Graphics card sales plummet after shifting among digital currencies

Those who are looking for a new graphics card can probably look forward to one or two good offers during the summer months. The stocks are well stocked and at the same time there is a shortage of new heavy-duty game titles, which usually support the sale of the most lavish graphics cards. In other words, it is set for price reductions.

According to the Taiwanese industry magazine Digitimes, sales of graphics cards are now falling sharply. The forecast is that deliveries will decrease by 30–40 percent in the second quarter of the year compared with the period before. Although this is partly seasonal, it also affects the trends among digital currencies.

Last year, virtual currencies increased rapidly in value. Many technology enthusiasts began digging for digital coins themselves, usually with graphics processors, which caused sales of predominantly Radeon-based graphics cards to skyrocket.

As the proportion of coins found increases, the degree of difficulty also increases and nowadays it is more or less unprofitable to use graphics processors to generate Bitcoins, for example. Instead, more and more people are choosing to either give up or acquire faster and more efficient specialized circuits (ASICs) for the purpose.

Swedish retailers also agree with the analysis. To SweClockers, Inet’s CEO Erik Wickman states that sales are sluggish and that this especially applies to more lavish graphics cards from the Radeon series. That is, the models that were previously used to look for digital coins.