Ethereum leads AMD and Nvidia GPUs to a historic quarter

The Bitcoin-like Ethereum cryptocurrency has jacked up the video card market. AMD and Nvidia GPUs saw a massive spike in shipments (to retailers and OEMs) of 31 percent from the first to the second quarter of the year, according to intelligence firm Jon Peddie Research. This is the first time in 20 years that discrete (as opposed to integrated) GPU shipments increased significantly from Q1 to Q2. The rush on the video cards comes alongside the growth of Ethereum mining, which is the GPU-friendly process for solving security algorithms for transactions involving the digital coin.

As more people jumped into Ethereum mining this year, graphics cards became more difficult to find at retail. Miners focused on AMD’s Radeon cards, which are more efficient at decrypting Ethereum than Nvidia cards. But the price of that digital coin jumped so high at certain points that Nvidia’s cards were well within the range of a positive return-on-investment. So both Radeon and GeForce GPUs were tough to find, and this forced retailers to continually order new stock to serve the demand of both cryptocurrency miners and the PC gaming audience.