NVIDIA's Crypto Mining GPU Shortage Response Is All Talk, No Action

Anyone in the market for PC hardware may have noticed a little problem with GPUs lately. In short: prices on GPUs are skyrocketing, and cryptocurrenecy miners are largely to blame for this surge. Cycles like this are nothing new and are as old as cryptocurrency itself, but with gamers growing ever more frustrated with the state of the GPU market, manufacturers are now sharing their two cents.

After reports of climbing GPU prices started making the rounds this weekend, NVIDIA has made a statement about the whole thing. Speaking to German site Computer Base, NVIDIA spokesperson Boris Böhles made a recommendation to its retail partners, suggesting that they "make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers' needs." Have a look at the statement for yourself:

For NVIDIA, gamers come first. All activities related to our GeForce product line are targeted at our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers' needs as usual.

For some retailers, those arrangements come in the form of limiting the number of graphics card a person can buy in one transaction. In stores, this may help ensure that gamers actually have a chance to buy the cards, but such restrictions have easy workarounds online. Since it isn't hard to imagine that the bulk of GPUs are sold via online retailers, limits like these might not help all that much.

In the end, NVIDIA's recommendation doesn't really have much sway on what retailers might do. It's up to those retailers to implement restrictions to make sure that there are enough GPUs to go around, and at the moment, whatever restrictions are in place don't seem to be working. We'll see if the problem gets any better soon enough, so stay tuned.