In a move that speaks loads towards the current state of the semiconductor market, NVIDIA has apparently begun reseeding retailers with 5-year-old Pascal-based GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards. In some retailers (namely, Newegg), the card can still be found at $499, a vestige of tight supply since its discontinuation, and a result of the constrained GPU market. However, retailers that have received fresh supply of the 14 nm, 4 GB GDDR5-totting graphics card have it at $179 - still above the 5-year-old asking price at release, which was set at $140. The GTX 1050 Ti features a 192-bit memory bus and a whopping 768 shading units.
Resupplying this card means that customers looking at the lower-end of the spectrum now have a feasible alternative to non-existent solutions on the RTX 3000 series. Equivalent models in the 2000-series are also hard to come by, and marred by much higher pricing. The choice for the GTX 1050 Ti with its 4 GB GDDR5 bus isn't an innocent one; it actually skirts two problems with current-generation hardware. First of all, constraints with GDDR6 memory allocation, which is becoming a bottleneck as well for new graphics card manufacture on account on the increasing amount of chips employed in each individual card, as well as its deployment in latest-gen consoles. And secondly, the 4 GB VRAM is no longer enough for these graphics cards to fit in the current Ethereum mining workload fully into memory, which means they also skirt mining demand. It is, however, a heavy moment for the industry and for any enthusiast who wants to see the progress we have been so readily promised.
