With cryptocurrencies of all types reaching new heights of popularity in 2017, one of the most aggravating trends for gamers was that there were very few new graphics cards to buy -- because miners were buying them all. That lead to price hikes and for those looking to upgrade, unless you were looking to buy the less efficient mining hardware found at the bottom or top-end of the price spectrum, you were unlikely to find a card that was right for your budget.
In 2018, Nvidia wants that to stop and it's calling on retailers to do more to limit the sale of graphics cards to gamers and not to miners. It doesn't outline any particular ideas of how they can go about doing that, but German retailers have responded in a similar manner to British and U.S. sellers, by imposing limits on the number of graphics cards that can be purchased by any one customer at any one time.
The rationale there being that only miners will want to buy more than two graphics cards at once. In comparison, gamers will be mainly going after one big upgrade for their system.
That may prove to be an effective tactic too. TechPowerUp claims that in one report, a retailer was seeing orders of upwards of 100 graphics cards at any one time
You might imagine that Nvidia doesn't need to bother preventing miner sales. Afterall, if it's selling graphics cards, it's selling graphics cards, why would it matter who they sell to? The problem is, that those gamers who can't buy a new graphics card but want to play a new game or want to experience something like 4K gaming, may instead turn to the latest crop of consoles, which are a direct competitor with Nvidia, because almost all of them utilize AMD hardware.
