Nvidia’s New GeForce RTX Graphics Not So Attractive for Mining

Nvidia has announced its new generation of GPUs with the new GeForce RTX platform and while they do seem interesting in terms of new graphics capabilities, they do not seem that attractive for miners at this point. The whole focus of the new NVIDIA Turing architecture utilize in the GeForce RTX platform is on real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading to make games even more realistic in terms of graphics. As far as performance for mining goes the new architecture will apparently not offer any significant performance improvements or power efficiency to be a really attractive option for miners. That is at least initially, unless the new Tensor Cores for the AI computing horsepower turn out to be usable for crypto as well and utilizing them could help drive performance up.

Price wise the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the successor of the GTX 1080 Ti, the new GeForce RTX 2080, the successor of GTX 1080 and the new GeForce RTX 2070, the successor of the GTX 1070 are not that attractive either. That of course goes for the initially announced prices of the Founders Edition series from Nvidia that are available for pre-order on Nvidia’s website in some regions with expected delivery around mid-September. For gamers buying a single of these GPUs it might be fine, but for miners these prices are definitely not very attractive with the current crypto market conditions and the expected performance improvement in the range of up to 10-15% up, at least initially.

We are still eager to get our hands on the new Nvidia RTX GPUs and play around with them to get some first hand experience and see the performance numbers, but you should probably not get very excited just yet… if you are on the market for more GPUs, it might be a wiser idea to look for good deals on used video cards from people that are selling their mining equipment purchased last year.