Sure there is, well it can be estimated based on expected mining revenue.
scryptr paid for 500 kh of quark. His ROI is how long it would take to recover the cost of the miner with 500 kh
after subtracting the cost of electricity to power that much hash. The falacy is that all the hash produced by the
miner is going toward ROI.
He also got 0.7MHash in the lyra2v2 algo
scryptr's results on the gtx 960 (compared to release 74 / nicehashminer):
keccak: +20%
lyra2v2: +11,64%
quark: +5.55%
Qubit: +3.03%
Nist5: +2.2%
x11: +2%
x13: +1.8%
Whirlpoolx: +1.2%
8 algos (including the most profitable) with an average percent increase of 5.9% more hash
The problem is optimization is an incremental process that produces diminishing returns and requires a lot more
effort to produce small improvements. These kinds of improvements only appeal to large operations that with scale
can ROI in a much shorter time.
With the private miner scryptr is earning $3.5 per card. Most of you have 10 cards or more. Some of you have more than 100 cards, and some have 1000+ cards.
It is complicated by the migration to cuda 7.5 where a lot of effort is needed just to
recover lost hash compared to 6.5, not something most people are prepared to pay for.
But it has to be done, and somebody had to do the job. The miner will get a higher hashrate in the end because the compiler is smarter and bether than before..
I expect donations to be pretty thin until something new happens. It just the nature of the business.
What do you think will happen when DJM34 will release his 25% faster miner and everybody mine neoscrypt? Is feathercoin and the clones able to hold the massive increase in the hashrate?
No.. The difficulty will rise, and the profit will decline. Then everybody will go back to mine another more profitable algo with the sp-mod.
The only way to guarantee a profit increase is to optimize all the minable algos.
I have done this in the private miner. You can buy the private miner for 0.1BTC and verify the results yourself.
