The chip shortage is pitting bitcoin miners against gamers

In the niche world of customers for high-end semiconductors, a bitter feud is pitting bitcoin miners against hardcore gamers. At issue is the latest line of NVIDIA graphics cards—powerful, cutting-edge chips with the computational might to display the most advanced video game graphics on the market.

Gamers want the chips so they can experience ultra-realistic lighting effects in their favorite games. But they can’t get their hands on NVIDIA cards, because miners are buying them up and adapting them to crunch cryptographic codes and harvest digital currency. The fierce competition to buy chips—combined with a global semiconductor shortage—has driven resale prices up as much as 300%, and led hundreds of thousands of desperate consumers to sign up for daily raffles for the right to buy chips at a significant mark-up.

To broker a peace between its warring customers, NVIDIA is, essentially, splitting its cutting-edge graphics chips into two dumbed-down products: GeForce for gamers and the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) for miners. GeForce is the latest NVIDIA graphics card—except key parts of it have been slowed down to make it less valuable for miners racing to solve crypto puzzles. CMP is based on a slightly older version of NVIDIA’s graphics card which has been stripped of all of its display outputs, so gamers can’t use it to render graphics.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.