those do something useful and there's a cap on how much
| people use: if I put up lights and then my neighbors put
| up lights, I don't put up twice as many lights so I can
| out-compete them for carolers and I certainly don't buy
| another house to put up even more lights. Proof-of-waste
| effectively requires that of all participants.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > I pay for all my energy to be renewable.
|
| That's not how it works. It just means that instead of
| everyone using 10% renewable energy you use 100% and 9 other
| people use 0%.
| nathias wrote:
| I'd give you pow ban if you give me a central bank ban
| Tenoke wrote:
| Good way to spin having only 4GB vram into an 'anti-mining
| feature' I guess.
|
| Of course, 4GB is typically considered the bare minimum for
| modern 1080p (let alone higher) gaming and this is just a budget
| card which was definitely not limited with any mining
| considerations.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| My 1060 3GB can still run every game I throw at it (except
| Cyberpunk). MS Flight Sim runs great at high, for instance,
| especially after the performance update.
| wnevets wrote:
| What FPS do you consider "great"?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Looks like ~60 (more in rural areas, less in cities) for
| 1080p low on that card... which isn't fantastic but better
| than I expected. The limiting factor in cities seems to be
| the VRAM as the 1060 6 GB version can bench about the same
| flying through New York City bumped up to medium and shows
| using nearly 5 GB of VRAM while doing it.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| For a flight sim, 45fps. Forza Horizon 5 runs at 60+ on
| high settings (despite telling me I need more memory, it
| doesn't crash). I mostly play CS, which runs at 200+ (yes I
| know it's an older game, Doom Eternal also runs at 60+ on
| high).
| [deleted]
| saulrh wrote:
| The fact that the entry-level card can run its clock 30% faster
| than the same line's top-end offering supports the story pretty
| solidly, IMO. Not supporting 8 GB of vram _can 't_ have given
| them enough breathing room to casually run the clock that fast,
| so this has to have been decided way up front.
|
| Like the article says, it remains to be seen whether this will
| also make the card bad at gaming, but I think that AMD at least
| had a coherent plan here.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| It's a much smaller chip, not surprising it can clock higher.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Isn't it a power budget and heat dissipation thing? For
| example the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 GPUs have pretty
| similar architectures, but the PS5 has fewer compute units at
| a higher frequency. Surely Microsoft would have loved to
| clock theirs as high as Sony.
|
| PS5: 10.28 Teraflops, 36 Compute Units running at 2.23GHz
| (variable frequency)
|
| XSX: 12.11 Teraflops, 52 Compute Units running at 1.825GHz
| (fixed)
| torginus wrote:
| I love how Mark Cerny managed to spin Sony having to raise
| the clock frequency of the PS5 GPU to compete with a the
| XSX's TFlop specs as an _advantage_. GPUs tend to be
| memory-bandwidth bound - if you play around with raising
| the clock frequency by 10% from stock on most GPUs, you won
| 't get 10% more fps, likewise if you drop the frequency by
| 10%, you won't lose 10% fps.
|
| But with the power consumption scaling with the square of
| the frequency, the difference in power draw can be
| absolutely significant. That's the reason many people (me
| among them) chose to underclock their 5700XTs
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > but the PS5 has fewer compute units at a higher
| frequency.
|
| Yes, this seems to be what's happening here. Less power
| used on memory bandwidth, means more is available for other
| things. This card is not so much "bad at mining" and more
| like trying to design for a _different_ niche that might be
| underserved by all the "good at mining" GPU's.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| The RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5
| years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'd expect otherwise actually.
|
| RDNA is far more efficient at gaming. GCN was compute-
| focused (higher TFLOPs, but weaker in practice). Case in
| point, micro-benchmarks show that VRAM latency is ~100
| nanoseconds on RDNA, but ~300 nanoseconds on GCN.
|
| RX 6500 XT is aimed at roughly the same specs as the RX480,
| but should perform slightly faster in practice, along with
| Raytracing support, Infinity Cache and therefore faster
| VRAM latency (probably faster fill-rates and other
| microbenchmarks important to gaming), all at 107W instead
| of 150W.
|
| ---------
|
| As such, Rx 480 would be a better mining card, while 6500
| XT would be a worse mining card, but better video game
| card.
|
| Its still stupid for AMD to market their cards like this,
| but they're not lying... (and whatever argument marketing
| wants to make... well... that's their job. It all looks
| stupid to me but I can't honestly call them out on it since
| it is true...)
|
| -------
|
| Turns out that video-gamers who want more uniformity and
| less jitter between frames want higher-clock speeds (notice
| the 2000+ MHz clock speed on 6500 XT) rather than raw
| TFLOPs (Rx 480 ran a slow clock of ~1000MHz but had many
| more compute units / SIMD units computing in parallel).
|
| Width of GPU leads to more variance, because its harder to
| load-balance your parallelism. If you have a narrower GPU
| (fewer compute units) at higher speeds, its easier to reach
| more consistent frame times / less jitter.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Further, given the prices of RX480 and modern video
| cards, even if they were on par, if you can actually GET
| RX6500XT for $200 today, then:
|
| 1. It sucks from big picture perspective, as we are "back
| where we were 5 years ago"
|
| but
|
| 2. It's great from pragmatic perspective, as we are
| otherwise today in "Wish I could afford a card from 5
| years ago" / "there's no such thing as a budget GPU"
| stage.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| If we look at the benchmarks of the 5500XT vs the RX480 I
| expect it to maybe be 5-8% faster if at all. AMD
| basically released this card 3 times now but this time
| they scrubbed the whole encoding feature set.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > AMD basically released this card 3 times now but this
| time they scrubbed the whole encoding feature set.
|
| Do you not see the difference between GCN, RDNA, and RDNA
| 2?
|
| At a minimum, this RDNA 2 6500 XT has raytracing cores
| that the two previous versions do not have. I'd assume
| that most video gamers care more about the raytracing
| feature (especially as more and more games are using it)
| than H265 encoding.
|
| Remember: Raytracing instructions were invented on RDNA2.
| The 5500 doesn't have it, and the 480 doesn't have it.
|
| -------
|
| I mean, seriously. Would you rather have the existence of
| this card? Or the non-existence? If you want something
| faster, that's why the 6800 exists. This 6500 XT is for
| people who want a barely-gaming ready card at the
| cheapest possible price. If that's not your use case,
| then don't buy the card.
|
| But every now and then, I build a computer for a child
| who doesn't play many video games, or for some uncle/aunt
| who doesn't know much about computers. I never like the
| idea of going iGPU only, because these people inevitably
| find at least one weird game that they like to play. So I
| like to put in a $100 to $200-class card in there. Not
| expensive enough to break the budget, but high enough
| that it'd perform decently on 10-year-old games and maybe
| a few indie-games.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| Are you suggesting that you could use Raytracing at all
| in modern games on a low end card like the RX 6500 XT? If
| you would use it you would lose the marginal performance
| increase of the updated architecture. Also content
| creation is a big point for younger generation if it is
| livestreaming, recording clips or general gameplay. This
| will both not be doable with this card if you don't have
| a good cpu. There is no discussion that more cards are
| good in the market we have right now. The card is 50%
| over MSRP right now at most retailers.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Are you suggesting that you could use Raytracing at all
| in modern games on a low end card like the RX 6500 XT?
|
| Yes?
|
| Minecraft Raytracing and Quake Raytracing are rather low-
| specs and probably would run on an RX 6500 XT. You might
| have to drop down to 720p but it probably would run.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| Minecraft release 18 November 2011. Quake release June
| 22, 1996.
|
| They may have frankensteined the engines to support ray
| tracing but these are not modern games at all.
| acdha wrote:
| Do you have a more reliable source than a random Reddit
| image assemblage?
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| You can check it yourself on AMDs website.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| It looks like it is just a different card designed for a
| different purpose. High clock speed, more power efficient,
| and a lot smaller...and $200 (supposedly).
| narrator wrote:
| This is kind of like Google and Youtube becoming worse
| because they have too many of the wrong kinds of users.
| yob22 wrote:
| postalrat wrote:
| Well is it cheaper than a 5 year old rx480?
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| It's the same MSRP.
| qayxc wrote:
| "MSRP"
|
| First partners selling the part in Europe already have a
| hefty 50% surcharge [0].
|
| [0] https://videocardz.com/newz/amds-199-radeon-
| rx-6500xt-offici...
| Osiris wrote:
| That picture is misleading. It doesn't show that the 6500
| has >2x the clock speed and lower power requirements.
|
| 2x the clock speed is crazy.
| wmf wrote:
| 2x the clock speed is a combination of design tradeoffs
| and Moore's Law.
| torginus wrote:
| I don't think that's true - the GTX 1060, which was its'
| competitor, and matched it's performance pretty closely
| only had 4.375 TFLOPS of compute. Architecture matters
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Man, I'm glad I snuck a 1080ti purchase in a few years ago when
| BTC was crashing hard. Of course, being Nvidia means it'll suck
| if I have to transition to a Linux Desktop before the next
| cryptoshit market crash, but if it takes that long then they've
| probably managed to kill of high-end PC gaming along with the
| environment and I'll have bigger problems.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| fwiw I've used nvidia drivers through DKMS for a long time and
| never really had any issues with it.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I'm afraid it isn't worth much, considering how many times a
| Linux Desktop user has told me "I haven't really had any
| problems with it" about something that ended up giving me no
| end of problems.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The problems of an even more infinite configuration space
| than what Windows offers...
| vmception wrote:
| Ethereum price crashing is what let you buy it. You might
| thinking the wrong decade but then the 1080ti didn't exist, and
| neither did Ethereum.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Looks like I bought it in June of 2018, and BTC was ~$6k,
| which was $7k down from its previous high in December of
| 2017. It would drop another $3k by January of 2019.
|
| At least, that's what the first graph I found said.
| vmception wrote:
| Nobody has used GPUs for mining bitcoin in nearly 10 years,
| my point was telling you what they were using them for
| qayxc wrote:
| BTC and ETH are closely correlated price-wise.
| vmception wrote:
| And all crypto assets at the time. People wouldn't be
| clamoring for GPUs if Ethereum didnt exist and also
| capture so much of the market. Its the only proof of work
| blockchain that people pay so much to use that it
| frequently exceeds the block subsidy.
|
| so Bitcoin crashing, without Ethereum existing, wouldn't
| mean anything. thats how I separate the two without it
| seeming pedantic to me.
| ray__ wrote:
| I started using Nvidia cards with Linux about two years ago and
| haven't had a single issue so far. It has always been Ubuntu,
| so that might be part of it, but I get the impression that
| Nvidia's beef with Linux isn't an issue anymore.
| II2II wrote:
| I have one machine using AMD and another using Nvidia. The
| only quirk with the Nvidia drivers, from my perspective, is
| having to install them separately under most distributions
| while AMD graphics just work. Even then, there is a lot less
| hassle to using Nvidia drivers under Linux than either
| vendor's drivers under Windows.
|
| (I recognize that there have been issues with Wayland support
| in the past, it creates issues for some developers, and
| support for modern Nvidia cards on most other operating
| systems is non-existent. There are likely other issues, but
| it seems like most of the issues would affect a small number
| of people.)
| FeistySkink wrote:
| NVIDIA is finally opening up to Linux and working on better
| support in their proprietary drivers:
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Is it also bad at gaming on purpose?
| jagger27 wrote:
| Key pull quote:
|
| > there isn't an 8GB version of the 6500 XT. The 6500 XT also
| uses a 64-bit memory interface
|
| It only comes with 4GB of RAM on a narrow bus which makes it
| useless for Ethereum mining. It doesn't seem like it uses the
| same "LHR" technique as Nvidia.
| qayxc wrote:
| This still doesn't explain why they cheaped out on the media
| engine side.
|
| While I can see a justification for the lack of 4K H264 encode
| support (kind of pointless for a card at this level of
| performance), removing the AV1 decoder and H265/HEVC encoder is
| something I don't understand.
|
| This makes the card completely useless for both game streaming
| and media creation for no discernible reason.
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