You know how people have been buying up GPUs to mine coin? A new company, Render Token, has just announced a service that works in a similar way, except that the output is rendered images. A better example would be something like Folding@Home, but the user is paid for the work that their computer performs. The CEO and the President, Jules Urbach and Alissa Grainger respectively, are co-founders of OTOY, which does GPU- and Cloud-accelerated rendering.
According to Jules Urbach at Unite Austin, they are apparently paying, deliberately, more than ethereum would give users for the same amount of processing power.
I am… torn on this issue. On the one hand, it’s a cool application of crowd-sourced work, and it helps utilize idle silicon scattered around the globe. On the other hand, I hope that this won’t kick GPU supply levels while they’re down. Sure, at least there’s some intrinsic value to the workload, but I can just see people sticking racks of caseless systems in their basement, while gamers keep browsing Amazon for something under four digits (excluding the cents) to appear in stock.
What do you all think? Does the workload usefulness dull the pain?
Consoles will be more popular
Consoles will be more popular and for the one time price of a High Mid-tier GPU. You get all you need that spans 3-4yrs.
Maybe software (games) will be more efficient because of this but fat chance since PC gaming been plagued with unfinished and patch work since its inception.
Well in colder climates
Well in colder climates homes, offices, schools could install GPUs and earn the blockchain tokens and make good use the waste heat from all that graphics/whatever number crunching and maybe convert the tokens into cash also. I’d rather have my electric heater doing some useful work that may just earn some payments to offset the heating costs. So for heating and maybe even hot water heating(year round) stick some CPU/GPU compute in where the old heat generating heating element would go and get some compute done for tokens while heating for the winter or hot water.
They really should do something with all the heat waste that processors generate and maybe some form of blockchain generated micropayment system where some dual usage of compute and heating can be combined and actually get the waste heat from computing as well as the compute to become a commodity to be traded.
Currently if your hot water heater is electric and the heating element is just a big old resistor then that’s planty of wasted electrons that could be used for both compute and heat generation. That’s a lot of wasted watts on those electric water heaters that could be put to some dual use crunching numbers and generating hot water.
Hell just look at those space heaters that folks are using in the winter months put some GPUs in there and get some heat and hashing done. Of course the data rates/data caps will have to be figured with the ISPs for folks to offer up some bandwidth for all that data transfer so there’s going to be some problems with that to fix but if all the heating devises that use electrons to generate heat could also used the electrons for compute at the same time well that some millions of gigawatts saved.
Why are you guys still
Why are you guys still complaining about gpu supply? Have you checked Newegg, Ebay, etc? Nvidia video cards are in stock ready to ship and have been for months. Rx 470/480/570/580 are still low supply but prices have dropped closer to reasonable for what is available.
If this is a mainstay, GPU
If this is a mainstay, GPU vendors need to increase capacity, it’s that simple. I can’t imagine there is an unlimited upward curve for these products. Eventually they run out of consumers on the mining / render side of things and you then fall back to core gamers.