File this in a ‘with a grain of salt’, but odds are good there is some truth behind this research. It would be great if benchmarking tools could detect the age of your GPU and see if they can corroborate this claim.

Palit Microsystems, a Taiwan-based graphics card manufacturer, is reporting that graphics cards in near constant use on massively compute intensive crypto currency mining degrade in performance by about 10% each year. Most cards in these environments run 24/7 and often on extremely compute heavy workloads. Proper cooling, power delivery, accelerated silicon aging, or a host of other factors could be leading to this

The caveat empeter here is that Palit is a manufacturer of new graphics cards, and gets no money from the resale market. So, they do have an interest in encouraging users to buy new cards. Too bad it’s impossible to get them…