While Bitcoin and various altcoins enjoyed a record-breaking 2017, chipmakers like Nvidia also benefited from the crypto boom.

The graphics card manufacturer was the top performer on the S&P 500 in the chip manufacturer category, Overall, Nvidia’s share price saw a 100% rise in 2017 - and Goldman Sachs believes that growth will bubble continue into 2018.

As reported by CNBC, Goldman Sachs analyst Toshiya Hari told clients that they could expect chipmakers to have another bumper year on the stock market.

"Nvidia is one of the few stocks in our coverage universe exposed to multiple secular growth markets. With the emergence of eSports and the potential proliferation of VR/AR, we view Gaming as a meaningful and sustainable growth driver for the overall company. In terms of single stock, our top picks in Semis and Semi Cap are Nvidia and Entegris."

Growth in the gaming sector is expected to drive up the company’s share price by 7%, according to Hari. A big factor in this projected growth was the recent launch of Nvidia’s new Volta-powered Titan V graphics card in December 2017.

Titan V results

There was plenty of hype ahead of the eventual launch of the Titan V. For $3,000, you could snap one up at this very moment, although you can only order two at a time on the Nvidia website.

The chip has 5,120 CUDA cores, 640 Tensor cores and 12 GB of memory, making it the most powerful PC GPU produced to date. Nvidia claims Volta is 9x more powerful than its previous architecture, Pascal.

Avid gamers who were ready to drop that amount of cash on a new GPU have already had a go with the new card. According to them, the results are impressive. A Reddit user posted a long list of games he’d benchmarked with the Titan V, all of which demonstrate impressive results.

He benchmarked the Titan V at about 64 mhash/sec with Betterhash, which is 25 mhash/sec more than a 1080ti according to another user.

Patience is a virtue

The best technology often comes with the heftiest of price tags, and this is the case with the Titan V. Avid gamers who plan to mine cryptocurrency on the side might wait for Nvidia’s consumer version of the card. In the past, Nvidia has launched their flagship professional gaming cards, which were followed by more affordable, slightly less powerful consumer grade cards.

The latest example was the Nvidia Titan, which birthed the 1080ti. The consumer-oriented 1080ti had slightly fewer CUDA cores and 11 GB of memory instead of the Titan’s 12 GB.

Nvidia crackdown on non-miners

As noted by The Register, Nvidia will ban the use of its GeForce and Titan cards in data centers around the world. Fortunately for miners, they are unaffected by these changes. The latest Nvidia GeForce licence agreement reads: