I am not too technical on the details but what is the deal exactly with ProgPOW? It seems that it will level the field with ASICs and GPUs however the brand of GPU seems to play a factor.
It seems that Nvidia performs much better than AMD, and is the reason for this that Nvidia generally costs more and since it costs more they want to make it more fair in that regards.
For example, say you can buy 2 AMDs for the price of 1 Nvidia. The 1 Nvidia will perform at the exact same speed as the 2 AMDs combined. Is this the point they are going for or is it just the way that the current miners are optimized?
No, mining currently has no effect on video card prices. That was like 6-18 months ago. Their prices today has more to do with gaming. With that said Nvidia cards do beat out AMD when it comes to algorithms like progpow and mimblewimble. I think the only algorithms where AMD flat out beats NVIDIA are all the cryptonight variants.
Anyways its very cheap now if you want to get into mining, but of course, thats because there's no money to be made. The used market is flooded with people selling their mining equipment. And if you buy new you could probably get some good deals.
With that said, spend at your own risk. Crypto doesn't look like it will be going up anytime soon. I'm still here since mining heats up the house pretty nicely during the winter. But once it hits April or May I will have to downsize the farm quite a bit.