I still think it's a while until we have dedicated scypt miners. By nature they need a ton of fast memory and that shit ain't cheap.
Do gamers have some inalienable right as the sole consumers of video cards?
Video cards are a consumer product. A new use has been found for that consumer product. Prices tend to go up when that occurs. I don't understand why this is a problem. It's a good thing; multi-use markets are healthier and more robust in the long run that specialty markets.
I already got mobile stuff killing speed progression, now there's this too man :[
Some cards are also constantly out of stock which is also annoying. Production yield issues on the new processes on top of that.
Mining alone might make the market large enough to convince nVidia/AMD to move to the next process after 20/22nm sooner though. I have no numbers, but the price inflation in the US is pretty substantial.
So why not insist on more aggressive production lines for NVidia? Urging increased supply seems like a far healthier directive than urging decreased demand. Assuming you want the high end GPU market to thrive, that is.
Large scale operations only care about Performance/Watt per machine setup, often GPU SKUs scale almost linearly so it doesn't really matter to them. Casual miners usually just buy the best single or dual card setup they can afford/power, under those are people who mine with what they have or what fits their budget.
On production lines, there's only 1 or 2 places that can make this stuff (20nm/22nm/28nm) in these GIANT die sizes without too many failures. GPUs are gargantuan compared to everything else we use and already they have supply issues. Normally you will see the high end come out first to get all that enthusiast money and make the best use of the low yields of the new process/architecture while production slowly ramps up as they then fill out the releases of the popular midrange cards.
Is it possible for them to ramp up production? Possibly, but in the past there have been large amounts of time where GPUs are not in stock, even without the miner boom. Unless there is direct competition at a price point, they just sell their old models and don't sweat it.
This could actually push GPU makers to make cards that can mine... I mean, render graphics faster and better.
This has a danger of coming close to what they sell to Workstations which would devalue that. Titan was a weird test card for compute. Something like a workstation Tesla / whatever the old workstation name is ~2x consumer GPU price.