Kinda sorta. Low end cards aren’t really used for AI and GPU crypto mining is largely dead aside from oddball currencies (during the actual crypto shortage, it was all Etherium but that’s not GPU mined any longer and BTC hasn’t been for ages).
What DID happen was the crypto boom caused massive GPU shortages, GPU manufacturers saw that they could sell cards even at inflated prices and even now they figure that, if the cheapest half-decent gaming card is $225 instead of $125, people will still buy it so there’s little incentive to let prices settle. Couple that with a practical duopoly on GPUs between AMD & Nvidia and neither interested in killing the goose.
On the high end, for Nvidia, AI matters more. Nvidia is making all their record profits off enterprise level cards, not gaming GPUs. But, if they let the price of a 4090 sink to a certain point, all those enterprises will find it cheaper to buy a bunch of 4090s than a $30,000 H100 card.
For LLM use, Graphics RAM is king. The cards available with large RAM sizes are selling out or are more expensive than they otherwise would be because of demand.
The smallest unquantized LLMs of around 7B parameters will run on a 16GB graphics card. There are quantized models that use much less RAM, though. But still, if you are considering running them, get the card with the most RAM.
You can run an LLM off the CPU and use system RAM if you don’t have a graphics card with enough VRAM, but it is dramatically slower.
If you aren’t planning to run a local LLM, ignore all of this and get the card recommended above. It’s fine.
I still have a GTX980. But I’m not playing many games these days.
When I got my Nvidia 960 it was not far off from state-of-the-art at the time, but now I’ve upgraded to an Nvidia RTX 3060 it’s been super whizzy. Hopefully that will serve me well for another five or so years.
Lord have mercy, I might be pushing up the date of buying that card.
I installed Enshrouded on Monday, and the game crashed over and over. No worries, I got this: some online research, and I found a guide on the game’s Discord to diagnose and treat the kind of crash I was getting. I went through it last night, step by step, until I got to the point where I used the Display Driver Uninstaller app in preparation for a clean install of my drivers. Ran the app, restarted the computer.
No monitor signal.
At this point, I’ve restarted a dozen times, taken out the video card, connected the monitor right to the motherboard’s display port, used a different HDMI cable, unplugged the power and held down the power button for thirty seconds and left it unplugged overnight. No luck. I’m out of town until Friday evening, so I won’t be able to work on it any more until then; meanwhile I’m leaving my family without a working computer.
I’m not really sure what happened, or what to do next; but I’m wondering if just getting a new videocard might be part of the solution.
Just to rule in or out the driver update, can you download an earlier driver revision (preferably your last known good one) and clean install it after DDUing the upgraded driver?
If I recall correctly, your CPU does not have integrated graphics. This is the worst case scenario you hope never happens when your CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics. I’m very sorry you’re going through this.
Yikes! There’s a port on the back of the motherboard labeled “Display”–is that not integrated graphics?
I need a signal to the monitor before I can do anything, unfortunately. If I can get that signal, I already have two different drivers on my desktop waiting to be installed (the most recent version, and a version from January that someone else said had worked for them).
That’s the port for connecting to the motherboard for integrated graphics but whether or not you have them depends on your CPU. What CPU do you have? If it’s Intel, is there an F at the end (i.e., 9600F)?
I remember him buying it. I’m pretty sure it’s the 10400F, because just before he decided to pull the trigger the 10400 went up in price like $50, but the 10400F was still the price he was expecting to pay. At the time I said that AMD graphics cards don’t even have the option of integrated graphics so it’s not the end of the world to not have it on your CPU.
I’m still a little unclear on next steps. If I put a new videocard in, will the Mobo detect it automatically and send a signal to the monitor, or have I likely screwed the pooch and need to figure out how to boot the machine from a different hard drive? I think I have like three drives in the PC (I’m a hoarder and keep old drives when I buy new ones); can I remove the drive that Windows is currently booting from, and it’ll boot from a much older version long enough for me to do some sort of repair?
I can of course take it to a shop, but that’s likely to be a couple hundred dollars, and if I can avoid that, I’d of course rather avoid it.
Typically, yeah. You’ll need to install new drivers to do “work” on it but the board/CPU should accept any card as a basic display adapter. I have a couple old GT 730 and GT 550ti cards I keep around for board testing or “just in case” scenarios.
Hmm…if I put the old card back in, should that also work, or will it specifically exclude the old card from working, having run DDU? (FWIW I watched a video on using DDU that was recommended by the Enshrouded developers, and followed those instructions, including leaving all the default app settings).
I forgot you ran DDU. I wouldn’t think it would remove the default Windows display drivers (versus the Nvidia/AMD drivers) but…
The thing is, if the card is working, you should at least get a POST style screen. Splash screen for the motherboard, option to spam F5 or DEL for the BIOS, etc. Those things don’t rely on the display drivers. If you’re not even getting that then it sounds like a GPU issue.
If you’re getting stuff pre-Windows – you see a BIOS message, can get into BIOS, etc then it sounds like a Windows problem and you’ll want to try to make a repair/recovery USB stick from a different PC to boot into. If you’re getting nothing at all and can’t get into BIOS, etc because the display just refuses to work, I’d try clearing the CMOS on the board and see if that at least gets you to seeing the POST level activity. Clearing the CMOS usually involves removing the little button battery on the board then either pressing a button on the board or jumping a few pins. Need to check your motherboard manual for details.
This brings up an unrelated question I’m wondering right now for my situation:
Nvidia’s geforce drivers don’t care what Nvidia card you have, right? Back in the day, when I swapped multiple times between my 1050 TI and 3050, I never did anything about the drivers. Both appeared to work exactly as expected with no driver updates at all. And I switched back and forth between them I think three times.
So now when I plug in this 4070 after lunch (it came this morning; so happy!), I should be good to go with just whatever geforce drivers are in there already, yes?
My understanding is that you only need to uninstall drivers with ddu when switching between Nvidia and AMD.
As long as the driver install isn’t so ancient that it doesn’t recognize the new card. I suspect that if your driver installation recognizes the 3xxx card, it will work OK for the 4070 as well.
Assuming you have recent drivers, you should be fine. Nvidia does eventually stop providing driver support for older cards but that mainly just means they don’t get updates specific to their architecture but should still generally work.