[HN Gopher] Nvidia won, we all lost
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia won, we all lost
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 864 points
Date : 2025-07-04 21:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.sebin-nyshkim.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.sebin-nyshkim.net)
| d00mB0t wrote:
| Sounds about right :D
| leakycap wrote:
| This article goes much deeper than I expected, and is a nice
| recap of the last few years of "green" gpu drama.
|
| Liars or not, the performance has not been there for me in any of
| my usecases, from personal to professional.
|
| A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080 performs so
| closely to the top end, expensive systems today that it makes
| almost no sense to upgrade at MSRP+markup unless your system is
| older than this.
|
| Unless you need specific features only on more recent cards,
| there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than a
| 30 series card right now.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, most people probably won't directly upgrade. Their old
| card will die, or eventually nvidia will stop making drivers
| for it. Unless you're looking around for used cards, the price
| difference between something low end like a 3060 isn't that
| much less in price for the length of support you're going to
| get.
|
| Unless nvidia's money printing machine breaks soon, expect the
| same to continue for the next 3+ years. Crappy expensive cards
| with a premium on memory with almost no actual video rendering
| performance increase.
| leakycap wrote:
| > Unless you're looking around for used cards, the price
| difference between something low end like a 3060 isn't that
| much less in price for the length of support you're going to
| get.
|
| This does not somehow give purchasers more budget room now,
| but they can buy 30-series cards in spades and not have to
| worry about the same heating and power deliveries as a little
| bonus.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080
| performs so closely to the top end, expensive systems today
|
| This is in no way true and is quite an absurd claim. Unless you
| meant for some specific isolated purposed restricted purely to
| yourself and _your_ performance needs.
|
| > there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than
| a 30 series card right now.
|
| How about I like high refresh and high resolutions? I'll throw
| in VR to boot. Which are my real use cases. I use a high
| refresh 4K display and VR, both have benefited hugely from my
| 2080Ti > 4090 Shift.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I have this exact CPU sans a 3090 (I started with 2080 but
| upgraded due to local AI needs). 8700k is perfectly fine for
| todays workloads. CPUs have stagnated and also the amount of
| RAM in systems has too (Apple still macbook air defaults of 8
| GB in 2025??????)
| theshackleford wrote:
| It wasn't "workloads" being talked about, it was gaming
| performance, the one area in which there is an absolutely
| huge difference mainly on the GPU side. We are taking a
| difference of close too if not 100%.
|
| And despite CPUs stagnating it's absolutely still possible
| to be held back on a stronger GPU with an older CPU
| especially in areas such as 1% lows, stuttering etc.
| ryao wrote:
| > The RTX 50 series are the second generation of NVIDIA cards to
| use the 12VHPWR connector.
|
| This is wrong. The 50 series uses 12V-2x6, not 12VHPWR. The 30
| series was the first to use 12VHPR. The 40 series was the second
| to use 12VHPWR and first to use 12V-2x6. The 50 series was the
| second to use 12V-2x6. The female connectors are what changed in
| 12V-2x6. The male connectors are identical between 12V-2x6 and
| 12VHPWR.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| Nitpicking it doesn't change the fact that the 12v2x6 connector
| _also_ burns down.
| ryao wrote:
| The guy accuses Nvidia of not doing anything about that
| problem, but ignored that they did with the 12V-2x6
| connector, which as far as I can tell, has had far fewer
| issues.
| Gracana wrote:
| It still has no fusing, sensing, or load balancing for the
| individual wires. It is a fire waiting to happen.
| ryao wrote:
| It is a connector. None of the connectors inside a PC
| have those. They could add them to the circuitry on the
| PCB side of the connector, but that is entirely separate
| from the connector.
|
| That said, the industry seems to be moving to adding
| detection into the PSU, given seasonic's announcement:
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-
| supplies/se...
|
| Finally, I think there is a simpler solution, which is to
| change the cable to use two large gauge wires instead of
| 12 individual ones to carry current. That would eliminate
| the need for balancing the wires in the first place.
| Gracana wrote:
| Previous well-designed video cards used the technologies
| I described. Eliminating the sense circuits and fusing is
| a recent development.
|
| I do like the idea of just using big wires. It'd be so
| much cleaner and simpler. Also using 24 or 48V would be
| nice, but that'd be an even bigger departure from current
| designs.
| ryao wrote:
| > Previous well-designed video cards used the
| technologies I described. Eliminating the sense circuits
| and fusing is a recent development.
|
| My point is that the PCB is where such features would be
| present, not the connector. There are connectors that
| have fusing. The UK's AC power plugs are examples of
| them. The connectors inside PCs are not.
| Gracana wrote:
| Oh, sure, I'm not proposing that the connector itself
| should have those features, rather that it shouldn't be
| used without them present on the device.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| The 50 series connectors burned up too. The issue was not
| fixed.
| ryao wrote:
| It seems incredibly wrong to assume that there was only 1
| issue with 12WHPWR. 12V-2x6 was an improvement that
| eliminated some potential issues, not all of them. If you
| want to eliminate all of them, replace the 12 current
| carrying wires with 2 large gauge wires. Then the wires
| cannot become unbalanced. Of course, the connector would
| need to split the two into 12 very short wires to be
| compatible, but those would be recombined on the GPU's
| PCB into a single wire.
| numpad0 wrote:
| (context: 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 are the exact same thing. The
| latter is supposed to be improved and totally fixed, complete
| with the underspecced load-bearing "supposed to be" clause.)
| AzN1337c0d3r wrote:
| They are not the exact same thing.
|
| https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/power-
| sup...
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Pretty much all upscalers force TAA for anti-aliasing and it
| makes the entire image on the screen look blurry as fuck the
| lower the resolution is.
|
| I feel like this is a misunderstanding, though I admit I'm
| splitting hairs here. DLSS _is_ a form of TAA, and so is FSR and
| most other modern upscalers. You generally don 't need an extra
| antialiasing pipeline if you're getting an artificially
| supersampled image.
|
| We've seen this technique variably developed across the lifespan
| of realtime raster graphics; first with checkerboard rendering,
| then TAA, then now DLSS/frame generation. It has upsides and
| downsides, and some TAA implementations were actually really good
| for the time.
| kbolino wrote:
| Every kind of TAA that I've seen creates artifacts around fast-
| moving objects. This may sound like a niche problem only found
| in fast-twitch games but it's cropped up in turn-based RPGs and
| factory/city builders. I personally turn it off as soon as I
| notice it. Unfortunately, some games have removed traditional
| MSAA as an option, and some are even making it difficult to
| turn off AA when TAA and FXAA are the only options (though you
| can usually override these restrictions with driver settings).
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| It's not that it's difficult to turn off TAA: it's that so
| many modern techniques do not work without temporal
| accumulation and anti-aliasing.
|
| Ray tracing? Temporal accumulation and denoising. Irradiance
| cache? Temporal accumulation and denoising. most modern light
| rendering techniques cannot be done in time in a single
| frame. Add to that the fact that deferred or hybrid rendering
| makes implementing MSAA be anywhere between "miserable" and
| "impossible", and you have the situation we're in today.
| kbolino wrote:
| A lot of this is going to come down to taste so _de
| gustibus_ and all that, but this feels like building on a
| foundation of sand. If the artifacts can be removed (or at
| least mitigated), then by all means let 's keep going with
| cool new stuff as long as it doesn't detract from other
| aspects of a game. But if they can't be fixed, then either
| these techniques ought to be relegated to special uses
| (like cutscenes or the background, kinda like the pre-
| rendered backdrops of FF7) or abandoned/rethought as pretty
| but impractical.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| So, there is a way to make it so that TAA and various
| temporal techniques look basically flawless. They need a
| _lot_ of information and pixels.
|
| You need a 4k rendering resolution, at least. Modern
| effects look stunning at that res.
|
| Unfortunately, nothing runs well at 4k with all the
| effects on.
| user____name wrote:
| The sad truth is that with rasterization every renderer needs
| to be designed around a specific set of antialiasing
| solutions. Antialiasing is like a big wall in your rendering
| pipeline, there's the stuff you can do before resolving and
| the stuff you can do afterwards. The problem with MSAA is
| that it is pretty much tightly coupled with all your
| architectural rendering decisions. To that end, TAA is simply
| the easiest to implement and it kills a lot of proverbial
| birds with one stone. And it can all be implemented as
| essentially a post processing effect, it has much less of the
| tight coupling.
|
| MSAA only helps with geometric edges, shader aliasing can be
| combatted with prefiltering but even then it's difficult to
| get rid of it completely. MSAA also needs beefy multisample
| intermediate buffers, this makes it pretty much a non-starter
| on heavily deferred rendering pipelines, which throw away
| coverage information to fit their framebuffer budget. On top
| of that the industry moved to stochastic effects for
| rendering all kinds of things that were too expensive before,
| the latest being actual realtime path tracing. I know people
| moan about TAA and DLSS but to do realtime path tracing at 4k
| is sort of nuts really. I still consider it a bit of a
| miracle we can do it at all.
|
| Personally, I wish there was more research by big players
| into things like texture space lighting, which makes shading
| aliasing mostly go away, plays nice with alpha blending and
| would make MSAA viable again. The issue there is with shading
| only the stuff you see and not wasting texels.
| kbolino wrote:
| There's another path, which is to raise the pixel densities
| so high we don't need AA (as much) anymore, but I'm going
| to guess it's a) even more expensive and b) not going to
| fix all the problems anyway.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| That's just called super sampling. Render at 4k+ and down
| sample to your target display. It's as expensive as it
| sounds.
| kbolino wrote:
| No, I mean high pixel densities all the way to the
| display.
|
| SSAA is an even older technique than MSAA but the results
| are not visually the same as just having a really high-
| DPI screen with no AA.
| cherioo wrote:
| High end GPU has over the last 5 years slowly turning from an
| enthusiast product into a luxury product.
|
| 5 or maybe 10 years ago, high-end GPU are needed to run games at
| reasonably eye candy setting. In 2025, $500 mid-range GPUs are
| more than enough. Folks all over can barely tell between High and
| Ultra settings, DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling.
| There's just no point to compete at $500 price point any more,
| that Nvidia has largely given up and relegating to the AMD-built
| Consoles, and integrated graphics like AMD APU, that offer good
| value in low-end, medium-end, and high-end.
|
| Maybe the rumored Nvidia PC, or the Switch 2, can bring some
| resurgence.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| Not quite $500, but at $650, the 9070 is an absolute monster
| that outperforms Nvidia's equivalent cards in everything but
| ray tracing (which you can only turn on with full DLSS framegen
| and get a blobby mess anyways)
|
| AMD is truly making excellent cards, and with a bit of luck
| UDNA is even better. But they're in the same situation as
| Nvidia: they could sell 200 GPUs, ship drivers, maintain them,
| deal with returns and make $100k... Or just sell a single
| MI300X to a trusted partner that won't make any waves and still
| make $100k.
|
| Wafer availability unfortunately rules all, and as it stands,
| we're lucky neither of them have abandoned their gaming
| segments for massively profitable AI things.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I have a 2080 that I'm considering upgrading but not sure
| which 50 series would be the right choice.
| thway15269037 wrote:
| Grab a used/refurb 3090 then. Probably as legendary card as
| a 1080Ti.
| k12sosse wrote:
| Just pray that it's a 3090 under that lid when you buy it
| second hand
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I went from a 2080 Ti to a 5070 Ti. Yes it's faster, but
| for the games I play, not dramatically so. Certainly not
| what I'm used to doing such a generational leap. The 5070
| Ti _is_ noticeably faster at local LLMs, and has a bit more
| memory which is nice.
|
| I went with the 5070 Ti since the 5080 didn't seem like a
| real step up, and the 5090 was just too expensive and
| wasn't in stock for ages.
|
| If I had a bit more patience, I would have waited till the
| next node refresh, or for the 5090. I don't think any of
| the other current 50-series cards are worth besides the
| 5090 it if you're coming from a 2080. And by worth it I
| mean will give you a big boost in performance.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I went from a 3070 to 5070 Ti and it's fantastic. Just
| finished Cyberpunk Max'd out at 4k with DLSS balanced, 2x
| frame gen, and reflex 2. Amazing experience.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Some models of 9070 use the well-proven old style PCI-E power
| connectors too, which is nice. As far as I'm aware none of
| the current AIB midrange or high end Nvidia cards do this.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| As I understand it, for the 50-series nvidia _requires_ the
| 12VHPWR connector
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I bought a new machine with an RTX 3060 Ti back in 2020 and
| it's still going strong, no reason to replace it.
| rf15 wrote:
| same, 2080 Super here, I even do AI with it
| gxs wrote:
| I think this is the even broader trend here
|
| In their never ending quest to find ways to suck more money out
| of people, one natural extension is to just turn the thing into
| a luxury good and that alone seems to justify the markup
|
| This is why new home construction is expensive - the layout of
| a home doesn't change much but it's trivial to throw on some
| fancy fixtures and slap the deluxe label on the listing.
|
| Or take a Toyota, slap some leather seats on it, call it a
| Lexus and mark up the price 40% (I get that these days there
| are more meaningful differences but the point stands)
|
| This and turning everything into subscriptions alone are
| responsible for 90% of the issues I have as a consumer
|
| Graphics cards seem to be headed in this direction as well -
| breaking through that last ceiling for maximum fps is going to
| be like buying a bentley (if it isn't already) where as before
| it was just opting for the v8
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nvidia's been doing this for a while now, since at least the
| Titan cards and technically the SLI/Crossfire craze too. If
| you sell it, egregiously-compensated tech nerds will show up
| with a smile and a wallet large enough to put a down-payment
| on two of them.
|
| I suppose you could also blame the software side, for
| adopting compute-intensive ray tracing features or getting
| lazy with upscaling. But PC gaming has always been a luxury
| market, at least since "can it run Crysis/DOOM" was a
| refrain. The homogeneity of a console lineup hasn't ever
| really existed on PC.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Just going to focus on this one:
|
| > DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling.
|
| I've used all of these (at 4K, 120hz, set to "balanced") since
| they came out, and I just don't understand how people say this.
|
| FSR is a vaseline-like mess to me, it has its own _distinct_
| blurriness. Not as bad as naive upscaling, and I 'll use it if
| no DLSS is available and the game doesn't run well, but it's
| distracting.
|
| Lossless is borderline unusable. I don't remember the
| algorithm's name, but it has a blur similar to FSR. It cannot
| handle text or UI elements without artifacting (because it's
| not integrated in the engine, those don't get rendered at
| native resolution). The frame generation causes almost
| everything to have a ghost or afterimage - UI elements and the
| reticle included. It can also _reduce_ your framerate because
| it 's not as optimized. On top of that, the way the program
| works interferes with HDR pipelines. It is a last resort.
|
| DLSS (3) is, by a large margin, the best offering. It just
| works and I can't notice any cons. Older versions _did_ have
| ghosting, but it 's been fixed. And I can retroactively fix
| older games by just swapping the DLL (there's a tool for this
| on GitHub, actually). I have not tried DLSS 4.
| paulbgd wrote:
| I've used fsr 4 and dlss 4, I'd say fsr 4 is a bit ahead of
| dlss 3 but behind dlss 4. No more vaseline smear
| cherioo wrote:
| Maybe I over exaggerated, but I was dumbfounded myself
| reading people's reaction to Lossless Scaling
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/s/wlaoHl6GAS
|
| Most people either can't tell the difference, don't care
| about the difference, or both. Similar discourse can be found
| about FSR, frame drop, and frame stutter. I have conceded
| that most people do not care.
| piperswe wrote:
| 10 years ago, $650 would buy you a top-of-the-line gaming GPU
| (GeForce GTX 980 Ti). Nowadays, $650 might get you a mid-range
| RX 9070 XT if you miraculously find one near MSRP.
| ksec wrote:
| That is $880 dollars in today's term. And 2015 Apple was
| already shipping a 16nm SoC. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti was still
| on 28nm. Two generation Node behind.
| conception wrote:
| Keeping with inflation (650 to 880) it'd get you a 5070TI.
| orphea wrote:
| 5070TI
|
| Which, performance-wise, is a 60TI class card.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| $650 of 2015 USD is around $875 of 2025 USD fwiw
| datagram wrote:
| The fact that we're calling $500 GPUs "midrange" is proof that
| Nvidia's strategy is working.
| WithinReason wrote:
| What strategy? They charge more because manufacturing costs
| are higher, cost per transistor haven't changed much since
| 28nm [0] but chips have more and more transistors. What do
| you think that does to the price?
|
| [0]: https://www.semiconductor-digest.com/moores-law-indeed-
| stopp...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| strategy of marketting expensive product as normal one?
| obviously?
|
| if your product can't be cheap - your product is luxury,
| not a day-to-day one
| WithinReason wrote:
| It's mid range. The range shifted.
| blueboo wrote:
| I think my TNT2 Ultra was $200. But Nvidia had dozens of
| competitors back then. 89 when it was founded! Now: AMD...
| luisgvv wrote:
| Absolutely right, only AAA games get to showcase the true power
| of GPUs.
|
| For cheaper guys like me, I'll just give my son indie and low
| graphic games which he enjoys
| ionwake wrote:
| I don't want to jump on nvidia but I found it super weird when
| they clearly remote controlled a Disney bot onto the stage and
| claimed it was all using real time AI which was clearly
| impossible due to no latency and weirdly the bot verifying
| correct stage position in relation to the presenter. It was
| obviously the Disney bot just being controlled by someone off
| stage.
|
| I found it super alarming because why would they fake something
| on stage to the extent of just lying.i know Steve jobs had backup
| phones but jsut claiming a robot is autonomous when it isn't I
| just feel it was scammy.
|
| It reminded me of when Tesla had remote controlled Optimus bots.
| I mean I think that's awesome like super cool but clearly the
| users thought the robots were autonomous during that dinner
| party.
|
| I have no idea why I seem to be the only person bothered by
| "stage lies" to this level. Tbh even the Tesla bots weren't
| claimed to be autonomous so actually I should never have
| mentioned them but it explains the "not real" vibe.
|
| Not meaning to disparage just explaining my perception as a
| European maybe it's just me though!
|
| EDIT > Im kinda suprised by the weak arguments in the replies, I
| love both companies, I am just offering POSITIVE feedback, that
| its important ( in my eyes ) to be careful not to pretend in
| certain specific ways or it makes the viewer question the
| foundation ( which we all know is SOLID and good ).
|
| EDIT 2 >There actually is a good rebuttal in the replies,
| although apparently I have "reading comprehension skill
| deficiencies" its just my pov that they were insinuating the
| robot was aware of its surroundings, which is fair enough.
| elil17 wrote:
| As I understand it the Disney bots do actually use AI in a
| novel way: https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/design-
| and-control...
|
| So there's at least a bit more "there" there than the Tesla
| bots.
| ionwake wrote:
| I believe its RL trained only.
|
| See this snipet : "Operator Commands Are Merged: The control
| system blends expressive animation commands (e.g., wave, look
| left) with balance-maintaining RL motions"
|
| I will print a full retraction if someone can confirm my gut
| feeling is correct
| dwattttt wrote:
| Having worked on control systems a long time ago, that's a
| 'nothing' statement: the whole job of the control system is
| to keep the robot stable/ambulating, regardless of whatever
| disturbances occur. It's meant to reject the forces induced
| due to waving exactly as much as bumping into something
| unexpected.
|
| It's easier to stabilise from an operator initiated wave,
| really; it knows it's happening before it does the wave,
| and would have a model of the forces it'll induce.
| ionwake wrote:
| I tried to understand the point of your reply but Im not
| sure what your point was - I only seemed to glean "its
| easier to balance if the operator is moving it".
|
| Please elaborate unless Im being thick.
|
| EDIT > I upvoted your comment in any case as Im sure its
| helping
| rcxdude wrote:
| 'control system' in this case is not implying remote
| control, it's referring to the feedback system that
| adjust the actuators in response to the sensed
| information. If the motion is controlled automatically,
| then the control loop can in principle anticipate the
| motion in a way that it could not if it was remote
| controlled: i.e. the opposite, it's easier to control the
| motions (in terms of maintaining balance and avoiding
| overstressing the actuators) if the operator is not live
| puppeteering it.
| dwattttt wrote:
| Apologies, yes, "control system" is somewhat niche
| jargon. "Balance system" is probably more appropriate.
| dboreham wrote:
| Well "control system" is a proper term understood by
| anyone with a decent STEM education since 150 years ago.
| tekla wrote:
| > "control system" is somewhat niche jargon
|
| Oh my god. What the hell is happening to STEM education?
| Control systems engineering is standard parlance. This is
| what Com Sci people are like?
| ionwake wrote:
| Thank you for the explanation
| dwattttt wrote:
| It's that there's nothing special about blending
| "operator initiated animation commands" with the RL
| balancing system. The balance system has to balance
| anyway; if there was no connection between an operator's
| wave command and balance, it would have exactly the same
| job to do.
|
| At best the advantage of connecting those systems is that
| the operator command can inform the balance system, but
| there's nothing novel about that.
| elil17 wrote:
| Only as opposed to what? VLAM/something else more trendy?
| numpad0 wrote:
| "RL is not AI" "Disney bots were remote controlled" are
| major AI hypebro delulu moment lol
|
| Your understanding of AI and robotics are more cucumber
| than pear shaped. You're making very little technical sense
| here. Challenges and progress in robotics aren't where you
| think they are. It's all propagandish contents you're
| basing your understandings on.
|
| If you're getting information from TikTok or YouTube Shorts
| style content, especially around Tesla bros - get the hell
| out of it at Ludicrous Speed. Or consume way more of it so
| thoroughly that you cannot be deceived anymore despite
| blatant lies everywhere. Then come back. They're all plain
| wrong and it's not good for you.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Not just you.
|
| I hate being lied to, especially if it's so the liar can reap
| some economic advantage from having the lie believed.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah. I have a general rule that I don't do business with
| people who lie to me.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I can't even imagine what kind of person would not follow
| that rule.
|
| Do business with people that are known liars? And just get
| repeatedly deceived?
|
| ...Though upon reflection that would explain why the
| depression rate is so high.
| frollogaston wrote:
| There's also a very thick coat of hype in
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/glossary/ai-factory/ and related
| material, even though the underlying product (an ML training
| cluster) is real.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I don't want to jump on nvidia but I found it super weird
| when they clearly remote controlled a Disney bot onto the stage
| and claimed it was all using real time AI which was clearly
| impossible due to no latency and weirdly the bot verifying
| correct stage position in relation to the presenter. It was
| obviously the Disney bot just being controlled by someone off
| stage.
|
| I don't know what you're referring to, but I'd just say that I
| don't believe what you are describing could have possibly
| happened.
|
| Nvidia is a huge corporation, with more than a few lawyers on
| staff and on retainer, and what you are describing is criminal
| fraud that any plaintiff's lawyer would have a field day with.
| So, given that, and since I don't think people who work at
| Nvidia are complete idiots, I think whatever you are describing
| didn't happen the way you are describing it. Now, it's
| certainly possible there was some small print disclaimer, or
| there was some "weasel wording" that described something with
| ambiguity, but when you accuse someone of criminal fraud you
| want to have more than "hey this is just my opinion" to back it
| up.
| numpad0 wrote:
| They're soaked eyebrows deep in Tiktok style hype juice,
| believing that latest breakthrough in robotics is that AGIs
| just casually started walking and talking on their own and
| therefore anything code controlled by now is considered proof
| of ineptitude and fake.
|
| It's complete cult crazy talk. Not even cargocult, it's
| proper cultism.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Tefal literally sells a rice cooker that boasts "AI Smart
| Cooking Technology" while not even containing a
| microcontroller and just being controlled by the time-honored
| technology of "a magnet that gets hot". They also have
| lawyers.
|
| AI doesn't mean anything. You can claim anything uses "AI"
| and just define what that means yourself. They could have
| some basic anti-collision technology and claim it's "AI".
| moogly wrote:
| > what you are describing is criminal fraud that any
| plaintiff's lawyer would have a field day with
|
| "Corporate puffery"
| ionwake wrote:
| Not sure why my comment got so upvoted, all my comments are my
| personal opinion based solely on the publicly streamed video,
| and as I said, I'll happily correct or retract my impression.
| yunyu wrote:
| If you are a gamer, you are no longer NVIDIA's most important
| customer.
| bigyabai wrote:
| A revelation on-par with Mac users waking up to learn their
| computer was made by a phone company.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| Barely even a phone company, more like a app store and
| microtransactions services company
| dcchambers wrote:
| Haven't been for a while. Not since crypto bros started buying
| up GPUs for coin mining.
| theshackleford wrote:
| Yes but why should I care provided the product they have
| already sold me continues to work? How does this materially
| change my life because Nvidia doesnt want to go steady with me
| anymore?
| Rapzid wrote:
| Sounds like an opening for AMD then. But as long as NVidia has
| the best tech I'll keep buying it when it's time to upgrade.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I wonder if the 12VHPWR connector is intentionally defective to
| prevent large-scale use of those consumer cards in
| server/datacenter contexts?
|
| The failure rate is just _barely_ acceptable in a consumer use-
| case with a single card, but with multiple cards the probability
| of failure (which takes down the whole machine, as there 's no
| way to hot-swap the card) makes it unusable.
|
| I can't otherwise see why they'd persevere on that stupid
| connector when better alternatives exist.
| mjevans wrote:
| Sunk cost fallacy and a burning (literal) desire to have small
| artistic things. That's probably also the reason the connector
| was densified so much, and clearly, released with so VERY
| little tolerance for error human and otherwise.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| IANAL, but knowingly leaving a serious defect in your product
| at scale for that purpose would be very bad behavior and juries
| tend not like that sort of thing.
| thimabi wrote:
| However, as we've learned from the Epic vs Apple case,
| corporations don't really care about bad behavior -- as long
| as their ulterior motives don't get caught.
| transcriptase wrote:
| It boggles my mind that an army of the most talented electrical
| engineers on earth somehow fumble a power connector and then
| don't catch it before shipping.
| ls612 wrote:
| They use the 12VHPWR on some datacenter cards too.
| monster_truck wrote:
| Remember when nvidia got caught dropping 2 bits of color
| information to beat ati in benchmarks? I still can't believe
| anyone has trusted them since! That is an insane thing to do
| considering the purpose of the product.
|
| For as long as they have competition, I will support those
| companies instead. If they all fail, I guess I will start one. My
| spite for them knows no limits
| 827a wrote:
| People need to start asking more questions about why the RTX 50
| series (Blackwell) has almost no performance uplift over the
| RTX 40 series (Ada/Hopper), and also conveniently its
| impossible to find B200s.
| alganet wrote:
| Right now, all silicon talk is bullshit. It has been for a while.
|
| It became obvious when old e-waste Xeons were turned into viable,
| usable machines, years ago.
|
| Something is obviously wrong with this entire industry, and I
| cannot wait for it to pop. THIS will be the excitement everyone
| is looking for.
| gizajob wrote:
| Do you have a timeframe for the pop? I need some excitement.
| alganet wrote:
| More a sequence of potential events than a timeframe.
|
| High-end GPUs are already useless for gaming (a low-end GPU
| is enough), their traditional source of demand. They're
| floating on artificial demand for a while now.
|
| There are two markets that currently could use them: LLMs and
| Augmented Reality. Both of these are currently useless, and
| getting more useless by the day.
|
| CPUs are just piggybacking on all of this.
|
| So, lots of things hanging on unrealized promises. It will
| pop when there is no next use for super high-end GPUs.
|
| War is a potential user of such devices, and I predict it
| could be the next thing after LLMs and AR. But then if war
| breaks out in such a scale to drive silicon prices up, lots
| of things are going to pop, and food and fuel will boom to
| such a magnitude that will make silicon look silly.
|
| I think it will pop before it comes to the point of war
| driving it, and it will happen within our lifetimes (so, not
| a Nostradamus-style prediction that will only be realized
| long-after I'm dead).
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't see how GPU factories could be running in the event
| of war "in such a scale to drive silicon prices up". Unless
| you mean that supply will be low and people scavanging TI
| calculators for processors to make boxes playing Tetris and
| Space Invaders.
| alganet wrote:
| Why not?
|
| This is the exact model in which WWII operated. Car and
| plane supply chains were practically nationalized to
| support the military industry.
|
| If drones, surveillance, satellites become the main war
| tech, they'll all use silicon, and things will be fully
| nationalized.
|
| We already have all sorts of hints of this. Doesn't need
| a genius to predict that it could be what happens to
| these industries.
|
| The balance with food and fuel is more delicate though. A
| war with drones, satellites and surveillance is not like
| WWII, there's a commercial aspect to it. If you put it on
| paper, food and fuel project more power and thus, can
| move more money. Any public crisis can make people forget
| about GPUs and jeopardize the process of nationalization
| that is currently being implemented, which still depends
| on relatively peaceful international trade.
| newsclues wrote:
| CPU and GPU compute will be needed for military use
| processing the vast data from all sorts of sensors. Think
| about data centres crunching satellite imagery for
| trenches, fortifications and vehicles.
| alganet wrote:
| > satellite imagery for trenches, fortifications and
| vehicles
|
| Dude, you're describing the 80s. We're in 2025.
|
| GPUs will be used for automated surveillance, espionage,
| brainwashing and market manipulation. At least that's
| what the current batch of technologies implies.
|
| The only thing stopping this from becoming a full
| dystopia is that delicate balance with food and fuel I
| mentioned earlier.
|
| It has become pretty obvious that entire wealthy nations
| can starve if they make the wrong move. Turns out GPUs
| cannot produce calories, and there's a limit to how much
| of a market you can manipulate to produce calories for
| you.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Why not?
|
| Bombs that fly between continents or are launched from
| submarines for any "big scale" war.
| alganet wrote:
| I don't see how this is connected to what you said
| before.
| rightbyte wrote:
| My point is that GPU factories are big static targets
| with sensitive supply chains and thus have no strategic
| importance in being so easy to distrupt.
| alganet wrote:
| So are airplane and car factories. I already explained
| all of this, what keeps the supply chain together, and
| what their strategic value is.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I have no clue if we agree with eachother or not?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Local LLMs are becoming more popular and easier to run, and
| Chinese corporations are releasing extremely good models of
| all sizes under MIT or similar terms in many cases. There
| amount of VRAM is the main limiter, and it would help with
| gaming too.
| alganet wrote:
| Gaming needs no additional VRAM.
|
| From a market perspective, LLMs sell GPUs. Doesn't even
| matter if they work or not.
|
| From the geopolitical tensions perspective, they're the
| perfect excuse to create infrastructure for a global
| analogue of the Great Firewall (something that the
| Chinese are pioneers of, and catching up to the plan).
|
| From the software engineering perspective, LLMs are a
| nuissance, a distraction. They harm everyone.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > Gaming needs no additional VRAM.
|
| Really? What about textures? Any ML that the new wave of
| games might use? For instance, while current LLMs
| powering NPC interactions would be pretty horrible, what
| about in 2 years time? You could have arbitrary dialogue
| trees AND dynamically voiced NPCs or PCs. This is
| categorically impossible without more VRAM.
|
| > the perfect excuse to create infrastructure for a
| global analogue of the Great Firewall
|
| Yes, let's have more censorship and kill the dream of the
| Internet even deader than it already is.
|
| > From the software engineering perspective, LLMs are a
| nuissance, a distraction. They harm everyone.
|
| You should be aware that reasonable minds can differ in
| this issue. I won't defend companies forcing the use of
| LLMs (it would be like forcing use of vim or any other
| tech you dislike), but I disagree about being a nuisance,
| distraction, or a universal harm. It's all down to
| choices and fit for use case.
| alganet wrote:
| How is any of that related to actual silicon sales
| strategies?
|
| Do not mistake adjacent topics for the main thing I'm
| discussing. It only proves my point that right now, all
| silicon talk is bullshit.
| grg0 wrote:
| Hell, yeah. I'm in for some shared excitement too if y'all
| want to get some popcorn.
| bigyabai wrote:
| A lot of those Xeon e-waste machines were downright awful,
| especially for the "cheap gaming PC" niche they were popular
| in. Low single-core clock speeds, low memory bandwidth for
| desktop-style configurations and super expensive motherboards
| that ran at a higher wattage than the consumer alternatives.
|
| > THIS will be the excitement everyone is looking for.
|
| Or TSMC could become geopolitically jeopardized somehow,
| drastically increasing the secondhand value of modern GPUs even
| beyond what they're priced at now. It's all a system of
| scarcity, things could go either way.
| alganet wrote:
| They were awful compared to newer models, but for the price
| of _nothing_ , pretty good deal.
|
| If no good use is found for high-end GPUs, secondhand models
| will be like AOL CDs.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Sure, eventually. Then in 2032, you can enjoy the raster
| performance that slightly-affluent people in 2025 had for
| years.
|
| By your logic people should be snatching up the 900 and
| 1000-series cards by the truckload if the demand was so
| huge. But a GTX 980 is like $60 these days, and honestly
| not very competitive in many departments. Neither it nor
| the 1000-series have driver support nowadays, so most users
| will reach for a more recent card.
| alganet wrote:
| There's no zero-cost e-waste like that anymore, it was a
| once-time thing.
|
| Also, it's not "a logic", it's not a cosumer
| recomendation. It was a fluke in the industry that to me,
| represents a symptom.
| system2 wrote:
| Why does the hero image of this website says "Made with GIMP"?
| I've never seen a web banner saying "Made with Photoshop" or
| anything similar.
| reddalo wrote:
| I don't know why it says that, but GIMP is an open-source
| project so it makes sense for fans to advertise it.
| goalieca wrote:
| Were you on the internet in the 90s? Lots of banners like that
| on every site.
| ls-a wrote:
| Finally someone
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| A bit hyperbolic
| dofubej wrote:
| > With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they're
| the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one
| of us.
|
| Of course the fact that we overwhelmingly chose the better option
| means that... we are worse off or something?
| atq2119 wrote:
| That bit does seem a bit whiney. AMD's latest offerings are
| quite good, certainly better value for money. Why not buy that?
| The only shame is that they don't sell anything as massive as
| Nvidia's high end.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| Choosing the vendor locked in, standards hating brand does tend
| to mean that you inevitably get screwed when they decide do
| massively inflate their prices and there's nothing you can do
| about it does tend to make you worse off, yes.
|
| Not that AMD was anywhere near being in a good state 10 years
| ago. Nvidia still fucked you over.
| johnklos wrote:
| Many of you chose Windows, so, well, yes.
| delduca wrote:
| Nothing new, it is just Enshittification
| porphyra wrote:
| The article complains about issues with consumer GPUs but those
| are nowadays relegated to being merely a side hobby project of
| Nvidia, whose core business is enterprise AI chips. Anyway Nvidia
| still has no significant competition from AMD on either front so
| they are still getting away with this.
|
| Deceptive marketing aside, it's true that it's sad that we can't
| get 4K 60 Hz with ray tracing with current hardware without some
| kind of AI denoising and upscaling, but ray tracing is really
| just _profoundly_ hard so I can't really blame anyone for not
| having figured out how to put it in a consumer pc yet. There's a
| reason why pixar movies need huge render farms that take lots of
| time per frame. We would probably sooner get gaussian splatting
| and real time diffusion models in games than nice full resolution
| ray tracing tbh.
| Jabrov wrote:
| I get ray tracing at 4K 60Hz with my 4090 just fine
| trynumber9 wrote:
| Really? I can't even play Minecraft (DXR: ON) at 4K 60Hz on a
| RTX 5090...
|
| Maybe another regression in Blackwell.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| What game? And with no upscaling or anything?
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Seems a bit calculated and agreed across the industry. What can
| really make sense of Microsoft's acquisitions and ruining of
| billion dollar IPs? It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming
| industry. They want to centralize control of the market and make
| it a service based (rent seeking) sector.
|
| I'm not saying they all got together and decided this together
| but their wonks are probably all saying the same thing. The
| market is shrinking and whether it's by design or incompetence,
| this creates a new opportunity to acquire it wholesale for
| pennies on the dollar and build a wall around it and charge for
| entry. It's a natural result of games requiring NVidia developers
| for driver tuning, bitcoin/ai and buying out capacity to prevent
| competitors.
|
| The wildcard I can't fit into this puzzle is Valve. They have a
| huge opportunity here but they also might be convinced that they
| have already saturated the market and will read the writing on
| the wall.
| layoric wrote:
| Valve is a private company so doesn't have the same growth at
| all costs incentives. To Microsoft, the share price is
| everything.
| keyringlight wrote:
| As much as they've got large resources, I'm not sure what
| projects they could reasonably throw a mountain of money at and
| expect to change things, and presumably benefit from in the
| future instead of doing it to be a a force of chaos in the
| industry. Valve's efforts all seem to orbit around the store,
| that's their main business and everything else seems like a
| loss-leader to get you buying through it even if it comes
| across as a pet project of a group of employees.
|
| The striking one for me is their linux efforts, at least as far
| as I'm aware they don't do a lot that isn't tied to the steam
| deck (or similar devices) or running games available on steam
| through linux. Even the deck APU is derived from the semi-
| custom work AMD did for the consoles, they're benefiting from a
| second later harvest that MS/Sony have invested (hundreds of
| millions?) in many years earlier. I suppose a lot of it comes
| down to what Valve needs to support their customers
| (developers/publishers), they don't see the point in pioneering
| and establishing some new branch of tech with developers.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think the reason you see things like Blizzard killing off
| Overwatch 1 is because the Lindy effect applies in gaming as
| well. Some things are so sticky and preferred that you have to
| commit atrocities to remove them from use.
|
| From a supply/demand perspective, if all of your customers are
| still getting high on the 5 (or 20) year old supply, launching
| a new title in the same space isn't going to work. There are
| not an infinite # of gamers and the global dopamine budget is
| limited.
|
| Launching a game like TF2 or Starcraft 2 in 2025 would be
| viewed as a business catastrophe by the metrics most AAA
| studios are currently operating under. Monthly ARPU for gamers
| _years_ after purchasing the Orange Box was approximately
| $0.00. Giving gamers access to that strong of a drug would ruin
| the demand for other products.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| I purchased "approximately $0.00" in TF2 loot boxes. How much
| exactly? Left as an exercise to the reader.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This is too clever for me, I think - 0?
| simonh wrote:
| Approximately. +/- 0
| bigyabai wrote:
| People forget that TF2 was originally 20 dollars before
| hitting the F2P market.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I paid full price for the orange box
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| When were microtransactions added to TF2? Probably years
| after the initial launch, and they worked so well the game
| became f2p.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Petition related to companies like Blizzard killing games:
| https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| From a business perspective, launching a game like Starcraft
| 2 at any time is a business catastrophe. There are obscure
| microtransactions in other Blizzard titles that have
| generated more revenue than Starcraft 2.
| bob1029 wrote:
| If SC2 was such a failure at any time, why bother with 3
| expansions?
|
| I think the biggest factors involve willingness to operate
| with substantially smaller margins and org charts.
|
| It genuinely seemed like "Is this fun?" was actually a
| bigger priority than profit prior to the Activision merger.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| I like games companies that create games for fun and
| story, rather than just pure profit.
| rollcat wrote:
| There's plenty of business opportunity in any genre; you
| can make a shit-ton of money by simply making the game good
| and building community goodwill.
|
| The strategy is simple: 1. there's always plenty of people
| who are ready to spend way more money in a game than you
| and I would consider sane - just let them spend it but 2.
| make it easy to gift in-game items to other players. You
| don't even need to keep adding that much content - the
| "whales" are always happy to keep giving away to new
| players all the time.
|
| Assuming you've built up that goodwill, this is all you
| need to keep the cash flowing. But that's non-exploitative,
| so you'll be missing that extra 1%. /shrug
| rollcat wrote:
| > Launching a game like [...] Starcraft 2
|
| They can't even _keep the lights on_ for SC2.
|
| We [the community] have been designing our own balance
| patches for the past five years; and our own ladder maps
| since +/- day 1 - all Blizzard was to do since 2020 was to
| press the "deploy" button, and they f-ed it up several times
| anyway.
|
| The news of the year so far is that someone has been
| exploiting a remote hole to upload some seriously disturbing
| stuff to the arcade (custom maps/mods) section. So of course
| rather than fixing the hole, Blizzard has cut off uploads.
|
| So we can't test the balance changes.
|
| Three weeks left until EWC, a __$700.000__ tournament, by the
| way.
|
| Theoretically SC2 could become like Brood War, with balance
| changes happening purely through map design. Except we can't
| upload maps either.
| kbolino wrote:
| The video game industry has been through cycles like this
| before. One of them (the 1983 crash) was so bad it killed most
| American companies and caused the momentum to shift to Japan
| for a generation. Another one I can recall is the "death" of
| the RTS (real-time strategy) genre around 2010. They have all
| followed a fairly similar pattern and in none of them that I
| know of have things played out as the companies involved
| thought or hoped they would.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I worked in the video game industry from the 90s through to
| today. I think you are over generalizing or missing the
| original point. It's true that there have been boom and
| busts. But there are also structural changes. Do you remember
| CD-ROMs? Steam and the iPhone were structural changes.
|
| What Microsoft is trying to do with Gamepass is a structural
| change. It may not work out the way that they plan but the
| truth is that sometimes these things do change the nature of
| the games you play.
| kbolino wrote:
| But the thing is that Steam didn't _cause_ the death of
| physical media. I absolutely do remember PC gaming before
| Steam, and between the era when it was awesome (StarCraft,
| Age of Empires, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc.) and the
| modern Steam-powered renaissance, there was an absolutely
| dismal era of disappointment and decline. Store shelves
| were getting filled with trash like "40 games on one CD!"
| and each new console generation gave retailers an excuse to
| shrink shelf space for PC games. Yet during this time, all
| of Valve's games were still available on discs!
|
| I think Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same
| result as Embracer Group. They've bought up lots of studios
| and they control a whole platform (by which I mean Xbox,
| not PC) but this doesn't give them that much power. Gaming
| does evolve and it often evolves to work around attempts
| like this, rather than in favor of them.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I am not saying that about Steam. In fact Steam pretty
| much saved triple A PC gaming. Your timeline is quite
| accurate!
|
| >> Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same
| result as Embracer Group.
|
| I hope you are right.
|
| If I were trying to make a larger point, I guess it would
| be that big tech companies (Apple, MSFT, Amazon) don't
| want content creators to be too important in the
| ecosystem and tend to support initiatives that emphasize
| the platform.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _big tech companies (Apple, MSFT, Amazon) don 't want
| content creators to be too important in the ecosystem_
|
| 100%. The platforms' ability to monetize in their factor
| is directly proportional to their relative power vs the
| most powerful creatives.
|
| Thus, in order to keep more money, they make strategic
| moves that disempower creatives.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Not in the game industry but as a consumer this is very
| true. One example: ubiquitous access to transactions and
| payment systems gave a huge rise to loot boxes.
|
| Also mobile games that got priced at $0.99 meant that only
| the unicorn level games could actually make decent money so
| In-App Purchases were born.
|
| But also I suspect it is just a problem where as consumers
| we spend a certain amount of money on certain kinds of
| entertainment and if as a content producer you can catch
| enough people's attention you can get a slice of that pie.
| We saw this with streaming services where an average
| household spent about $100/month on cable so Netflix, Hulu,
| et al all decided to price themselves such that they could
| be a portion of that pie (and would have loved to be the
| whole pie but ironically studios not willing to license
| everything to everyone is what prevented that).
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Thankfully, RTS is healthy again! (To your point about
| cycles)
| needcaffeine wrote:
| What RTS games are you playing now, please?
| sgarland wrote:
| AoE2, baby. Still going strong, decades after launch.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| And AoE4, one of the few high profile RTS games of the
| past years, is dead.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| That was disappointing to see. I thought it was a great
| game, with some mechanics improved over 2, and missing
| some of the glitchy behavior that became cannon (e.g.
| foot archer kiting) The community (nor my friends) didn't
| seem to go for it, primarily for the reason that it's not
| AoE2. Exquisite sound design too.
| evelant wrote:
| Sins of a solar empire 2. AI War 2. There haven't been
| any really "big" ones like StarCraft but some very good
| smaller ones like those two.
| somat wrote:
| BAR
|
| https://www.beyondallreason.info/
|
| But... While bar is good, very good. It is also very hard
| to compete with, so I see it sort of killing any funding
| for good commercial RTS's for the next few years.
| rollcat wrote:
| It's non-competitive (I'm burnt out with SC2 ladder a
| bit), but I've been enjoying Cataclismo, Settlers 3 (THAT
| is a throwback), and I'm eyeing They are Billions.
|
| Some SC2 youtubers are now covering Mechabellum, Tempest
| Rising, BAR, AoE4, and some in-dev titles: Battle Aces,
| Immortal: Gates of Pyre, Zerospace, and of course
| Stormgate.
|
| These are all on my list but I'm busy enough playing
| Warframe ^^'
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming industry. They
| want to centralize control of the market and make it a service
| based (rent seeking) sector.
|
| It also won't work, and Microsoft has developed no way to
| compete on actual value. As much as I hate the acquisitions
| they've made, even if Microsoft as a whole were to croak
| tomorrow I think the game industry would be fine.
| ehnto wrote:
| New stars would arise, others suggesting the games industry
| would collapse and go away is like saying the music industry
| collapsing would stop people from making music.
|
| Yes games can be expensive to make, but they don't have to
| be, and millions will still want new games to play. It is
| actually a pretty low bar for entry to bring an indie game to
| market (relative to other ventures). A triple A studio
| collapse would probably be an amazing thing for gamers, lots
| of new and unique indie titles. Just not great for profit for
| big companies, a problem I am not concerned with.
| beefnugs wrote:
| This post is crazy nonsense: Bad games companies have always
| existed, and the solution is easy: dont buy their trash. I buy
| mostly smaller indie games these days just fine.
|
| nvidia isn't purposely killing anything, they are just
| following the pivot into the AI nonsense. They have no choice,
| if they are in a unique position to make 10x by a pivot they
| will, even if it might be a dumpsterfire of a house of cards.
| Its immoral to just abandon the industry that created you, but
| companies have always been immoral.
|
| Valve has an opportunity to what? Take over video card hardware
| market? No. AMD and Intel are already competitors in the market
| and cant get any foothold (until hopefully now consumers will
| have no choice but to shift to them)
| proc0 wrote:
| I've always played a few games for many hours as opposed to
| many games for one playthrough. Subscription just does not make
| sense for me, and I suspect that's a big part of the market.
| Add to this the fact that you have no control over it and then
| top it off with potential ads and I will quit gaming before
| switching to subs only. Luckily there is still GoG and Steam
| doesn't seem like it will change but who knows.
| pointlessone wrote:
| If it's manufactured it implies intent. Someone at Microsoft is
| doing it on purpose and, presumably, thinks it'll benefit them.
| I'm not sure how this can be seen as a win for them. They
| invested a massive amount of money into buying all those game
| studios. They also admitted Xbox hardware is basically dead. So
| the only way they can any return on that investment is third
| party hardware: either PlayStation or PC. If I were to choose
| it would be pc for MS. They already have game pass and windows
| is the gaming OS. By giving business to Sony they would
| undermine those.
|
| I don't think nVidia wants gaming collapse either. They might
| not prioritize it now but they definitely know that it will
| persist in some form. They bet on AI (and crypto before it)
| because those are lucrative opportunities but there's no
| guarantee they will last. So they squeeze as much as they can
| out of those while they can. They definitely want gaming as a
| backup. It might be not as profitable and more finicky as it's
| a consumer market but it's much more stable in the long run.
| jekwoooooe wrote:
| This guy makes some good points but he clearly has a bone to
| pick. Calling dlss snake oil was where I stopped reading
| kevingadd wrote:
| The article doesn't make the best argument to support the claim
| but it's true that NVIDIA is now making claims like '4090 level
| performance' on the basis that if you turn on DLSS multi-frame
| generation you suddenly have Huge Framerates when most of the
| pixels are synthesized instead of real.
|
| Personally I'm happy with DLSS on balanced or quality, but the
| artifacts from framegen are really distracting. So I feel like
| it's fair to call their modern marketing snake oil since it's
| so reliant on frame gen to create the illusion of real
| progress.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Yeah, computer graphics has always been "software trickery" all
| the way down. There are valid points to be made about DLSS
| being marketed in misleading ways, but I don't think it being
| "software trickery" is a problem at all.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Exactly. Running games at a lower resolution isn't new. I
| remember changing the size of the viewport in the original
| DOOM 1993 to get it to run faster. Making a lower resolution
| look better without having to run at a higher resolution is
| the exact same problem anti-aliasing has been tackling
| forever. DLSS is just another form of AA that is now so
| advanced, you can go from an even lower resolution and still
| look good.
|
| So even when I'm running a game at native resolution, I still
| want anti-aliasing, and DLSS is a great choice then.
| imiric wrote:
| It's one thing to rely on a technique like AA to improve
| visual quality with negligible drawbacks. DLSS is entirely
| different though, since upscaling introduces all kinds of
| graphical issues, and frame generation[1] even more so,
| while adding considerable input latency. NVIDIA will claim
| that this is offset by its Reflex feature, but that has its
| own set of issues.
|
| So, sure, we can say that all of this is ultimately
| software trickery, but when the trickery is dialed up to 11
| and the marketing revolves entirely on it, while the raw
| performance is only slightly improved over previous
| generations, it's a clear sign that consumers are being
| duped.
|
| [1]: I'm also opposed to frame generation from a
| philosophical standpoint. I want my experience to be as
| close as possible to what the game creator intended. That
| is, I want every frame to be generated by the game engine;
| every object to look as it should within the world, and so
| on. I don't want my graphics card to create an experience
| that approximates what the creator intended.
|
| This is akin to reading a book on an e-reader that replaces
| every other word with one chosen by an algorithm. I want
| none of that.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I don't disagree about frame-gen, but upscaling and its
| artifacts are not new nor unique to DLSS. Even later PS3
| games upscaled from 720p to 1080p.
| sixothree wrote:
| But we're not talking about resolution here. We're talking
| about interpolation of entire frames, multiple frames.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I don't think we are? Article talks about DLSS on RTX 20
| series cards, which do not support DLSS frame-gen:
|
| > What always rubbed me the wrong way about how DLSS was
| marketed is that it wasn't only for the less powerful
| GPUs in NVIDIA's line-up. No, it was marketed for the top
| of the line $1,000+ RTX 20 series flagship models to
| achieve the graphical fidelity with all the bells and
| whistles.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| > With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they're
| the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one
| of us.
|
| I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were
| upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets.
|
| I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world
| besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn't
| worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooom and then
| cry and outrage when they are exploited instead of just walking
| away and doing something else.
|
| Same with magic the gathering, the game went to shit and so many
| people got outraged and in a big huff but they still spend
| thousands on the hobby. I just stopped playing mtg.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Also playing PC video games doesn't even require a Nvidia GPU.
| It does sorta require Windows. I don't want to use that, so
| guess I lost the ability to waste tons of time playing boring
| games, oh no.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Steam's Wine thing works quite well. And yes you need to
| fiddle and do work arounds including giving up getting some
| games to work.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Yeah, but it's not worth. Apparently the "gold" list on
| ProtonDB is games that _allegedly_ work _with tweaks_. So
| like, drop in this random DLL and it might fix the game. I
| 'm not gonna spend time on that.
|
| Last one I ever tried was
| https://www.protondb.com/app/813780 with comments like
| "works perfectly, except multiplayer is completely broken"
| and the workaround has changed 3 times so far, also it lags
| no matter what. Gave up after stealing 4 different DLLs
| from Windows. It doesn't even have anticheat, it's just
| cause of some obscure math library.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > Yeah, but it's not worth. Apparently the "gold" list on
| ProtonDB is games that allegedly work with tweaks. So
| like, drop in this random DLL and it might fix the game.
| I'm not gonna spend time on that.
|
| I literally never had to do that. Most tweaking I needed
| to do was switching proton versions here and there (which
| is trivial to do).
| webstrand wrote:
| I've been running opensuse+steam and I never had to tweak
| a dll to get a game running. Albeit that I don't exactly
| chase the latest AAA, the new releases that I have tried
| have worked well.
|
| Age of empires 2 used to work well, without needing any
| babying, so I'm not sure why it didn't for you. I will
| see about spinning it up.
| imtringued wrote:
| You're not supposed to "steal DLLs".
|
| You're supposed to find a proton fork like "glorious
| eggroll" that has patches specifically for your game.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Yeah Proton covers a lot of titles. It's mainly games that
| use the most draconian forms of anticheat that don't work.
| y-curious wrote:
| It's Linux, what software _doesn 't_ need fiddling to work?
| msgodel wrote:
| Other than maybe iOS what OSes in general don't need
| fiddling these days to be usable?
| snackbroken wrote:
| Out of the 11 games I've bought through Steam this year, I've
| had to refund one (1) because it wouldn't run under Proton,
| two (2) had minor graphical glitches that didn't meaningfully
| affect my enjoyment of them, and two (2) had native Linux
| builds. Proton has gotten good enough that I've switched from
| spending time researching if I can play a game to just
| assuming that I can. Presumably ymmv depending on your taste
| in games of course, but I'm not interested in competitive
| multiplayer games with invasive anticheat which appears to be
| the biggest remaining pain point.
|
| My experience with running non-game windows-only programs has
| been similar over the past ~5 years. It really is finally the
| Year of the Linux Desktop, only few people seem to have
| noticed.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| The only games in my library _at all_ that don 't work on
| linux are indie games from the early 2000s, and I'm
| comfortable blaming the games themselves in this case.
|
| I also don't play any games that require a rootkit, so..
| globalnode wrote:
| good move, thats why i treat my windows install as a dumb
| game box, they can steal whatever data they want from
| that i dont care. i do my real work on linux, as far away
| from windows as i can possibly get.
| theshackleford wrote:
| Same way I treat my windows machine, but also the reason
| I wont be swapping it to linux any time soon. I use
| different operating systems for different purposes for a
| reason. It's great for fompartmentalization.
|
| When I am in front of windows, I know I can permit myself
| to relax, breath easy and let off some steam. When I am
| not, I know I am there to learn/earn a living/produce
| something etc. Most probably do not need this, but my
| brain does, or I would never switch off.
| duckmysick wrote:
| What works for me is having different
| Activities/Workspaces in KDE - they have different
| wallpapers, pinned programs in the taskbar, the programs
| themselves launch only in a specific Activity. I hear
| others also use completely different user accounts.
| proc0 wrote:
| My hesitation is around high end settings, can Proton run
| 240hz on 1440p and high settings? I'm switching anyway soon
| and might just have a separate machine for gaming but I'd
| rather it be Linux. SteamOS looks promising if they release
| for PC.
| onli wrote:
| Proton has often better performance than gaming under
| Windows - partly because Linux is faster - so sure it can
| run those settings.
| proc0 wrote:
| Interesting, thanks.
| onli wrote:
| :) To give a source, https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/
| betriebssysteme/welche-l... is one. There was a more
| recent article the search is not showing me now.
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| It depends on the games you play and what you are doing. It
| is a mixed bag IME. If you are installing a game that is
| several years old it will work wonderfully. Most guides
| assume you have Arch Linux or are using one of the "gaming"
| distros like Bazzite. I use Debian (I am running
| Testing/Trixie RC on my main PC).
|
| I play a lot of HellDivers 2. Despite what a lot of Linux
| YouTubers say. It doesn't work very well on Linux. The
| recommendations I got from people was to change distro. I
| do other stuff on Linux. Game slows down when you need it
| to be running smoothly doesn't matter what
| resolution/settings you set.
|
| Anything with anti-cheat probably won't work very well if
| at all.
|
| I also wanted to play the old Command and Conquer games.
| Getting the fan made patchers (not the games itself) to run
| properly that fix a bunch of bugs that EA/Westwood never
| fixed and mod support is more difficult than I cared to
| bother with.
| esseph wrote:
| Fedora 42, Helldivers 2
|
| Make sure to change your Steam launch options to:
|
| PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=84 gamemoderun %command%
|
| This will use gamemode to run it, give it priority, put
| the system in performance power mode, and will fix any
| pulse audio static you may be having. You can do this for
| any game you launch with steam, any shortcut, etc.
|
| It's missing probably 15fps on this card between windows
| and Linux, and since it's above 100fps I really don't
| even notice.
|
| It does seem to run a bit better under gnome with
| Variable Refresh Rate than KDE.
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| I will be honest, I just gave up. I couldn't get
| _consistent_ performance on HellDivers 2. Many of the
| things you have mentioned I 've tried and found they
| don't make much of a difference or made things worse.
|
| I did get it running nice for about a day and then an
| update was pushed and it ran like rubbish again. The game
| runs smoothly when initially running the map and then
| massive dip in frames for several seconds. This is
| usually when one of the bugs is jumping at you.
|
| This game may work better on Fedora/Bazzite or <some
| other distro> but I find Debian to be super reliable and
| don't want to switch distro. I also don't like Fedora
| generally as I've found it unreliable in the past. I had
| a look at Bazzite and I honestly just wasn't interested.
| This is due to it having a bunch of technologies that I
| have no interest in using.
|
| There are other issues that are tangential but related
| issues.
|
| e.g.
|
| I normally play on Super HellDive with other players in a
| Discord VC. Discord / Pipewire seems to reset my sound
| for no particular reason and my Plantronics Headset Mic
| (good headset, not some gamer nonsense) will be not
| found. This requires a restart of pipewire/wireplumber
| and Discord (in that order). This happens often enough I
| have a shell script alias called "fix_discord".
|
| I have weird audio problems on HDMI (AMD card) thanks to
| a regression in the kernel (Kernel 6.1 with Debian worked
| fine).
|
| I could mess about with this for ages and maybe get it
| working or just reboot into Windows which takes me all of
| a minute.
|
| It is just easier to use Windows for Gaming. Then use
| Linux for work stuff.
| esseph wrote:
| I used Debian for about 15 years.
|
| Honestly? Fedora is really the premier Linux distro these
| days. It's where the most the development is happening,
| by far.
|
| All of my hardware, some old, some brand new (AMD card),
| worked flawlessly out of the box.
|
| There was a point when you couldn't get me to use an rpm-
| based distro if my life depended on it. That time is long
| gone.
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| I don't want to use Fedora. Other than I've found it
| unreliable I switched to Debian because I was fed up of
| all the Window-isms/Corporate stuff in the distro that
| was enabled by default that I was trying to get away
| from.
|
| It the same reason I don't want to use Bazzite. It misses
| the point of using a Linux/Unix system altogether.
|
| I also learned a long time ago Distro Hopping doesn't
| actually fix your issues. You just end up either with the
| same issues or different ones. If I switched from Debian
| to Fedora, I suspect I would have many of the same
| issues.
|
| e.g. If a issue is in the Linux kernel itself such as
| HDMI Audio on AMD cards having random noise, I fail to
| see how changing from one distro to another would help.
| Fedora might have a custom patch to fix this, however I
| could also take this patch and make my own kernel image
| (which I've done in the past btw).
|
| The reality is that most people doing development for
| various project / packages that make the Linux desktop
| don't have the setup I have and some of the peculiarities
| I am running into. If I had a more standard setup, I
| wouldn't have an issue.
|
| Moreover, I would be using FreeBSD/OpenBSD or some other
| more traditional Unix system and ditch Linux if I didn't
| require some Linux specific applications. I am
| considering moving to something like Artix / Devuan in
| the future if I did decide to switch.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > It does sorta require Windows.
|
| The vast majority of my gaming library runs fine on Linux.
| Older games might run better than on Windows, in fact.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| True for single player, but if you're into multiplayer
| games anti-cheat is an issue.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| If a game requires invasive anticheat, it is probably
| something I won't enjoy playing. Most likely the game
| will be full of cheaters anyway.
|
| And yes, I rarely play anything online multiplayer.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| multiplayer games with anti cheat are the minority and of
| those about 40% do work
|
| areweanticheatyet.com
| esseph wrote:
| Proton/Steam/ Linux works damn nearly flawlessly for /most/
| games. I've gone through a Nvidia 2060, a 4060, and now an
| AMD 6700 XT. No issues even for release titles at launch.
| jabwd wrote:
| What version of Linux do you run for that? I've had issues
| getting Fedora or Ubuntu or Mint to work with my Xbox
| controller + Bluetooth card combo, somehow Bazzite doesn't
| have these issues even though its based on Fedora and I
| don't know what I did wrong with the other distros.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the
| world besides video games
|
| My favorite part about being a reformed gaming addict is the
| fact that my MacBook now covers ~100% of my computer use cases.
| The desktop is nice for Visual Studio but that's about it.
|
| I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely
| zero desire to upgrade.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Same here. I got mine five years ago when I needed to upgrade
| my workstation to do work-from-home, and it's been entirely
| adequate since then. I switched the CPU from an AMD 3900 to a
| 5900, but that's the only upgrade. The differences from one
| generation to the next are pretty marginal.
| leoapagano wrote:
| Same here - actually, my PC broke in early 2024 and I still
| haven't fixed it. I quickly found out that without gaming, I
| no longer have any use for my PC, so now I just do everything
| on my MacBook.
| nicce wrote:
| > I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely
| zero desire to upgrade.
|
| Same boat. I have 5700XT as well and since 2023, used mostly
| my Mac for gaming.
| pshirshov wrote:
| PCI reset bug makes it necessary to upgrade to 6xxx series at
| least.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Im a reformed gaming addict as well and mostly play games
| over 10 years old, and am happy to keep doing that.
| Mars008 wrote:
| Still have 2080 RTX on primary desktop, it's more than enough
| for GUI.
|
| Just got PRO 6000 96GB for models tuning/training/etc. The
| cheapest 'good enough' for my needs option.
| jabwd wrote:
| Is this like a computational + memory need? Otherwise one
| would think something like the framework desktop or a mac
| mini would be a better choice right?
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Put Linux on it, and you can even run software raytracing on
| it for games like Indiana Jones! It'll do something like ~70
| fps medium 1080p IIRC.
|
| No mesh shader supports though. I bet more games will start
| using that soon
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| I don't think a reformed gaming addict wants to be tempted
| with another game :P
| nozzlegear wrote:
| The only video game I've played with any consistency is World
| of Warcraft, which runs natively on my Mac. Combined with
| Rider for my .NET work, I couldn't be happier with this
| machine.
| int_19h wrote:
| Parallels is great for running Windows software on Mac.
| Ironically, what with the Microsoft push for Windows on ARM,
| increasingly more Windows software gets native ARM64 builds
| which are great for Parallels on Apple Silicon. And Visual
| Studio specifically is one of those.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the
| world besides video games
|
| My main hobby is videogames, but since I can consistently play
| most games on Linux (that has good AMD support), it doesn't
| really matter.
| kassner wrote:
| Steam+Proton has been so incredibly good in the last year
| that I'm yet to install Windows on my gaming PC. I really do
| recommend anyone to try out that option first.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| AMD isn't even bad at video games, it's just pytorch that
| doesn't work so well.
| kyrra wrote:
| Frame per watt they aren't as good. But they are still
| decent.
| msgodel wrote:
| TCO per FPS is almost certainly cheaper.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| They seem to be close? The RX 9070 is the 2nd most
| efficient graphics card this generation according to
| TechPowerUp and they also do well when limited to 60Hz,
| implying their joules per frame isn't bad either.
|
| Efficiency: https://tpucdn.com/review/gigabyte-geforce-
| rtx-5050-gaming-o...
|
| Vsync power draw: https://tpucdn.com/review/gigabyte-
| geforce-rtx-5050-gaming-o...
|
| The variance within Nvidia's line-up is much larger than
| the variance between brands, anyway.
| docmars wrote:
| The RX 9070XT goes toe-to-toe with the RTX 4080 in many
| benchmarks, and costs around 2/3 MSRP. I'd say that's a
| pretty big win!
| tankenmate wrote:
| I run 9070s (non XT) and in combination with under-
| volting it is very efficient in both joules per frame and
| joules per token. And in terms of purchase price it was a
| steal compared to similar class of NVidia cards.
| darkoob12 wrote:
| I am not a gamer and don't why AMD GPUs aren't good enough.
| It's weird since both Xbox and PlayStation are using AMD GPUs.
|
| I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia
| graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and
| ignore large console market.
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| Nvidia is the high end, AMD is the mid segment and Intel is
| the low end. In reality I am playing 4K on HellDivers with
| 50-60FPS on a 6800XT.
|
| Traditionally the NVIDIA drivers have been more stable on
| Windows than the AMD drivers. I choose an AMD card because I
| wanted a hassle free experience on Linux (well as much as you
| can).
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| ive used an amd card for a couple years
|
| its been great. flawless in fact.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Same. Bought a 6950xt for like $800ish or something like
| that a few years ago and it's been perfect. Runs any game I
| want to play on ultra 1440p with good fps. No issues.
|
| Maybe there's a difference for the people who buy the
| absolute top end cards but I don't. I look for best value
| and when I looked into it amd looked better to me. Also got
| an amd CPU which has aso been great.
| senko wrote:
| > AMD GPUs aren't good enough.
|
| Software. AMD has traditionally been really bad at their
| drivers. (They also missed the AI train and are trying to
| catch up).
|
| I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a
| lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long
| time ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel
| integrated (if no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less
| risky choices.
| rewgs wrote:
| > I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and
| to a lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a
| long time ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel
| integrated (if no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are
| less risky choices.
|
| Err, what? While you're right about Intel integrated GPUs
| being a safe choice, AMD has long since been the GPU of
| choice for Linux -- it just works. Whereas Nvidia on Linux
| has been flaky for as long as I can remember.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| They have never been flaky on the x11 desktop
| senko wrote:
| Had major problems with xinerama, suspend/resume, vsync,
| probably a bunch of other stuff.
|
| That said, I've been avoiding AMD in general for so long
| the ecosystem might have really improved in the meantime,
| as there was no incentive for me to try and switch.
|
| Recently I've been dabbling in AI where AMD GPUs (well,
| sw ecosystem, really) are lagging behind. Just wasn't
| worth the hassle.
|
| NVidia hw, once I set it up (which may be a bit
| involved), has been pretty stable for me.
| tankenmate wrote:
| I run llama.cpp using Vulkan and AMD CPUs, no need to
| install any drivers (or management software for that
| matter, nor any need to taint the kernel meaning if I
| have an issue it's easy to get support). For example the
| other day when a Mesa update had an issue I had a fix in
| less than 36 hours (without any support contract or fees)
| and `apt-mark hold` did a perfect job until there was a
| fix. Performance for me is within a couple of % points,
| and with under-volting I get better joules per token.
| homebrewer wrote:
| > I've been avoiding AMD in general
|
| I have no opinion on GPUs (I don't play anything released
| later than about 2008), but Intel CPUs have had more
| problems over the last five years than AMD, including
| disabling the already limited support for AVX-512 after
| release and simply burning themselves to the ground to
| get an easy win in initial benchmarks.
|
| I fear your perception of their products is seriously out
| of date.
| senko wrote:
| > I fear your perception of their products is seriously
| out of date.
|
| How's the chipset+linux story these days? That was the
| main reason for not choosing AMD CPU for me the last few
| times I was in the market.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Err, what? While you're right about Intel integrated
| GPUs being a safe choice, AMD has long since been the GPU
| of choice for Linux -- it just works. Whereas Nvidia on
| Linux has been flaky for as long as I can remember.
|
| Not OP, I had same experience in the past with AMD,I
| bought a new laptop and in 6 months the AMD decided that
| my card is obsolete and no longer provided drivers
| forcing me to be stuck with older kernel/X11 , so I
| switched to NVIDIA and after 2 PC changes I still use
| NVIDIA since the official drivers work great, I really
| hope AMD this time is putting the effort to keep older
| generations of cards working on latest kernels/X11 maybe
| next card will be AMD.
|
| But this is an explanations why us some older Linux users
| have bad memories with AMD and we had good reason to
| switch over to NVIDIA and no good reason to switch back
| to AMD
| ho_schi wrote:
| This is wrong. For 14 years the recommendation on Linux is:
| * Purchase always AMD. * Purchase never
| Nvidia. * Intel is also okay.
|
| Because the AMD drivers are good and open-source. And AMD
| cares about bug reports. The one from Nvidia can and will
| create issues because they're closed-source and avoided for
| years to support Wayland. Now Nvidia published source-code
| and refuses to merge it into Linux and Mesa _facepalm_
|
| While Nvidia comes up with proprietary stuff AMD brought us
| Vulkan, FreeSync, supported Wayland well already with
| Implicit-Sync (like Intel) and used the regular Video-
| Acceleration APIs for long time.
|
| Meanwhile Nvidia:
|
| https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_robust
| n... It's not a bug, it's a feature!
|
| Their bad drivers still don't handle simple actions like a
| VT-Switch or Suspend/Resume. If a developer doesn't know
| about that extension the users suffer for years.
|
| Okay. But that is probably only a short term solution? It
| is Nvidias short term solution since 2016!
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR
| josephg wrote:
| I've been using a 4090 on my linux workstation for a few
| years now. Its mostly fine - with the occasional bad
| driver version randomly messing things up. I'm using
| linux mint. Mint uses X11, which, while silly, means
| suspend / resume works fine.
|
| NVIDIA's drivers also recently completely changed how
| they worked. Hopefully that'll result in a lot of these
| long term issues getting fixed. As I understand it, the
| change is this: The nvidia drivers contain a huge amount
| of proprietary, closed source code. This code used to be
| shipped as a closed source binary blob which needed to
| run on your CPU. And that caused all sorts of problems -
| because its linux and you can't recompile their binary
| blob. Earlier this year, they moved all the secret,
| proprietary parts into a firmware image instead which
| runs on a coprocessor within the GPU itself. This then
| allowed them to - at last - opensource (most? all?) of
| their remaining linux driver code. And that means we can
| patch and change and recompile that part of the driver.
| And that should mean the wayland & kernel teams can start
| fixing these issues.
|
| In theory, users shouldn't notice any changes at all. But
| I suspect all the nvidia driver problems people have been
| running into lately have been fallout from this change.
| nirv wrote:
| No browser on Linux supports any other backend for video
| acceleration except VAAPI, as far as I know. AMD and
| Intel use VAAPI, while Nvidia uses VDPAU, which is not
| supported anywhere. This single fact means that with
| Nvidia graphics cards on Linux, there isn't even such a
| simple and important feature for users as video decoding
| acceleration in the browser. Every silly YouTube video
| will use CPU (not iGPU, but CPU) to decode video,
| consuming resources and power.
|
| Yes, there are translation layers[1] which you have to
| know about and understand how to install correctly, which
| partially solve the problem by translating from VAAPI to
| NVDEC, but this is certainly not for the average user.
|
| Hopefully, in the future browsers will add support for
| the new Vulkan Video standard, but for now,
| unfortunately, one has to hardcode the browser launch
| parameters in order to use the integrated graphics chip's
| driver (custom XDG-application file for AMD APU in my
| case: ~/.local/share/applications/Firefox-
| amdgpu.desktop): `Exec=env LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi
| DRI_PRIME=0 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
| __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=0
| __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=radeons i /usr/bin/firefox-beta
| %u`.
|
| [1] https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/
| whatevaa wrote:
| VAAPI support in browsers is also bad and oftenly
| requires some forcing.
|
| On my Steam deck, I have to use vulkan. AV1 decoder is
| straight up buggy, have to disable it with config or
| extensions.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I never managed to get it working on my Netbook APU.
| homebrewer wrote:
| They opened a tiny kernel level sliver of their driver,
| everything else (including OpenGL stack et al) is and
| will still be closed.
|
| Sadly, a couple of years ago someone seriously
| misunderstood the news about "open sourcing" their
| drivers and spread that misunderstanding widely; many
| people now think their whole driver stack is open, when
| in reality it's like 1% of the code -- the barest minimum
| they could get away with (I'm excluding GSP code here).
|
| The real FOSS driver is Nova, and it's driven by the
| community with zero help from Nvidia, as always.
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| The AMD drivers are open source, but they definitely are
| not good. Have a look at the Fedora discussion forums
| (for example
| https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-does-not-
| boot-... ) to see what happens about each month.
|
| I have no NVIDIA hardware, but I understand that the
| drivers are even worse than AMD's.
|
| Intel seems to be, at the moment, the least worse
| compromise between performance and stability,
| roenxi wrote:
| Although you get to set your own standards "A bug was
| discovered after upgrading software" isn't very
| illuminating vis a vis quality. That does happen from
| time to time in most software.
|
| In my experience an AMD card on linux is a great
| experience unless you want to do something AI related, in
| which case there will be random kernel panics (which, in
| all fairness, may one day go away - then I'll be back on
| AMD cards because their software support on Linux was
| otherwise much better than Nvidia's). There might be some
| kernel upgrades that should be skipped, but using an
| older kernel is no problem.
| homebrewer wrote:
| I have zero sympathy for Nvidia and haven't used their
| hardware for about two decades, but amdgpu is the sole
| reason I stick to linux-lts kernels. They introduce
| massive regressions into every mainline release, even if
| I delay kernel updates by several minor versions (to
| something like x.y.5), it's still often buggy and crashy.
|
| They do care about but reports, and their drivers -- when
| given time to stabilize -- provide the best experience
| across all operating systems (easy updates, etc), but IME
| mainline kernels should be treated as alpha-to-beta
| material.
| jorams wrote:
| > I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs
|
| The situation completely changed with the introduction of
| the AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was
| like 10 years ago.
|
| Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was
| atrocious. The open source drivers performed so bad you'd
| get better performance out of Intel integrated graphics
| than an expensive AMD GPU, and their closed source drivers
| were so poorly updated you'd have to downgrade the entire
| world for the rest of your software to be compatible. At
| that time Nvidia was clearly ahead, even though the driver
| needs to be updated separately and they invented their own
| versions of some stuff.
|
| With the introduction of AMDGPU and the years after that
| everything changed. AMD GPUs now worked great without any
| effort, while Nvidia's tendency to invent their own things
| really started grating. Much of the world started moving to
| Wayland, but Nvidia refused to support some important
| common standards. Those that really wanted their stuff to
| work on Nvidia had to introduce entirely separate code
| paths for it, while other parts of the landscape refused to
| do so. This started improving again a few years ago, but
| I'm not aware of the current state because I now only use
| Intel and AMD hardware.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| I use the amdgpu driver and my luck has not been as good
| as yours. Can't sleep my PC without having it wake up to
| fill my logs with spam [0] and eventually crash.
|
| Then there is the (in)famous AMD reset bug that makes AMD
| a real headache to use with GPU passthrough. The card
| can't be properly reset when the VM shuts down so you
| have to reboot the PC to start the VM a second time.
| There are workarounds but they only work on some cards &
| scenarios [1] [2]. This problem goes back to around the
| 390 series cards so they've had forever to properly
| implement reset according to the pci spec but haven't.
| nvidia handles this flawlessly
|
| [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3911
|
| [1] https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset
|
| [2] https://github.com/inga-lovinde/RadeonResetBugFix
| eptcyka wrote:
| I was under the impression that nvidia just didn't let
| consumer cards do GPU passthrough.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The open source driver for the Netboooks APU was never as
| good as either the Windows version, or the closed source
| that predated it.
|
| Lesser OpenGL version, and I never managed to have
| hardware accelerated video until it died last year.
| datagram wrote:
| AMD cards are fine from a raw performance perspective, but
| Nvidia has built themselves a moat of software/hardware
| features like ray-tracing, video encoding, CUDA, DLSS, etc
| where AMD's equivalents have simply not been as good.
|
| With their current generation of cards AMD has caught up on
| all of those things except CUDA, and Intel is in a similar
| spot now that they've had time to improve their drivers, so
| it's pretty easy now to buy a non-Nvidia card without feeling
| like you're giving anything up.
| SSLy wrote:
| AMD RT is still slower than Nvidia's.
| jezze wrote:
| I have no experience of using it so I might be wrong but
| AMD has ROCm which has something called HIP that should be
| comparable to CUDA. I think it also has a way to
| automatically translate CUDA calls into HIP as well so it
| should work without the need to modify your code.
| StochasticLi wrote:
| it's mostly about AI training at this point. the software
| for this only supports CUDA well.
| tankenmate wrote:
| `I think it also has a way to automatically translate
| CUDA calls`
|
| I suspect the thing you're referring to is ZLUDA[0], it
| allows you to run CUDA code on a range of non NVidia
| hardware (for some value of "run").
|
| [0] https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| For an extremely flexible value of "run" that you would
| be extremely unwise to allow anywhere near a project
| whose success you have a stake in.
| tankenmate wrote:
| To quote "The Dude"; "Well ... ummm ... that's ... ahh
| ... just your opinion man". There are people who are
| successfully running it in production, but of course
| depending on your code, YMMV.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| AMD "has" ROCm just like Intel "has" AVX-512
| whatevaa wrote:
| Consumer card ROCm support is straight up garbage. CUDA
| support project was also killed.
|
| AMD doesn't care about consumers anymore either. All the
| money in AI.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > AMD doesn't care about consumers anymore either. All
| the money in AI.
|
| I mean, this also describes the quality of NVIDIA cards.
| And their drivers have been broken for the last two
| decades if you're not using windows.
| npteljes wrote:
| What I experienced is that AI is a nightmare on AMD in Linux.
| There is a myriad of custom things that one needs to do, and
| even that just breaks after a while. Happened so much on my
| current setup (6600 XT) that I don't bother with local AI
| anymore, because the time investment is just not worth it.
|
| It's not that I can't live like this, I still have the same
| card, but if I were looking to do anything AI locally with a
| new card, for sure it wouldn't be an AMD one.
| eden-u4 wrote:
| I don't have much experience with ROCm for large trainings,
| but NVIDIA is still shit with driver+cuda version+other
| things. The only simplification is due to ubuntu and other
| distros that already do the heavy lift by installing all
| required components, without much configuration.
| npteljes wrote:
| Oh I'm sure. The thing is that with AMD I have the same
| luxury, and the wretched thing still doesn't work, or has
| regressions.
| int_19h wrote:
| On Ubuntu, in my experience, installing the .deb version
| of the CUDA toolkit pretty much "just works".
| phronimos wrote:
| Are you referring to AI training, prediction/inference, or
| both? Could you give some examples for what had to be done
| and why? Thanks in advance.
| npteljes wrote:
| Sure! I'm referring to setting up a1111's stable
| diffusion webui, and setting up Open WebUI.
|
| Wrt/ a1, it worked at one point (a year ago) after 2-3
| hours of tinkering, then regressed to not working at all,
| not even from fresh installs on new, different Linuxes. I
| tried the main branch and the AMD specific fork as well.
|
| Wrt/ Open WebUI, it works, but the thing uses my CPU.
| FredPret wrote:
| I set up a deep learning station probably 5-10 years ago
| and ran into the exact same issue. After a week of pulling
| out my hair, I just bought an Nvidia card.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| AMD GPU's are fine, but nvidia's marketing (overt and covert
| / word-of-mouth) is better. "RTX On" is a meme where people
| get convinced the graphics are over 9000x "better"; it's a
| meaningless marketing expression but a naive generation of
| fairly new PC gamers are eating it up.
|
| And... they don't need to. Most of the most played video
| games on PC are all years old [0]. They're online multiplayer
| games that are optimized for average spec computers (and
| mobile) to capture as big a chunk of the potential market as
| possible.
|
| It's flexing for clout, nothing else to it. And yet, I can't
| say it's anything new, people have been bragging, boasting
| and comparing their graphics cards for decades.
|
| [0] https://activeplayer.io/top-15-most-popular-pc-games-
| of-2022...
| keyringlight wrote:
| One thing I wonder about is whether PC gaming is splitting
| into two distinct tiers, high end for those with thousands
| to spend on their rig and studios who are pathfinders (id,
| Remedy, 4A, etc) in graphics, then the wider market for
| cheaper/older systems and studios going for broad appeal. I
| know the market isn't going to be neatly divided and more
| of a blurry ugly continuum.
|
| The past few years (2018 with the introduction of RT and
| upscaling reconstruction seems as good a milestone as any)
| feel like a transition period we're not out of yet, similar
| to the tail end of the DX9/Playstation3/Xbox360 era when
| some studios were moving to 64bit and DX11 as optional
| modes, almost like PC was their prototyping platform for
| when they made completed the jump with PS4/Xbox one and
| more mature PC implementations. It wouldn't surprise me if
| it takes more years and titles built targeting the next
| generation consoles before it's all settled.
| phatfish wrote:
| Once the "path tracing" that the current top end Nvidia
| cards can pull off reaches mainstream it will settle
| down. The PS6 isn't going to be doing path tracing
| because the hardware for that is being decided now. I'd
| guess PS7 time frame. It will take console level hardware
| pricing to bring the gaming GPU prices down.
|
| I understand the reason for moving to real time ray-
| tracing. It is much easier for development, and
| apparently the data for baked/pre-rendered lighting in
| these big open worlds was getting out of hand. Especially
| with multiple time-of-day passes.
|
| But, it is only the "path tracing" that top end Nvidia
| GPUs can do that matches baked lighting detail.
|
| The standard ray-tracing in the latest Doom for instance
| has a very limited number of entities that actually emit
| light in a scene. I guess there is the main global
| illumination source, but many of the extra lighting
| details in the scene don't emit light. This is a step
| backward compared to baked lighting.
|
| Even shots from the plasma weapon don't cast any light
| into the scene with the standard ray-tracing, which Quake
| 3 was doing.
| wredcoll wrote:
| A significant part of the _vocal_ "gamers" is about being
| "the best" which translates into gpu benchmarking.
|
| You don't get headlines and hype by being an affordable way
| to play games at a decent frame rate, you achieve it by
| setting New Fps Records.
| stodor89 wrote:
| > I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the
| world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it
| isn't worth my time or energy.
|
| I think more and more people will realize games are a waste of
| time for them and go on to find other hobbies. As a game
| developer, it kinda worries me. As a gamer, I can't wait for
| gaming to be a niche thing again, haha.
| esseph wrote:
| "it's just a fad"
|
| Nah. Games will always be around.
| stodor89 wrote:
| Of course they will. People play since before they were
| people.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| The games industry is now bigger than the movies industry. I
| think you're very wrong about this, as games are engaging in
| a way other consumption based media simply cannot replicate.
| padjo wrote:
| I played video games since I was a teenager. Loved them,
| was obsessed with them. Then sometime around 40 I just gave
| up. Not because of life pressure or lack of time but
| because I just started to find them really boring and
| unfulfilling. Now I'd much rather watch movies or read. I
| don't know if the games changed or I changed.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| I get that, I go through periods of falling in and out of
| them too after having grown up with them. But there is a
| huge fraction of my age group (and a little older) that
| have consistently had games as their main "consumption"
| hobby throughout.
|
| And then there's the age group younger than me, for whom
| games are not only a hobby but also a "social place to
| be", I doubt they'll be dropping gaming entirely easily.
| FredPret wrote:
| I'm an ex-gamer, but I remember games in the 90's and
| earlier 00's being much more respecting of one's time.
|
| You could still sink a ton of time into it if you wanted
| do, but you could also crank out a decent amount of fun
| in 5-15 minutes.
|
| Recently games seem to have been optimized to maximize
| play time rather than for fun density.
| int_19h wrote:
| I would strongly disagree. If anything, it's the other
| way around - a typical 90s game had a fairly steep
| learning curve. Often no tutorials whatsoever, difficulty
| could be pretty high from the get go, players were
| expected to essentially learn through trial and error and
| failing a lot. Getting familiar enough with the game
| mechanics to stop losing all the time would often take a
| while, and could be frustrating while it lasted.
|
| These days, AAA games are optimized for "reduced
| friction", which in practice usually means dumbing down
| the mechanics and the overall gameplay to remove
| everything that might annoy or frustrate the player. I
| was playing Avowed recently and the sheer amount of
| convenience features (e.g. the entire rest / fast travel
| system) was boggling.
| immibis wrote:
| Fortunately for your business model, there's a constant
| stream of new people to replace the ones who are aging out.
| But you have to make sure your product is appealing to them,
| not just to the same people who bought it last decade.
| klipklop wrote:
| You are certainly right that this group has little spending
| self-control. There is no limit just about to how abusive
| companies like Hasbro, Nvidia and Nintendo can be and still
| rake in record sales.
|
| They will complain endlessly about the price of a RTX 5090 and
| still rush out to buy it. I know people that own these high end
| cards as a flex, but their lives are too busy to actually play
| games.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm not saying that these companies aren't charging "fair"
| prices (whatever that means) but for many hardcore gamers
| their spending per hour is tiny compared to other forms of
| entertainment. They may buyba $100 game and play to for over
| 100 hours. Maybe add another $1/hour for the console.
| Compared to someone who frequents the cinema goes to the pub
| or does many other common hobbies and it can be hard to say
| that games are getting screwed.
|
| Now it is hard to draw a straight comparison. Gamers may
| spend a lot more time playing so $/h isn't a perfect metric.
| And some will frequently buy new games or worse things like
| microtransactions which quickly skyrocket the cost. But
| overall it doesn't seem like the most expensive hobby,
| especially if you are trying to spend less.
| dgellow wrote:
| Off-topic: micro transactions are just digital
| transactions. There is nothing micro about them. I really
| wish that term would just die
| fireflash38 wrote:
| It's because it's part and parcel of their identity. Being
| able to play the latest games, often with their friends, is
| critical to their social networks.
| duckmysick wrote:
| > I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the
| world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it
| isn't worth my time or energy.
|
| I'd really love to try AMD as a daily driver. For me CUDA is
| the showstopper. There's really nothing comparable in the AMD
| camp.
| delusional wrote:
| ROCM is, to some degree and in some areas, a pretty decent
| alternative. Developing with it is often times a horrible
| experience, but once something works, it works fine.
| pixelesque wrote:
| > but once something works, it works fine.
|
| Is there "forwards compatibility" to the same code working
| on the next cards yet like PTX provided Nvidia?
|
| Last time (4 years ago?) I looked into ROCM, you seemed to
| have to compile for each revision of each architecture.
| delusional wrote:
| I'm decently sure you have to compile separately for each
| architecture, and if you elect to compile for multiple
| architectures up front, you'll have excruciating compile
| times. You'd think that would be annoying, but it ends up
| not really mattering since AMD completely switches out
| the toolchain about every graphics generation anyway.
| That's not a good reason to not have forwards
| compatibility, but it is a reason.
|
| The reason I'm not completely sure is because I'm just
| doing this as a hobby, and I only have a single card, and
| that single card has never seen a revision. I think
| that's generally the best way to be happy with ROCM.
| Accept that it's at the abstraction level of embedded
| programming, any change in the hardware will have to
| result in a change in the software.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the
| world besides video games
|
| ...and even if you're all in on video games, there's a massive
| amount of really brilliant indie games on Steam that run just
| fine on a 1070 or 2070 (I still have my 2070 and haven't found
| a compelling reason to upgrade yet).
| xg15 wrote:
| > _I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the
| world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it
| isn't worth my time or energy._
|
| I'm with you - in principle. Capital-G "Gamers" who turned
| gaming into an identity and see themselves as the _real_
| discriminated group have fully earned the ridicule.
|
| But I think where the criticism is valid is how NVIDIA's
| behavior is part of the wider enshittification trend in tech.
| Lock-in and overpricing in entertainment software might be
| annoying but acceptable, but it gets problematic when we have
| the exact same trends in actually critical tech like phones and
| cars.
| reissbaker wrote:
| I want to love AMD, but they're just... mediocre. Worse for
| gaming, and _much_ worse for ML. They 're better-integrated
| into Linux, but given that the entire AI industry runs on:
|
| 1. Nvidia cards
|
| 2. Hooked up to Linux boxes
|
| It turns out that Nvidia tends to work pretty well on Linux
| too, despite the binary blob drivers.
|
| Other than gaming and ML, I'm not sure what the value of
| spending much on a GPU is... AMD is just in a tough spot.
| const_cast wrote:
| Price-per-price AMD typically has better rasterization
| performance in comparison to nvidia. The only price point
| where this doesn't hold true is the very tippy top, which, I
| think, most people aren't at. Nvidia does have DLSS which I
| hear is quite good these days. But I know for me personally,
| I just try to buy the GPU with the best rasterization
| performance at my price point, which is always AMD.
| dgellow wrote:
| > when they are exploited instead of just walking away and
| doing something else.
|
| You don't even have to walk away. You pretty much never need
| the latest GPUs to have a great gaming experience
| artursapek wrote:
| I just learned MTG this year because my 11 year old son got
| into it. I like it. How did it "go to shit"?
| zaneyard wrote:
| If you don't care about competitive balance or the "identity"
| of magic it probably didn't.
|
| Long answer: the introduction of non-magic sets like
| SpongeBob SquarePants, Deadpool, or Assassin's Creed are seen
| as tasteless money grabs that dilute the quality and theme of
| magic even further, but fans of those things will scoop them
| up.
|
| The competitive scene has been pretty rough, but I haven't
| played constructed formats in a while so I'm not as keyed
| into this. I just know that there have been lots of cards
| released recently that have had to be banned for how powerful
| they were.
|
| Personally, I love the game, but I hate the business model.
| It's ripe for abuse and people treat cards like stocks to
| invest in.
| artursapek wrote:
| yeah I hate that Lego has been doing this too. most new
| sets are co-branded garbage.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Don't let my opinion affect you, MTG is still a fun game and
| you should do that if you find it enjoyable -- especially if
| your son likes it. But here is why I had a falling out:
|
| 1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there are
| too many cards being printed to keep up
|
| 2. Cards from new sets are pushed to be very strong (FIRE
| design) which means that the new cards are frequently the
| best cards. Combine this with the high number of new sets
| means the pool of best cards is always churning and you have
| to constantly be buying new cards to keep up.
|
| 3. Artificial scarcity in print runs means that the best
| cards in the new sets are very expensive. We are talking
| about cardboard here, it isn't hard to simply print more
| sheets of a set.
|
| 4. The erosion of the brand identity and universe. MTG used
| to have a really nicely curated fantasy universe and things
| meshed together well. Now we have spongebob, deadpool, and a
| bunch of others in the game. It like if you put spongebob in
| the star wars universe, it just ruins the texture of the
| game.
|
| 5. Print quality of cards went way down. Older cards actually
| have better card stock than the new stuff.
|
| 6. Canadians MTG players get shafted. When a new set is
| printed stores get allocations of boxes (due to the
| artificial scarcity) and due to the lower player count in
| Canada, usually Canadian stores get much lower allocations
| than their USA counterparts. Additionally, MTG cards get
| double tariffs as they get printed outside of the USA,
| imported into the USA and tariffed, and then imported into
| Canada and tariffed again. I think the cost of MTG cards when
| up like 30-40% since global trade war.
|
| Overall it boils down to hasbro turning the screws on players
| to squeeze more money, and I am just not having it. I already
| spent obscene amounts of money on the game before this all
| happened.
| hadlock wrote:
| > 1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there
| are too many cards being printed to keep up
|
| My local shop has an entire wall of the last ~70 sets,
| everything from cyberpunk ninjas to gentlemen academic
| fighting professors to steampunk and everything in between.
| I think they are releasing ~10 sets per year on average? 4
| main ones and then a bunch of effectively novelty ones. I
| hadn't been in a store in years (most of my stuff is 4th
| edition from the late 1990s) I did pull the trigger on the
| Final Fantasy novelty set recently though, for nostalgia's
| sake.
|
| But yeah it's overwhelming, as a kid I was used to a new
| major set every year and a half or so with a handful of new
| cards. 10 sets a year makes it feel futile to participate.
| artursapek wrote:
| "There's an infinite amount of cash at the Federal
| Reserve"
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And even if you ignore AMD, most PCs being sold are cheap
| computers using whatever integrated hardware Intel is selling
| for graphics.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| If I hadn't bought a 3090 when they were 1k new, I likely
| would've switched back onto the AMD train by now.
|
| So far there hasn't been enough of a performance increase for
| me to upgrade either for gaming or ML. Maybe AMDs rumored 9090
| will be enough to get me to open my wallet.
| witnessme wrote:
| Couldn't agree more
| snitty wrote:
| NVIDIA is, and will be for at least the next year or two, supply
| constrained. They only have so much capacity at TSMC for all the
| chips, and the lion's share of that is going to be going
| enterprise chips, which sell for an order of magnitude more than
| the consumer chips.
|
| It's hard to get too offended by them shirking the consumer
| marker right now when they're printing money with their
| enterprise business.
| wmf wrote:
| They could be more honest about it though.
| davidee wrote:
| Not personally offended, but when a company makes a big stink
| around several gross exaggerations (performance, price,
| availability) it's not hard to understand why folks are kicking
| up their own stink.
|
| Nvidia could have said "we're prioritizing enterprise" but
| instead they put on a big horse and pony show about their
| consumer GPUs.
|
| I really like the Gamer's Nexus paper launch shirt. ;)
| nicce wrote:
| They could rapidly build new own factories but they don't.
| axoltl wrote:
| Are you saying Nvidia could spin up their own chip fabs in
| short order?
| benreesman wrote:
| If they believed they were going to continue selling AI
| chips at those margins they would:
|
| - outbid Apple on new nodes
|
| - sign commitments with TSMC to get the capacity in the
| pipeline
|
| - absolutely own the process nodes they made cards on
| that are still selling way above retail
|
| NVIDIA has been posting net earnings in the 60-90 range
| over the last few years. If you think that's going to
| continue? You book the fab capacity hell or high water.
| Apple doesn't make those margins (which is what on paper
| would determine who is in front for the next node).
| ksec wrote:
| And what if Nvidia booked but the order didn't come. What
| if Nvidia's customer isn't going to commit? How expensive
| and how much prepayment is needed for TSMC to break a new
| Fab?
|
| These are the same question Apple Fans asking Apple to
| buy TSMC. The fact is isn't so simple. And even if Nvidia
| were willing to pay for it TSMC wouldn't do it just for
| Nvidia alone.
| benreesman wrote:
| Yeah, I agree my "if" is doing a lot of lifting there. As
| in, "if Jensen were being candid and honest when he goes
| on stage and said things".
|
| Big if, I I get that.
| nicce wrote:
| Yes, if they wanted. They have had years to make that
| decision. They have enough knowledge. Their profits are
| measured in billions. But in order to maximize profits,
| that is not good because it is better to throttle supply.
| selectodude wrote:
| Somebody should let Intel know.
| scrubs wrote:
| "It's hard to get too offended by them shirking the consumer"
|
| BS! Nvidia isn't entitled. I'm not obligated. Customer always
| has final say.
|
| The problem is a lot of customers can't or don't stand their
| ground. And the other side knows that.
|
| Maybe you're a well trained "customer" by Nvidia just like
| Basil Fawlty was well trained by his wife ...
|
| Stop excusing bs.
| msgodel wrote:
| I was under the impression that a ton of their sales growth
| last quarter was actually from consumers. DC sales growth was
| way lower than I expected.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Because they won't sell you an in-demand high-end GPU for cheap?
| Well TS
| tiahura wrote:
| Not to mention that they are currently in stock at my local
| microcenter.
| another_kel wrote:
| I'm sorry but this framing is insane
|
| > So 7 years into ray traced real-time computer graphics and
| we're still nowhere near 4K gaming at 60 FPS, even at $1,999.
|
| The guy is complaining that a product can't live up to his
| standard, while dismissing barely noticeable proposed trade off
| that can make it possible because it's <<fake>>.
| jdprgm wrote:
| The 4090 was released coming up on 3 years and is currently going
| for about 25% over launch msrp USED. Buying gpu's is literally an
| appreciating asset. It is complete insanity and an infuriating
| situation for an average consumer.
|
| I honestly don't know why nvidia didn't just suspend their
| consumer line entirely. It's clearly no longer a significant
| revenue source and they have thoroughly destroyed consumer
| goodwill over the past 5 years.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| >I honestly don't know why nvidia didn't just suspend their
| consumer line entirely.
|
| It's ~$12 billion a year with a high gross margin by the
| standards of every other hardware company. They want to make
| sure neither AMD nor Intel get that revenue they can invest
| into funding their own AI/ML efforts.
| oilkillsbirds wrote:
| Nobody's going to read this, but this article and sentiment is
| utter anti-corporate bullshit, and the vastly congruent responses
| show that none of you have watched the historical development of
| GPGPU, or do any serious work on GPUs, or keep up with the open
| work of nvidia researchers.
|
| The spoiled gamer mentality is getting old for those of us that
| actually work daily in GPGPU across industries, develop with RTX
| kit, do AI research, etc.
|
| Yes they've had some marketing and technical flubs as any giant
| publically traded company will have, but their balance of
| research-driven development alongside corporate profit
| necessities is unmatched.
| oilkillsbirds wrote:
| And no I don't work for nvidia. I've just been in the industry
| long enough to watch the immense contribution nvidia has made
| to every. single. field. The work of their researchers is
| astounding, it's clear to anyone that's honestly worked in this
| field long enough. It's insane to hate on them.
| grg0 wrote:
| Their contribution to various fields and the fact that they
| treat the average consumer like shit nowadays are not
| mutually exclusive.
|
| Also, nobody ever said they hate their researchers.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Maybe the average consumer doesn't agree they are being
| treated like shit? Steam top 10 GPU list is almost all
| NVidia. Happy customers or duped suckers? I've seen the
| later sentiment a lot over the years and discounting
| consumer's preferences never seems to lead to correct
| prediction of outcomes..
| detaro wrote:
| Or maybe the average consumer bought them while still
| being unhappy about the overall situation?
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| It pains me to be on the side of "gamers" but I would rather
| support spoiled gamers than modern LLM bros.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Oh man, you haven't gotten into their AI benchmark bullshittery.
| There's factors of 4x on their numbers that are basically
| invented whole cloth by switching units.
| benreesman wrote:
| The thing is, company culture is a real thing. And some cultures
| are invasive/contagious like kudzu both internally to the company
| and into adjacent companies that they get comped against. The
| people get to thinking a certain way, they move around between
| adjacent companies at far higher rates than to more distant parts
| of their field, the executives start sitting on one another's
| boards, before you know it a whole segment is enshittified, and
| customers feel like captives in an exploitation machine instead
| of parties to a mutually beneficial transaction in which trade
| increases the wealth of all.
|
| And you can build mythologies around falsehoods to further
| reinforce it: "I have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder
| value." No buddy, you have some very specific restrictions on
| your ability to sell the company to your cousin (ha!) for a
| handful of glass beads. You have a legal obligation to bin your
| wafers the way it says on your own box, but that doesn't seem to
| bother you.
|
| These days I get a machine like the excellent ASUS Proart P16
| (grab one of those before they're all gone if you can) with a
| little 4060 or 4070 in it that can boot up Pytorch and make sure
| the model will run forwards and backwards at a contrived size,
| and then go rent a GB200 or whatever from Latitude or someone
| (seriously check out Latitude, they're great), or maybe one of
| those wildly competitive L40 series fly machines (fly whips the
| llama's ass like nothing since Winamp, check them out too). The
| GMTek EVO-X1 is a pretty capable little ROCm inference machine
| for under 1000, its big brother is nipping at the heels of a DGX
| Spark under 2k. There is good stuff out there but its all from
| non-incumbent angles.
|
| I don't game anymore but if I did I would be paying a lot of
| attention to ARC, I've heard great things.
|
| Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs for more than Latitude
| charges for 5Ghz EPYC. Fuck NVIDIA gaming retail rat race, its an
| electrical as well as moral hazard in 2025.
|
| It's a shame we all have to be tricky to get what used to be a
| halfway fair deal 5-10 years ago (and 20 years ago they passed a
| HUGE part of the scaling bonanza down to the consumer), but its
| possible to compute well in 2025.
| glitchc wrote:
| Nice advertorial. I hope you got paid for all of those plugs.
| benreesman wrote:
| I wish! People don't care what I think enough to monetize it.
|
| But I do spend a lot of effort finding good deals on modern
| ass compute. This is the shit I use to get a lot of
| performance on a budget.
|
| Will people pay you to post on HN? How do I sign up?
| 827a wrote:
| > Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs
|
| Dude, no one talks about this and it drives me up the wall. The
| only way to guarantee modern CPUs from any cloud provider is to
| explicitly provision really new instance types. If you use any
| higher-level abstracted services (Fargate, Cloud Run, Lambda,
| whatever) you get salvation army second-hand CPUs from 15 years
| ago, you're billed by the second so the slower, older CPUs
| screw you over there, and you pay a 30%+ premium over the
| lower-level instances because its a "managed service". Its
| insane and extremely sad that so many customers put up with it.
| benreesman wrote:
| Bare metal is priced like it always was but is mad convenient
| now. latitude.sh is my favorite, but there are a bunch of
| providers that are maybe a little less polished.
|
| It's also way faster to deploy and easier to operate now. And
| mad global, I've needed to do it all over the world (a lot of
| places the shit works flawlessly and you can get Ryzen SKUs
| for nothing).
|
| Protip: burn a partition of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS which is the
| default on everything and use that as "premium IPMI", even if
| you run Ubuntu. you can always boot into a known perfect
| thing with all the tools to tweak whatever. If I have to even
| restart on I just image it, faster than launching a VM on
| EC2.
| sonicvrooom wrote:
| it would be "just" capitalist to call these fuckers out for real,
| on the smallest level.
|
| you are safe.
| shmerl wrote:
| _> ... NVENC are pretty much indispensable_
|
| What's so special about NVENC that Vulkan video or VAAPI can't
| provide?
|
| _> AMD also has accelerated video transcoding tech but for some
| reason nobody seems to be willing to implement it into their
| products_
|
| OBS works with VAAPI fine. Looking forward to them adding Vulkan
| video as an option.
|
| Either way, as a Linux gamer I haven't touched Nvidia in years.
| AMD is a way better experience.
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if people getting this salty over "fake"
| frames actually realise every frame is fake even in native mode.
| Neither is more "real" than the other, it's just different.
| strictnein wrote:
| This really makes no sense:
|
| > This in turn sparked rumors about NVIDIA purposefully keeping
| stock low to make it look like the cards are in high demand to
| drive prices. And sure enough, on secondary markets, the cards go
| way above MSRP
|
| Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP,
| but they get almost all the hate for it. Why would they set
| themselves up for that?
|
| Scalpers are a retail wide problem. Acting like Nvidia has the
| insight or ability to prevent them is just silly. People may not
| believe this, but retailers hate it as well and spend millions of
| dollars trying to combat it. They would have sold the product
| either way, but scalping results in the retailer's customers
| being mad and becoming some other company's customers, which are
| both major negatives.
| kbolino wrote:
| Scalping and MSRP-baiting have been around for far too many
| years for nVidia to claim innocence. The death of EVGA's GPU
| line also revealed that nVidia holds most of the cards in the
| relationship with its "partners". Sure, Micro Center and Amazon
| can only do so much, and nVidia isn't a retailer, but they know
| what's going on and their behavior shows that they actually
| like this situation.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah wait, what happened with EVGA? (guess I can search it
| up, of course) I was browsing gaming PC hardware recently and
| noticed none of the GPUs were from EVGA .. I used to buy
| their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in
| my experience)... :\
| theshackleford wrote:
| In 2022 claiming a lack of respect from Nvidia, low
| margins, and Nvidia's control over partners as just a few
| of the reasons, EVGA ended its partnership with Nvidia and
| ceased manufacturing Nvidia GPUs.
|
| > I used to buy their cards because they had such a good
| warranty policy (in my experience)... :\
|
| It's so wild to hear this as in my country, they were not
| considered anything special over any other third party
| retailer as we have strong consumer protection laws which
| means its all much of a muchness.
| kbolino wrote:
| The big bombshell IMO is that, according to EVGA at
| least, nVidia just comes up with the MSRP for each card
| all on its own, and doesn't even tell its partners what
| that number will be before announcing it to the public. I
| elaborate on this a bit more in a response to a sibling
| comment.
| izacus wrote:
| EVGA was angry because nVidia wouldn't pay them for
| attempts at scalping which failed.
| kbolino wrote:
| I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give
| the benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing
| scalping with MSRP-baiting.
|
| It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or
| even make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and
| develop the IP cores, and they contract with TSMC and
| others to make the chips, and they do make _limited runs_
| of "Founders Edition" cards, but most cards that are
| available to consumers undergo final assembly and retail
| boxing according to the specs of the partner -- ASUS,
| GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc.
|
| MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP
| without consulting any of its partners and then those
| partners go and assemble the graphics cards and have to
| charge more than that to make a reasonable profit. This
| has been going on for many GPU generations now, but it's
| not scalping. We can question why this "partnership"
| model even exists in the first place, since these
| middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their
| competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand
| here and thus the lion's share of the blame.
|
| Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the
| industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices,
| causing a supply shortage, so that they can resell the
| cards at higher prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct
| control over this (though I wouldn't be too surprised if
| it came out that there was some insider involvement),
| they also never do very much to address it either.
| Getting all the hate for this without directly reaping
| the monetary benefit sounds irrational at first, but
| artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are real
| business tactics.
| izacus wrote:
| Then you didn't follow the situation, since majority of
| EVGA anger was because nVidia wouldn't buy back their
| chips after EVGA failed to sell cards at hugely inflated
| price point.
|
| Then they tried to weaponize PR to beat nVidia into
| buying back their unsold cores they thought they'll
| massively profit off with inflated crypto hype prices.
| kbolino wrote:
| Ok, this seems to be based entirely on speculation. It
| could very well be accurate but there's no statements I
| can find from either nVidia or EVGA corroborating it.
| Since it's done by the manufacturer themselves, it's more
| like gouging rather than scalping.
|
| But more to the point, there's still a trail of blame
| going back to nVidia here. If EVGA could buy the cores at
| an inflated price, then nVidia should have raised its
| advertised MSRP to match. The reason I call it MSRP-
| baiting is not because I care about EVGA or any of these
| other rent-seekers, it's because it's a calculated lie
| weaponized against the consumer.
|
| As I kind of implied already, it's probably for the best
| if this "partner" arrangement ends. There's no good
| reason nVidia can't sell all of its desktop GPUs directly
| to the consumer. EVGA may have bet big and lost from
| their own folly, but everybody else was in on it too
| (except video gamers, who got shafted).
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| NVIDIA doesn't make a lot of finished cards for the same
| reason Intel doesn't make a lot of motherboards,
| presumably.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| > Scalpers are a retail wide problem. Acting like Nvidia has
| the insight or ability to prevent them is just silly.
|
| Oh trust me, they can combat it. The easiest way, which is what
| Nintendo often does for the launch of its consoles, is produce
| an enormous amount of units before launch. The steady supply to
| retailers, absolutely destroys folks ability to scalp. Yes a
| few units will be scalped, but most scalpers will be underwater
| if there is a constant resupply. I know this because I used to
| scalp consoles during my teens and early twenties, and
| Nintendo's consoles were the least profitable and most
| problematic because they really try to supply the market. The
| same with iPhones, yeah you might have to wait a month after
| launch to find one if you don't pre-order but you can get one.
|
| It's widely reported that most retailers had maybe tens of
| cards per store, or a few hundred nationally, for the 5090s
| launch. This immediately creates a giant spike in demand, and
| drove prices up along with the incentive for scalpers. The
| manufacturing partners immediately saw what (some) people were
| willing to pay (to the scalpers) and jacked up prices so they
| could get their cut. It is still so bad in the case of the 5090
| that MSRP prices from AIBs skyrocketed 30%-50%. PNY had cards
| at the original $1999.99 MSRP and now those same cards can't be
| found for less than $2,999.99.
|
| By contrast look at how AMD launched it's 9000 series of GPUS--
| each MicroCenter reportedly had hundreds on hand (and it sure
| looked like by pictures floating around). Folks were just
| walking in until noon and still able to get a GPU on launch
| day. Multiple restocks happened across many retailers
| immediately after launch. Are there still some inflated prices
| in the 9000 series GPUs? Yes, but we're not talking a 50%
| increase. Having some high priced AIBs has always occurred but
| what Nvidia has done by intentionally under supplying the
| market is awful.
|
| I personally have been trying to buy a 5090 FE since launch. I
| have been awake attempting to add to cart for every drop on BB
| but haven't been successful. I refuse to pay the inflated MSRP
| for cards that haven't been been that well reviewed. My 3090 is
| fine... At this point, I'm so frustrated by NVidia I'll likely
| just piss off for this generation and hope AMD comes out with
| something that has 32GB+ of VRAM at a somewhat reasonable
| price.
| pshirshov wrote:
| W7900 has 48 Gb and is reasonably priced.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| It' $4.2k on Newegg; I wouldn't necessarily call it
| reasonably priced, even compared to NVidia.
|
| If we're looking at the ultra high end, you can pay double
| that and get an RTX 6000 Pro with double the VRAM (96GB vs
| 48GB), double the memory bandwidth (1792 GB/s vs 864 GB/s)
| and much much better software support. Or you could get an
| RTX 5000 Pro with the same VRAM, better memory bandwidth
| (1344 GB/s vs 864 GB/s) at similar ~$4.5k USD from what I
| can see (only a little more expensive than AMD).
|
| Why the hell would I ever buy AMD in this situation? They
| don't really give you anything extra over NVidia, while
| having similar prices (usually only marginally cheaper) and
| much, much worse software support. Their strategy was
| always "slightly worse experience than NVidia, but $50
| cheaper and with much worse software support"; it's no
| wonder they only have less than 10% GPU market share.
| ksec wrote:
| >Oh trust me, they can combat it.
|
| As has been explained by others. They cant. Look at the tech
| which is used by Switch 2 and then look at the tech by Nvidia
| 50 series.
|
| And Nintendo didn't destroy scalpers, they are still in many
| market not meeting demand despite "is produce an enormous
| amount of units before launch".
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| If you put even a modicum of effort into trying to acquire
| a Switch 2 you can. I've had multiple instances to do so,
| and I don't even have interest in it yet. Nintendo even
| sent me an email giving me a 3 day window to buy one. Yes,
| it will require a bit of effort and patience but it's
| absolutely possible. If you decide you want one
| "immediately" yeah you probably are going to be S.O.L. but
| it has literally been out a month as of today. I'd bet by
| mid August it's pretty darn easy.
|
| Nintendo has already shipped over 5 million of them. That's
| an insane amount of supply for its first month.
|
| Also, Nvidia could have released the 50-series after
| building up inventory. Instead, they did the opposite
| trickling supply into the market to create scarcity and
| drive up prices. They have no real competition right now
| especially in the high end. There was no reason to have a
| "paper launch" except to drive up prices for consumers and
| margins for their board partners. Process node had zero to
| do with what has transpired.
| cherioo wrote:
| Switch 2 inventory was amazing, but how did RX 9070 inventory
| remotely sufficient? News at the time were all about how
| limited its availability
| https://www.tweaktown.com/news/103716/amd-rx-9070-xt-
| stock-a...
|
| Not to mention it's nowhere to be found on Steam Hardware
| Survey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
| Rapzid wrote:
| The 9070 XT stock situation went about like this; I bought
| a 5070 Ti instead.
| lmm wrote:
| > Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP
|
| How would we know if they were?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Theoretically they'd need to make a public filing about their
| revenue and disclose this income stream. More to your point,
| I think it's pretty easy to obscure this under something
| else. My understanding is Microsoft has somehow always
| avoided disclosing the actual revenue from the Xbox for
| example.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| Think of it this way, the only reason 40 series and above are
| priced like they are is because they saw how willing people
| were to pay dueing 30 series scalper days. This over
| representation by the rich is training other customers that
| nvidia gpus are worth that much so when they increase it again
| people won't feel offended.
| Mars008 wrote:
| Is AMD doing the same? From another post in this thread:
|
| > Nowadays, $650 might get you a mid-range RX 9070 XT if you
| miraculously find one near MSRP.
|
| If yes then it's industry wide phenomena.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Did you just casually forget about the AI craze we are in the
| midst of? Nvidia still selling GPUs for gamers at all is a
| surprise to be honest.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above
| MSRP, but they get almost all the hate for it. Why would they
| set themselves up for that?
|
| If you believe their public statements, because they didn't
| want to build out additional capacity and then have a huge
| excess supply of cards when demand suddenly dried up.
|
| In other words, the charge of "purposefully keeping stock low"
| is something NVidia admitted to; there was just no theory of
| how they'd benefit from it in the present.
| rf15 wrote:
| which card's demand suddenly dried up? Can we buy their
| excess stock already? please?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I didn't say that happened. I said that was why NVidia said
| they didn't want to ramp up production. They didn't want to
| end up overextended.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't even think Nvidia _could_ overextend if they
| wanted to. They 're buying low-margin, high demand TSMC
| wafers to chop into _enormous_ GPU tiles or _even larger_
| datacenter products. These aren 't smartphone chipsets,
| they're enormous, high-power desktop GPUs.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Nvidia shareholders make money when share price rises.
| Perceived extreme demand raises share prices
| solatic wrote:
| Scalpers are only a retail-wide problem if (a) factories could
| produce more, but they calculated demand wrong, or (b)
| factories can't produce more, they calculated demand wrong, and
| under-priced MSRP relative to what the market is actually
| willing to pay, thus letting scalpers capture more of the
| profits.
|
| Either way, scalping is not a problem that persists for
| multiple years unless it's intentional corporate strategy.
| Either factories ramp up production capacity to ensure there is
| enough supply for launch, or MSRP rises much faster than
| inflation. Getting demand planning wrong year after year after
| year smells like incompetence leaving money on the table.
|
| The argument that scalping is better for NVDA is coming from
| the fact that consumer GPUs no longer make a meaningful
| difference to the bottom line. Factory capacity is better
| reserved for even more profitable data center GPUs. The
| consumer GPU market exists not to increase NVDA profits
| directly, but as a marketing / "halo" effect that promotes
| decision makers sticking with NVDA data center chips. That
| results in a completely different strategy where out-of-stock
| is a feature, not a bug, and where product reputation is more
| important than actual product performance, hence the coercion
| on review media.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I disagree with some of the article's points - primarily, that
| nVidia's drivers were _ever_ "good" - but the gist I agree with.
|
| I have a 4070 Ti right now. I use it for inference and VR gaming
| on a Pimax Crystal (2880x2880x2). In War Thunder I get ~60 FPS.
| I'd love to be able to upgrade to a card with at least 16GB of
| VRAM and better graphics performance... but as far as I can tell,
| such a card does not exist at any price.
| scrubs wrote:
| Another perspective: Nvidia customer support on their mellanox
| purchase ...is total crap. It's the worst of corporate America
| ... paper pushing beurceatric guys who slow roll stuff ...
| getting to a smart person behind the customer reps requires one
| to be an ape in a bad mood 5x ... I think they're so used to that
| now that unless you go crazy mode their take is ... well I guess
| he wasn't serious about his ask and he dropped it.
|
| Here's another nvdia/mellanox bs problem: many mlx nic cards are
| finalized or post assembled say by hp. So if you have a hp
| "mellanox" nic nvidia washes their hands of anything detailed.
| It's not ours; hp could have done anything to it what do we know?
| So one phones hp ... and they have no clue either because it's
| really not their IP or their drivers.
|
| It's a total cluster bleep and more and more why corporate
| america sucks
| grg0 wrote:
| Corporate America actually resembles the state of government a
| lot too. Deceptive marketing, inflated prices that leave the
| average Joe behind, and low quality products on top of all
| that.
| scrubs wrote:
| In the 1980s maybe a course correction was needed to help
| capitalism. But it's over corrected by 30%. I'm not knocking
| corporate america or capitalism in absolute terms. I am
| saying customers have lost power... whether it's phone trees,
| right to fix, a lack of accountability (2008 housing crisis),
| the ability to play endless accounting games to pay lower
| taxes plus all the more mundane things ... it's gotten out of
| whack.
| ksec wrote:
| I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X
| support are great.
| scrubs wrote:
| >I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X
| support are great.
|
| I'll have to take your word on that.
|
| And if I take your word: ergo not Connect-X support sucks
|
| So that's sucks yet again on the table ... for what the 3rd
| time? Nvidia sucks.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| The real issue here is actually harebrained youtubers stirring up
| drama for views. That's 80% of the problem. And their viewers
| (and readers, for that which makes it into print) eat it up.
|
| Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using
| 3rd party cables incorrectly, posting to social media, and
| youtubers jumping on the trend for likes.
|
| These are 99% user error issues drummed up by non-professionals
| (and, in some cases, people paid by 3rd party vendors to protect
| _those_ vendors ' reputation).
|
| And the complaints about transient performances issues with
| drivers, drummed up into apocalyptics scenarios, again, by
| youtubers, who are putting this stuff under a microscope for
| views, are universal across every single hardware and software
| product. Everything.
|
| Claiming "DLSS is snakeoil", and similar things are just an
| expression of the complete lack of understanding of the people
| involved in these pot-stirring contests. Like... the technique
| obviously couldn't magically multiply the ability of hardware to
| generate frames using the primary method. It is exactly as
| advertised. It uses machine learning to approximate it. And it's
| some fantastic technology, that is now ubiquitous across the
| industry. Support and quality will increase over time, _just like
| every _quality_ hardware product does_ during its early lifespan.
|
| It's all so stupid and rooted in greed by those seeking ad-money,
| and those lacking in basic sense or experience in what they're
| talking about and doing. Embarrassing for the author to so
| publicly admit to eating up social media whinging.
| grg0 wrote:
| If you've ever watched a GN or LTT video, they never claimed
| that DLSS is snakeoil. They specifically call out the pros of
| the technology, but also point out that Nvidia lies, very
| literally, about its performance claims in marketing material.
| Both statements are true and not mutually exclusive. I think
| people like in this post get worked up about the false
| marketing and develop (understandably) a negative view of the
| technology as a whole.
|
| > Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience,
| using 3rd party cables incorrectly
|
| This is not true. Even GN reproduced the melting of the _first-
| party_ cable.
|
| Also, why shouldn't you be able to use third-party cables? Fuck
| DRM too.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| I'm referring to the section header in this article.
| Youtubers are not a truly hegemonic group, but there's a set
| of ideas and narratives that pervade the group as a whole
| that different subsets buy into, and push, and that's one
| that exists in the overall sphere of people who discuss the
| use of hardware for gaming.
| grg0 wrote:
| Well, I can't speak for all youtubers, but I do watch most
| GN and LTT videos and the complaints are legitimate, nor
| are they random jabronis yolo'ing hardware installations.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| As far as I know, neither of them have had a card
| unintentionally light on fire.
|
| The whole thing started with Derbauer going to bat for a
| cable from some 3rd party vendor that he'd admitted he'd
| already plugged in and out of various cards something
| like 50 times.
|
| The actual instances that youtubers report on are all
| reddit posters and other random social media users who
| would clearly be better off getting a professional
| installation. The huge popularity for enthusiast consumer
| hardware, due to the social media hype cycle, has brought
| a huge number of naive enthusiasts into the arena. And
| they're getting burned by doing hardware projects on
| their own. It's entirely unsurprising, given what happens
| in all other realms of amateur hardware projects.
|
| Most of those who are whinging about their issues are
| false positive user errors. The actual failure rates (and
| there are device failures) are far lower, and that's what
| warrantys are for.
| grg0 wrote:
| I'm sure the failure rates are blown out of proportion, I
| agree with that.
|
| But the fact of the matter is that Nvidia has shifted
| from a consumer business to b2b, and they don't even give
| a shit about pretending they care anymore. People take
| beef with that, understandably, and when you couple that
| with the false marketing, the lack of inventory, the
| occasional hardware failure, missing ROPs, insane prices
| that nobody can afford and all the other shit that's
| wrong with these GPUs, then this is the end result.
| Rapzid wrote:
| GN were the OG "fake framers" going back to their constant
| casting shade on DLSS, ignoring it on their reviews, and also
| crapping on RT.
|
| AI upscaling, AI denoising, and RT were clearly the future even
| 6 years ago. CDPR and the rest of the industry knew it, but
| outlets like GN pushed a narrative(borderline conspiracy) the
| developers were somehow out of touch and didn't know what they
| were talking about?
|
| There is a contingent of gamers who play competitive FPS. Most
| of which are, like in all casual competitive hobbies, not very
| good. But they ate up the 240hz rasterization be-all meat GN
| was feeding them. Then they think they are the majority and
| speak for all gamers(as every loud minority on the internet
| does).
|
| Fast forward 6 years and NVidia is crushing the Steam top 10
| GPU list, AI rendering techniques are becoming ubiquitous, and
| RT is slowly edging out rasterization.
|
| Now that the data is clear the narrative is most consumers are
| "suckers" for purchasing NVidia, Nintendo, and etc. And the
| content creator economy will be there to tell them they are
| right.
|
| Edit: I believe too some of these outlets had chips on their
| shoulder regarding NVidia going way back. So AMDs poor RT
| performance and lack of any competitive answer the the DLSS
| suite for YEARS had them lying to themselves about where the
| industry was headed. Essentially they were running interference
| for AMD. Now that FSR4 is finally here it's like AI upscaling
| is finally ok.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| All symptoms of being number one.
|
| Customers don't matter, the company matters.
|
| Competition sorts out such attitude quick smart but AMD never
| misses a chance to copy Nvidias strategy in any way and intel is
| well behind.
|
| So for now, you'll eat what Jensen feeds you.
| voxleone wrote:
| It's reasonable to argue that NVIDIA has a de facto monopoly in
| the field of GPU-accelerated compute, especially due to CUDA
| (Compute Unified Device Architecture). While not a legal monopoly
| in the strict antitrust sense (yet), in practice, NVIDIA's
| control over the GPU compute ecosystem -- particularly in AI,
| HPC, and increasingly in professional content creation -- is
| extraordinarily dominant.
| arcanus wrote:
| > NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem --
| particularly in AI, HPC
|
| The two largest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD.
| I don't think it's accurate to say Nvidia has monopoly on HPC
|
| Source: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/
| infocollector wrote:
| It's misleading to cite two government-funded supercomputers
| as evidence that NVIDIA lacks monopoly power in HPC and AI:
|
| - Government-funded outliers don't disprove monopoly
| behavior. The two AMD-powered systems on the TOP500 list--
| both U.S. government funded--are exceptions driven by
| procurement constraints, not market dynamics. NVIDIA's
| pricing is often prohibitive, and its dominance gives it the
| power to walk away from bids that don't meet its margins.
| That's not competition--it's monopoly leverage.
|
| - Market power isn't disproven by isolated wins. Monopoly
| status isn't defined by having every win, but by the lack of
| viable alternatives in most of the market. In commercial AI,
| research, and enterprise HPC workloads, NVIDIA owns an
| overwhelming share--often >90%. That kind of dominance is
| monopoly-level control.
|
| - AMD's affordability is a symptom, not a sign of strength.
| AMD's lower pricing reflects its underdog status in a market
| it struggles to compete in--largely because NVIDIA has
| cornered not just the hardware but the entire CUDA software
| stack, developer ecosystem, and AI model compatibility. You
| don't need 100% market share to be a monopoly--you need
| control. NVIDIA has it.
|
| In short: pointing to a couple of symbolic exceptions doesn't
| change the fact that NVIDIA's grip on the GPU compute stack--
| from software to hardware to developer mindshare--is
| monopolistic in practice.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Strict antitrust sense don't look at actual monopoly to
| trigger, but just if you use your standing in the market to
| gain unjust advantages. Which does not require a monopoly
| situation but just a strong standing used wrong (like abusing
| vertical integration). So Standard Oil, to take a famous
| example, never had more than a 30% market share.
|
| Breaking a monopoly can be a solution to that, however. But
| having a large part of a market by itself doesn't trigger anti
| trust legislation.
| hank808 wrote:
| Thanks ChatGPT!
| rkagerer wrote:
| I am a volunteer firefighter and hold a degree in electrical
| engineering. The shenanigans with their shunt resistors, and
| ensuing melting cables, is in my view criminal. Any engineer
| worth their salt would recognize pushing 600W through a bunch of
| small cables with no contingency if some of them have failed is
| just asking for trouble. These assholes are going to set
| someone's house on fire.
|
| I hope they get hit with a class action lawsuit and are forced to
| recall and properly fix these products before anyone dies as a
| result of their shoddy engineering.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Apparently somebody did sue a couple years back. Anyone know
| what happened with the Lucas Genova vs. nVidia lawsuit?
|
| EDIT: Plantiff dismissed it. Guessing they settled. Here are
| the court documents (alternately, shakna's links below include
| unredacted copies):
|
| https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora...
|
| https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora...
|
| A GamersNexus article investigating the matter:
| https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/12vhpwr-dumpster-fire-investiga...
|
| And a video referenced in the original post, describing how the
| design changed from one that proactively managed current
| balancing, to simply bundling all the connections together and
| hoping for the best: https://youtu.be/kb5YzMoVQyw
| shakna wrote:
| > NOTICE of Voluntary Dismissal With Prejudice by Lucas
| Genova (Deckant, Neal) (Filed on 3/10/2023) (Entered:
| 03/10/2023)
|
| Sounds like it was settled out of court.
|
| [0] https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Dis
| tri...
| middle-aged-man wrote:
| Do those mention failing to follow Underwriters Laboratory
| requirements?
|
| I'm curious whether the 5090 package was not following UL
| requirements.
|
| Would that make them even more liable?
|
| Part of me believes that the blame here is probably on the
| manufacturers and that this isn't a problem with Nvidia
| corporate.
| autobodie wrote:
| GamersNexus ftw as always
| ryao wrote:
| Has anyone made 12VHPWR cables that replace the 12 little wires
| with 2 large gauge wires yet? That would prevent the wires from
| becoming unbalanced, which should preempt the melting connector
| problem.
|
| As a bonus, if the gauge is large enough, the cable would
| actually cool the connectors, although that should not be
| necessary since the failure appears to be caused by overloaded
| wires dumping heat into the connector as they overheat.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Or 12 strands in a single sheath so it's not overly rigid.
| alright2565 wrote:
| Might help a little bit, by heatsinking the contacts better,
| but the problem is the contact resistance, not the wire
| resistance. The connector itself dangerously heats up.
|
| Or at least I think so? Was that a different 12VHPWR scandal?
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Contact resistance is a problem.
|
| Another problem is when the connector is angled, several of
| the pins may not make contact, shoving all the power
| through as few as one wire. A common bus would help this
| but the contact resistance in this case is still bad.
| ryao wrote:
| A common bus that is not also overheating would cool the
| overheating contact(s).
| alright2565 wrote:
| It would help, but my intuition is that the thin steel of
| the contact would not move the heat fast enough to make a
| significant difference. Only way to really know is to
| test it.
| ryao wrote:
| I thought that the contact resistance caused the unbalanced
| wires, which then overheat alongside the connector, giving
| the connector's heat nowhere to go.
| chris11 wrote:
| I think it's both contact and wire resistance.
|
| It is technically possible to solder a new connector on.
| LTT did that in a video.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzwrLLg1RR4
| ryao wrote:
| Uneven abnormal contact resistance is what causes the
| wires to become unbalanced, and then the remaining ones
| whose contacts have low resistance have huge currents
| pushed through them, causing them to overheat due to wire
| resistance. I am not sure if it is possible to have
| perfect contact resistance in all systems.
| AzN1337c0d3r wrote:
| They don't just specify 12 smaller cables for nothing if 2
| larger ones will do. There are concerns here with mechanical
| compatibility (12 wires have smaller allowable bend radius
| than 2 larger ones with the same ampacity).
| kuschku wrote:
| One option is to use two very wide, thin insulated copper
| sheets as cable. Still has a good bend radius in one
| dimension, but is able to sink a _lot_ of power.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Also, like, I kind of want to play with these things, but also
| I'm not sure I want a computer that uses 500W+ in my house, let
| alone just a GPU.
|
| I might actually be happy to buy one of these things, at the
| inflated price, and run it at half voltage or something... but
| I can't tell if that is going to fix these concerns or they're
| just bad cards.
| wasabinator wrote:
| It's not the voltage, it's the current you'd want to halve.
| The wire gauge required to carry power is dependent on the
| current load. It's why when i first saw these new connectors
| and the loads they were being tasked with it was a wtf moment
| for me. Better to just avoid them in the first place though.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| It's crazy, you don't even need to know about electricity
| after you see a thermal camera on them operating at full
| load. I'm surprised they can be sold to the general public,
| the reports of cables melting plus the high temps should be
| enough to force a recall.
| izacus wrote:
| With 5080 using 300W, talking about 500W is a bit of an
| exaggeration, isn't it?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I'm talking about the 5090 which is 575W.
| izacus wrote:
| But why are you talking about it? It's a hugely niche
| hardware which is a tiny % of nVidia cards out there.
| It's deliberately outsized and you wouldn't put it in 99%
| of gaming PCs.
|
| And yet you speak of it like it's a representative model.
| Do you also use a Hummer EV to measure all EVs?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I am interested in buying hardware that can run the full
| DeepSeek R1 locally. I don't think it's a particularly
| good idea, but I've contemplated an array of 5090s.
|
| If I were interested in using an EV to haul particularly
| heavy loads, I might be interested in the Hummer EV and
| have similar questions that might sound ridiculous.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| To emphasize this point, go outside at noon in the summer and
| mark off a square meter on the sidewalk. That square of
| concrete is receiving about 1000w from the sun.
|
| Now imagine a magnifying glass that big (or more practically a
| fresnel lens) concentrating all that light into one square
| inch. That's a lot of power. When copper connections don't work
| perfectly they have nonzero resistance, and the current running
| through them turns into heat by I^2R.
| johnklos wrote:
| I'm so happy to see someone calling NVIDIA out for their
| bullshit. The current state of GPU programming sucks, and that's
| just an example of the problems with the GPU market today.
|
| The lack of open source anything for GPU programming makes me
| want to throw my hands up and just do Apple. It feels much more
| open than pretending that there's anything open about CUDA on
| Linux.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The competing open standard is FreeSync, spearheaded by AMD.
| Since 2019, NVIDIA also supports FreeSync, but under their
| "G-Sync Compatible" branding. Personally, I wouldn't bother with
| G-Sync when a competing, open standard exists and differences are
| negligible[4].
|
| Open is good, but the open standard itself is not enough. You
| need some kind of testing/certification, which is built in to the
| G-Sync process. AMD does have a FreeSync certification program
| now which is good.
|
| If you rely on just the standard, some manufacturers get really
| lazy. One of my screens technically supports FreeSync but I
| turned it off day one because it has a narrow range and flickers
| very badly.
| jes5199 wrote:
| with Intel also shitting the bed, it seems like AMD is poised to
| pick up "traditional computing" while everybody else runs off to
| chase the new gold rush. Presumably there's still _some_ money in
| desktops and gaming rigs?
| fracus wrote:
| This was an efficient, well written, TKO.
| anonymars wrote:
| Agreed. An excellent summary of a lot of missteps that have
| been building for a while. I had watched that article on the
| power connector/ shunt resistors and was dumbfounded at the
| seemingly rank-amateurish design. And although I don't have a
| 5000 series GPU I have been astonished at how awful the drivers
| have been for the better part of a year.
|
| As someone who filed the AMD/ATi ecosystems due to their quirky
| unreliability, Nvidia and Intel have really shit the bed these
| days (I also had the misfortune of "upgrading" to a 13th gen
| Intel processor just before we learned that they cook
| themselves)
|
| I do think DLSS supersampling is incredible but Lord almighty
| is it annoying that the frame generation is under the same
| umbrella because that is nowhere near the same, and the water
| is awful muddy since "DLSS" is often used without distinction
| ksec wrote:
| > _How is it that one can supply customers with enough stock on
| launch consistently for decades, and the other can't?_
|
| I guess the author is too young and didn't go through iPhone 2G
| to iPhone 6 era. Also worth remembering it wasn't too long ago
| Nvidia was sitting on nearly ONE full year of GPU stock unsold.
| That has completely changed the course of how Nvidia does supply
| chain management and forecast. Which unfortunately have a
| negative impact all the way to Series 50. I believe they have
| since changed and next Gen should be better prepared. But you can
| only do so much when AI demand is seemingly unlimited.
|
| > _The PC, as gaming platform, has long been held in high regards
| for its backwards compatibility. With the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA
| broke that going forward. PhysX....._
|
| Glide? What about all the Audio Drivers API before. As much as I
| wish everything is backward compatible. That is just not how the
| world works. Just like any old games you need some fiddling to
| get it work. And they even make the code available so people
| could actually do something rather then emulation or reverse
| engineering.
|
| > _That, to me, was a warning sign that maybe, just maybe, ray
| tracing was introduced prematurely and half-baked._
|
| Unfortunately that is not how it works. Do we want to go back to
| Pre-3DFx to today to see how many what we thought was great idea
| for 3D accelerator only to be replaced by better ideas or
| implementation? These idea were good on paper but didn't work
| well. We than learn from it and reiterate.
|
| > _Now they're doing an even more computationally expensive
| version of ray tracing: path tracing. So all the generational
| improvements we could've had are nullified again......_
|
| How about Path Tracing is simply a better technology? Game
| developers also dont have to use any of these tech. The article
| act as if Nvidia forces all game to use it. Gamers want better
| graphics quality, Artist and Graphics asset is already by far the
| most expensive item in gaming and it is still increasing. What
| hardware improvement is allowing those to be achieved at lower
| cost. ( To Game Developers )
|
| > _Never mind that frame generation introduces input lag that
| NVIDIA needs to counter-balance with their "Reflex" technology,_
|
| No. That is not _why_ "Reflex" tech was invented. Nvidia spend
| R&D on 1000 fps monitor as well and potentially sub 1ms frame
| monitor. They have always been latency sensitive.
|
| ------------------------------
|
| I have no idea how modern Gamers become what they are today. And
| this isn't the first time I have read it even on HN. You dont
| have to buy Nvidia. You have AMD and now Intel ( again ).
| Basically I can summarise one thing about it, Gamers want Nvidia
| 's best GPU for the lowest price possible. Or a price they think
| is acceptable without understanding the market dynamics and
| anything supply chain or manufacturing. They also want higher
| "generational" performance. Like 2x every 2 year. And if they
| dont get it, it is Nvidia's fault. Not TSMC, not Cadence, not
| Tokyo Electron, not Issac Newton or Law of Physic. But Nvidia.
|
| Nvidia's PR tactic isn't exactly new in the industry. Every
| single brand do something similar. Do I like it? No. But
| unfortunately that is how the game is played. And Apple is by far
| the worst offender.
|
| I do sympathise with the Cable issue though. And not the first
| time Nvidia has with thermal issues. But then again they are also
| the one who are constantly pushing the boundary forward. And
| AFAIK the issues isn't as bad as the series 40 but some YouTube
| seems to be making a bigger issue than most. Supply issues will
| be better but TSMC 3nm is fully booked . The only possible
| solution would be to have consumer GPU less capable of AI
| workload. Or to have AI GPU working with leading edge node and
| consumer always be a node lower to split the capacity problem. I
| would imagine that is part of the reason why TSMC is accelerating
| 3nm capacity increase on US soil. Nvidia is now also large enough
| and has enough cash to take on more risk.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| > And I hate that they're getting away with it, time and time
| again, for over seven years.
|
| Nvidia's been at this way longer than 7 years. They were cheating
| at benchmarks to control a narrative back in 2003.
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/05/23/1516220/futuremark-...
| 827a wrote:
| Here's something I don't understand: Why is it that when I go
| look at DigitalOcean's GPU Droplet options, they don't offer any
| Blackwell chips? [1] I thought Blackwell was supposed to be the
| game changing hyperchip that carried AI into the next generation,
| but the best many providers still offer are Hopper H100s? Where
| are all the Blackwell chips? Its been oodles of months.
|
| Apparently AWS has them available in the P6 instance type, but
| the only configuration they offer has 2TB of memory and costs...
| $113/hr [2]? Like, what is going on at Nvidia?
|
| Where the heck is Project Digits? Like, I'm developing this
| shadow opinion that Nvidia actually hasn't built anything new in
| three years, but they fill the void by talking about hypothetical
| newtech that no one can actually buy + things their customers
| have built with the actually good stuff they built three years
| ago. Like, consumers can never buy Blackwell because "oh
| Enterprises have bought them all up" then when Microsoft tries to
| buy any they say "Amazon bought them all up" and vice-versa.
| Something really fishy is going on over there. Time to short.
|
| [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/products/gpu-droplets
|
| [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
| hank808 wrote:
| Digits: July 22 it seems is the release date for the version
| with the Asus badge. https://videocardz.com/newz/asus-ascent-
| gx10-with-gb10-black...
| mcdeltat wrote:
| Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech
| hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less
| improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful.
| Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with
| diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and
| now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us)
| don't need it.
|
| It's staggering that we are throwing so many resources at
| marginal improvements for things like gaming, and I say that as
| someone whose main hobby used to be gaming. Ray tracing, path
| tracing, DLSS, etc at a price point of $3000 just for the GPU -
| who cares when a 2010 cell shaded game running on an upmarket
| toaster gave me the utmost joy? And the AI use cases don't
| impress me either - seems like all we do each generation is burn
| more power to shove more data through and pray for an improvement
| (collecting sweet $$$ in the meantime).
|
| Another commenter here said it well, there's just so much more
| you can do with your life than follow along with this drama.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I remember when it was a serious difference, like PS1-PS3 was
| absolutely miraculous and exciting to watch.
|
| It's also fun that no matter how fast the hardware seems to
| get, we seem to fill it up with shitty bloated software.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| IMO at some point in the history of software we lost track of
| hardware capabilities versus software end outcomes. Hardware
| improved many orders of magnitude but overall software
| quality/usefulness/efficiency did not (yes this is a hill I
| will die on). We've ended up with mostly garbage and an
| occasional legitimately brilliant use of transistors.
| philistine wrote:
| Your disillusionment is warranted, but I'll say that on the Mac
| side the grass has never been greener. The M chips are
| screamers year after year, the GPUs are getting ok, the ML
| cores are incredible and actually useful.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| Good point, we should commend genuinely novel efforts towards
| making baseline computation more efficient, like Apple has
| done as you say. Particularly in light of recent x86
| development which seems to be "shove as many cores as
| possible on a die and heat your apartment while your power
| supply combusts" (meanwhile the software gets less efficient
| by the day, but that's another thing altogether...). ANY DAY
| of the week I will take a compute platform that's no-bs no-
| bells-and-whistles simply more efficient without the
| manufacturer trying to blow smoke up our asses.
| seydor wrote:
| Our stock investments are going up so ...... What can we do
| other than shrug
| keyringlight wrote:
| What stands out to me is that it's not just the hardware side,
| software production to make use of it to realize the benefits
| offered doesn't seem to be running smoothly either, at least
| for gaming. I'm not sure nvidia really cares too much though as
| there's no market pressure on them where it's a weakness for
| them, if consumer GPUs disappeared tomorrow they'd be fine.
|
| A few months ago Jensen Huang said he sees quantum computing as
| the next big thing he wants nvidia to be a part of over the
| next 10-15 years (which seems like a similar timeline as GPU
| compute), so I don't think consumer GPUs are a priority for
| anyone. Gaming used to be the main objective with byproducts
| for professional usage, for the past few years that's reversed
| where gaming piggybacks on common aspects to compute.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Call it delusions or conspiracy theories, what ever, I don't
| care, but it seems to me that NVIDIA wants to vendor lock the
| whole industry
|
| If all game developers begin to rely on NVIDIA technology, the
| industry as a whole puts customers in a position where they are
| forced to give in
|
| The public's perception of RTX's softwarization (DLSS) and them
| coining the technical terms says it all
|
| They have a long term plan, and that plan is:
|
| - make all the money possible
|
| - destroy all competition
|
| - vendor lock the whole world
|
| When I see that, I can't help myself but to think something is
| fishy:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/WBwg6qQ.png
| yalok wrote:
| a friend of mine is a SW developer in Nvidia, working on their
| drivers. He was complaining lately that he is required to fix a
| few bugs in the drivers code for the new card (RTX?), while not
| provided with the actual hardware. His pleas to send him this HW
| were ignored, but the demand to fix by a deadline kept being
| pushed.
|
| He actually ended up buying older but somewhat similar used
| hardware with his personal money, to be able to do his work.
|
| Not even sure if he was eventually able to expense it, but
| wouldn't be surprised if not, knowing how big companies
| bureaucracy works...
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| > The RTX 4090 was massive, a real heccin chonker. It was so huge
| in fact, that it kicked off the trend of needing support brackets
| to keep the GPU from sagging and straining the PCIe slot.
|
| This isn't true. People were buying brackets with 10 series
| cards.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Consumer GPU feels like an "paper launch" for the past years
|
| that's like they purposely not selling because they allocated 80%
| of their production to enterprise only
|
| I just hope that new fabs operate early as possible because these
| price is insane
| amatecha wrote:
| Uhh, these 12VHPWR connectors seem like a serious fire risk. How
| are they not being recalled? I just got a 5060ti , now I'm
| wishing I went AMD instead.. what the hell :(
|
| Whoa, the stuff covered in the rest of the post is just as
| egregious. Wow! Maybe time to figure out which AMD models
| compares performance-wise and sell this thing, jeez.
| musebox35 wrote:
| With the rise of LLM training, Nvidia's main revenue stream
| switched to datacenter gpus (>10x gaming revenue). I wonder
| whether this have affected the quality of these consumer cards,
| including both their design and product processes:
|
| https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nvda/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
| reichstein wrote:
| Aks. "Every beef anyone has ever had with Nvidia in one outrage
| friendly article."
|
| If you want to hate on Nvidia, there'll be something for you in
| there.
|
| An entire section on 12vhpwr connectors, with no mention of
| 12V-2x6.
|
| A lot of "OMG Monopoly" and "why won't people buy AMD" without
| considering that maybe ... AMD cards are not considered by the
| general public to be as good _where it counts_. (Like benefit per
| Watt, aka heat.) Maybe it's all perception, but then AMD should
| work on that perception. If you want the cooler CPU/GPU,
| perception is that that's Intel/Nvidia. That's reason enough for
| me, and many others.
|
| Availability isn't great, I'll admit that, if you don't want to
| settle for a 5060.
| Sweepi wrote:
| Nvidia is full of shit, but this article is full of shit, too. A
| lot of human slop, some examples:
|
| - 12VHPWR is not at fault / the issue. As the article itself
| points out, the missing power balancing circuit is to blame. The
| 3090 Ti had bot 12VHPWR and the balancing power circuit and ran
| flawless.
|
| - Nvidia G-Sync: Total non-issue. G-Sync native is dead. Since
| 2023, ~1000 Freesync Monitors have been released, and 3(!!)
| G-Sync native Monitors.
|
| - The RTX 4000 series is not still expensive, it is again
| expensive. It was much cheaper a year before RTX 5000 release
|
| - Anti-Sag Brackets were a thing way before RTX 4000
| Kon5ole wrote:
| TSMC can only make about as many Nvidia chips as OpenAI and the
| other AI guys wants to buy. Nvidia releases gpus made from
| basically the shaving leftovers from the OpenAI products, which
| makes them limited in supply and expensive.
|
| So gamers have to pay much more and wait much longer than before,
| which they resent.
|
| Some youtubers make content that profit from the resentment so
| they play fast and loose with the fundamental reasons in order to
| make gamers even more resentful. Nvidia has "crazy prices" they
| say.
|
| But they're clearly not crazy. 2000 dollar gpus appear in
| quantities of 50+ from time to time at stores here but they sell
| out in minutes. Lowering the prices would be crazy.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| This is one reason, and another is that both Dennard scaling
| has stopped and GPUs hit a memory wall for DRAM. The only
| reason AI hardware gets the significant improvements is that
| they are using big matmuls and a lot of research has been in
| getting lower precision (now 4bit) training working (numerical
| precision stability was always a huge problem with backprop).
| Ologn wrote:
| Yes. In 2021, Nvidia was actually making more revenue from its
| home/consumer/gaming chips than from its data center chips. Now
| 90% of its revenue is from its data center hardware, and less
| than 10% of its revenue is from home gpus. The home gpus are an
| afterthought to them. They take up resources that can be
| devoted to data center.
|
| Also, in some sense there can be some fear 5090s could
| cannibalize the data center hardware in some aspects - my
| desktop has a 3060 and I have trained locally, run LLMs locally
| etc. It doesn't make business sense at this time for Nvidia to
| meet consumer demand.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Read this in good faith but I don't see how it's supposed to be
| Nvidia's fault?
|
| How could Nvidia realistically stop scalper bots?
| liendolucas wrote:
| I haven't read the whole article but a few things to remark:
|
| * The prices for Nvidia GPUs are insane. For that money you can
| have an extremely good PC with a good non Nvidia GPU.
|
| * The physical GPU sizes are massive, even letting the card rest
| on a horizontal motherboard looks like scary.
|
| * Nvidia has still issues with melting cables? I've heard about
| those some years ago and thought it was a solved problem.
|
| * Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall
| at some point, is just a matter of time.
|
| Looks as if Nvidia at the moment is only looking at the AI market
| (which as a personal belief has to burst at some point) and
| simply does not care the non GPU AI market at all.
|
| I remember many many years ago when I was a teenager and 3dfx was
| the dominant graphics card manufacturer that John Carmack
| profethically in a gaming computer magazine (the article was
| about Quake I) predicted that the future wasn't going to be 3dfx
| and Glide. Some years passed by and effectively 3dfx was gone.
|
| Perhaps is just the beginning of the same story that happened
| with 3dfx. I think AMD and Intel have a huge opportunity to
| balance the market and bring Nvidia down, both in the AI and
| gaming space.
|
| I have only heard excellent things about Intel's ARC GPUs in
| other HNs threads and if I need to build a new desktop PC from
| scratch there's no way to pay for the prices that Nvidia is
| pushing to the market, I'll definitely look at Intel or AMD.
| Havoc wrote:
| They're not full of shit - they're just doing what a for profit
| co in a dominant position does.
|
| In other news I hope intel pulls their thumb out of their ass
| cause AMD is crushing it and that's gonna end the same way
| snarfy wrote:
| I'm a gamer and love my AMD gpu. I do not give a shit about ray
| tracing, frame generation, or 4k gaming. I can play all modern
| fps at 500fps+. I really wish the market wasn't so trendy and
| people bought what worked for them.
| alt227 wrote:
| Yeah I was exactly the same as you for years, holding out
| against what I considered to be unecessary exrtravagence. That
| was until I got a 4k monitor at work and experienced 4k HDR
| gaming. I immediately went out and bought an RTX 4070 and a 4k
| monitor and I will never be going back. The experience is
| glorious and I was a fool for not jumping sooner.
|
| 4K HDR gaming is not the future, is has been the standard for
| many years now for good reason.
| Arainach wrote:
| Why was the title of this post changed long after posting to
| something that doesn't match the article title? This
| editorializing goes directly against HN Guidelines (but was
| presumably done by the HN team?)
| cbarrick wrote:
| +1. "Nvidia won, we all lost" sets a very different tone than
| "NVIDIA is full of shit". It's clearly not the tone the author
| intended to set.
|
| Even more concerning is that, by editorializing the title of an
| article that is (in part) about how Nvidia uses their market
| dominance to pressure reviewers and control the narrative, we
| must question whether or not the mod team is complicit in this
| effort.
|
| Is team green afraid that a title like "NVIDIA is full of shit"
| on the front page of HN is bad for their image or stock price?
| Was HN pressured to change the name?
|
| Sometimes, editorialization is just a dumb and lazy mistake.
| But editorializing something like this is a lot more
| concerning. And it's made worse by the fact that the title was
| changed by the mods.
| tyre wrote:
| Okay let's take off the tin foil hat for a second. HN has a
| very strong moderation team with years and years of history
| letting awkward (e.g. criticism of YC, YC companies) things
| stand.
| cbarrick wrote:
| I said what I said above not as a genuinely held belief (I
| doubt Nvidia had any involvement in this editorialization),
| but as a rhetorical effect.
|
| There are many reasons why the editorialized-title rule
| exists. One of the most important reasons is so that we can
| trust HN as an unbiased news aggregator. Given the content
| of the article, this particular instance of
| editorialization is pretty egregious and trust breaking.
|
| And to be clear, those questions I asked are not outlandish
| to ask, even if we do trust HN enough to dismiss them.
|
| The title should not have been changed.
| blibble wrote:
| > HN has a very strong moderation team with years and years
| of history letting awkward (e.g. criticism of YC, YC
| companies) things stand.
|
| the attempt to steer direction is well hidden, but it is
| very much there
|
| with https://hnrankings.info/ you can see the correction
| applied, in real time
|
| the hidden bits applied to dissenting accounts? far less
| visible
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| Oh wow, i always had that gut feeling, but now i know.
| Stop killing games went from consistent rank 2 to 102 in
| an instant. And it all happend outside my timezone so i
| didnt even know it existed here.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Jesus Christ. That is a massive correction. I fear most
| of those EU petition numbers are probably bots, designed
| to sabotage it.
| p_j_w wrote:
| HN's moderation system (posts with lots of flagged
| comments get derated) seems to really easy to game. Don't
| like a story? Have bots post a bunch of inflammatory
| comments likely to get flagged and it will go away.
| There's no way the people who run the site don't know
| this, so I don't know how to possibly make the case that
| they are actually okay with it.
| const_cast wrote:
| I believe usually when this happens the admins like dang
| and tomhow manually unflag the post if they think it's
| relevant. Which... is not a perfect system, but it works.
| I've seen plenty of posts be flagged, dead, then get
| unflagged and revived. They'll go in and manually flag
| comments, too, to get the conversation back on track. So,
| I think site admins are aware that this is happening.
|
| Also, it's somewhat easy to tell who is a bot. Really new
| accounts are colored green. I'm sure there's also long-
| running bots, and I'm not sure how you would find those.
| cipher_accompt wrote:
| I'm curious whether you're playing devil's advocate or if
| you genuinely believe that characterizing OP's comment as
| "tin foil hat" thinking is fair.
|
| The concentration of wealth and influence gives entities
| like Nvidia the structural power to pressure smaller
| players in the economic system. That's not speculative --
| it's common sense, and it's supported by antitrust cases.
| Firms like Nvidia are incentivized to abuse their market
| power to protect their reputation and, ultimately, their
| dominance. Moreover, such entities can minimize legal and
| economic consequences in the rare instances that there are
| any.
|
| So what exactly is the risk created by the moderation team
| allowing criticism of YC or YC companies? There aren't many
| alternatives -- please fill me in if I'm missing something.
| In contrast, allowing sustained or high-profile criticism
| of giants like Nvidia could, even if unlikely, carry
| unpredictable risks.
|
| So were you playing devil's advocate, or do you genuinely
| think OP's concern is more conspiratorial than it is a
| plausible worry about the chilling effect created by
| concentration of immense wealth?
| sillyfluke wrote:
| >the concentration of wealth
|
| On this topic, I'm curious what others think of the
| renaming of this post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435732
|
| The original title I gave was: "Paul Graham: without
| billionaires, there will be no startups."
|
| As it was a tweet, I was trying to summarize his
| conclusive point in the first part of the sentence:
|
| _Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don't
| think that we should have billionaires" are also saying
| "I don't think there should be startups,"_
|
| Now, this part of the sentence to me was the far more
| interesting part because it was a much bolder claim than
| the second part of the sentence:
|
| _because successful startups inevitably produce
| billionaires._
|
| This second part seems like a pretty obvious observation
| and is a completely uninteresting observation by itself.
|
| The claim that successful startups have produced
| billonaires _therefore successful startups require
| billionaires_ is a far more contentious and interesting
| claim.
|
| The mods removed "paul graham" from the title and
| switched the title to the uninteresting second part of
| the sentence, turning it into a completely banal and
| pointless title: Successful startups produce
| billionaires. Thereby removing any hint of the bold claim
| being made by the founder of one of the most succesful
| VCs of the 21st century. And incidentally, also the
| creator of this website.
|
| I can only conclude someone is loathe to moderate a
| thread about whether billionaires are neccessary for
| sucessful startups to exist.
|
| ps. There is no explicit guideline for tweets as far as I
| can tell. You are forced to use an incomplete quote or
| are forced to summarize the tweet im some fashion.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| I thought HN was a dingle moderator, dang, and now I think
| there may be 2 people?
| card_zero wrote:
| That's correct, dang has offloaded some of the work to
| tomhow, another dingle.
| kevindamm wrote:
| and together they are trouble?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| theres alot of shadow banning, up ranking and down ranking
| rubatuga wrote:
| Probably malicious astroturfing is going on from Nvidia and
| the mods. @dang who was the moderator who edited the title?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious. People were investing like crazy
| into Nvidia on the "AI" gamble. Now everybody needs to keep
| hyping up Nvidia and AI no matter reality. (Until it starts to
| become obvious and then the selloff starts)
| j_timberlake wrote:
| Literally every single anti-AI comment I see on this site
| uses a form of the word "hype". You cannot make an actual
| objective argument against the AI-wave predictions, so you
| use the word hype and pretend that's a real argument and not
| just ranting.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I work with AI, I consider generative AI an incredible tool
| in our arsenal of computing things.
|
| But, in my opinion, the public expectations in my opinion
| are clearly exaggerated and sometimes even dangerous as we
| ran the risk of throwing the baby with the bathwater when
| some ideas/marketing/vc people ideas become not realizable
| in the concrete world.
|
| Why, having this outlook, I should be banned of using the
| very useful word/concept of "hype"?
| j_timberlake wrote:
| Your post doesn't contain a single prediction of a
| problem that will occur, dangerous or otherwise, just
| some vague reference to "the baby might get thrown out
| with the bathwater". This is exactly what I'm talking
| about, you just talk around the issue without naming
| anything specific, because you don't have anything. If
| you did, you'd state it.
|
| Meanwhile the AI companies continue to produce new SotA
| models yearly, sometimes quarterly, meaning the evidence
| that you're just completely wrong never stops increasing.
| dandanua wrote:
| Haven't you figured out the new global agenda yet? Guidelines
| (and rules) exist only to serve the masters.
| Zambyte wrote:
| New as of which millennium?
| rectang wrote:
| When titles are changed, the intent as I understand it is to
| nudge discussion towards thoughtful exchange. Discussion is
| forever threatening to spin out of control towards flame wars
| and the moderators work hard to prevent that.
|
| I think that if you want to understand why it might be helpful
| to change the title, consider how well "NVIDIA is full of shit"
| follows the HN _comment_ guidelines.
|
| I don't imagine you will agree with the title change no matter
| what, but I believe that's essentially the rationale. Note that
| the topic wasn't flagged, which if suppression of the author's
| ideas or protection of Nvidia were goals would have been more
| effective.
|
| (FWIW I have plenty of issues with HN but how titles are
| handled isn't one of them.)
| mindslight wrote:
| I agree with your explanation, but I think it's a hollow
| rationale. "Full of shit" is a bit aggressive and divisive,
| but the thesis is in the open and there is plenty of room to
| expand on it in the actual post. Whereas "Nvidia won" is
| actually just as divisive and in a way has _more_ implied
| aggression (of a fait accompli), it 's just cloaked in using
| less vulgar language.
| rectang wrote:
| The new title, "Nvidia won, we all lost", is taken from a
| subheading in the actual article, which is something I've
| often seen dang recommend people do when faced with baity
| or otherwise problematic titles.
|
| https://blog.sebin-nyshkim.net/posts/nvidia-is-full-of-
| shit/...
| iwontberude wrote:
| I don't see how changing the title has encouraged thoughtful
| exchange when the top comments are talking about the change
| to the title. Seems better to let moderators do their job
| when there is an actual problem with thoughtful exchange
| instead of creating one.
| shutupnerd0000 wrote:
| Barbara Streisand requested it.
| dagaci wrote:
| Jenson has managed to kneel into every market boom in a
| reasonable amount of time with his GPUs and tech (hardware and
| software). No doubt he will be there when the next boom kicks off
| too.
|
| Microsoft fails consistently ... even when offered a lead on the
| plate... it fails, but these failures are eventually corrected
| for by the momentum of its massive business units.
|
| Apple is just very very late... but this failure can be
| eventually corrected for by its unbeatable astroturfing units.
|
| Perhaps AMD are too small keep up everywhere it should. But
| compared to the rest, AMD is a fast follower. Why Intel is where
| it is is a mystery to me but i'm quite happy about its demise and
| failures :D
|
| Being angry about NVIDIA is not giving enough credit to NVIDIA
| for being on-time and even leading the charge in the first place.
|
| Everyone should remember that NVIDIA also leads into the markets
| that it dominates.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| What is the next boom? I honestly can't think of one. Feels
| like we are just at the Age of the Plateau, which will be quite
| painful for markets and the world.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Humanoid robotics
| chriskanan wrote:
| This will be huge in the next decade and powered by AI.
| There are so many competitors, currently, that it is hard
| to know who the winners will be. Nvidia is already angling
| for humanoid robotics with its investments.
| mtmail wrote:
| and skynet
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Not THAT kind of boom
| mdaniel wrote:
| relevant: _Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) - Open-Source
| Humanoid Robots_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456904 - July, 2025
| (97 comments)
| debesyla wrote:
| As all the previous booms - hard to predict before it
| happens. And if we do predict, high chances are that we will
| miss.
|
| My personal guess is something in the medical field, because
| surely all the AI search tools could help to detect common
| items in all the medical data. Maybe more of ozempyc, maybe
| for some other health issue. (Of course, who knows. Maybe it
| turns out that the next boom is going to be in figuring out
| ways to make things go boom. I hope not.)
| xeromal wrote:
| It's just because we can't know what the next boom is until
| it hits us in the face except for a tiny population of humans
| that effect those changes
| thebruce87m wrote:
| VLM / VLA.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I'm gonna predict biotech. Implanted chips that let you
| interact with LLMs directly with your brain. Chips that allow
| you to pay for stuff by waving your hand at a sensor. Fully
| hands-free videoconferencing on the go. As with blockchain
| and current LLMs, not something I fancy spending any time
| with, but people will call it the next step towards some kind
| of tech utopia.
| bgnn wrote:
| Jensen id betting on two technologies: integrated silicon
| photonucs, aka optical compute + communication (realistic
| bet), and Quantum computing (moonshot bet).
| thfuran wrote:
| Why be happy about the demise of Intel? I'd rather have more
| chip designers than fewer.
| int_19h wrote:
| With respect to GPUs and AI I think it might actually be the
| case of engineering the boom more so than anticipating it. Not
| the AI angle itself, but the GPU compute part of it
| specifically - Jensen had NVIDIA invest heavily into that when
| it was still very niche (Ian Buck was hired in 2004) and then
| actively promoted it to people doing number crunching.
| parineum wrote:
| Nvidia won and we all did too. There's a reason they own so
| much if the market, they are the best. There's no allegations
| of anything anticompetitive behavior alleged and the market is
| fairly open.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Probably the next big thing will be Chinese GPUs that are the
| same quality as NVIDIA GPUs but at least 10-20% cheaper aaand we
| will have to wait for that maybe 5-10 years.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| It has been decades since I did any electronics, and even then
| only as a hobby doing self-build projects, but the power feed
| management (obviously a key part of such a high current and
| expensive component in a system) is shameful.
| zoobab wrote:
| Not enough VRAM to load big LLMs, in order not to compete with
| their expensive high end. Market segmentation it's called.
| fithisux wrote:
| NVidia won?
|
| Not for me. I prefer Intel offerings. Open and Linux friendly.
|
| I even hope they would release the next gen Risc-V boards with
| Intel Graphics.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| A RISC-V board with NVIDIA graphics is more likely:
| https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/KiV13GqXGMZfZjopY0Xxpg
|
| NVIDIA Keynote from the upcoming RISC-V Summit China: "Enabling
| RISC-V application processors in NVIDIA compute platforms"
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| To anyone who remembers econ 101 it's hard to read something like
| "scalper bots scoop up all of the new units as soon as they're
| launched" and not conclude that Nvidia itself is simply pricing
| the units they sell too low.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I just don't think NVidia cares all that much about it's gaming
| cards, except to the extent that they don't want to cede too much
| ground to AMD and basically preserve their image in that market
| for now. Basically they don't want to lose their legions of
| gaming fans that got them started, and who still carry the torch.
| But they'll produce the minimum number of gaming cards needed to
| accomplish that.
|
| Otherwise the money is in the datacenter (AI/HPC) cards.
| avipars wrote:
| If only, NVIDIA could use their enterprise solution on consumer
| hardware.
| parketi wrote:
| Here's my take on video cards in general. I love NVIDIA cards for
| all out performance. You simply can't beat them. And until
| someone does, they will not change. I have owned AMD and Intel
| cards as well and played mainly FPS games like Doim, Quake,
| Crysis, Medal of Honor, COD, etc. all of them perform better on
| NVIDIA. But I have noticed a change.
|
| Each year those performance margins seem to narrow. I paid $1000+
| dollars for my RTX 4080 Super. That's ridiculous. No video card
| should cost over $1000. So the next time I "upgrade," it won't be
| NVIDIA. I'll probably go back to AMD or Intel.
|
| I would love to see Intel continue to develop video cards that
| are high performance and affordable. There is a huge market for
| those unicorns. AMDs model seems to be slightly less performance
| for slightly less money. Intel on the other hand is offering
| performance on par with AMD and sometimes NVIDIA for far less
| money - a winning formula.
|
| NVIDIA got too greedy. They overplayed their hand. Time for Intel
| to focus on development and fill the gaping void of price for
| performance metrics.
| TimParker1727 wrote:
| Here's my take on video cards in general. I love NVIDIA cards for
| all out performance. You simply can't beat them. And until
| someone does, they will not change. I have owned AMD and Intel
| cards as well and played mainly FPS games like Doim, Quake,
| Crysis, Medal of Honor, COD, etc. all of them perform better on
| NVIDIA. But I have noticed a change.
|
| Each year those performance margins seem to narrow. I paid $1000+
| dollars for my RTX 4080 Super. That's ridiculous. No video card
| should cost over $1000. So the next time I "upgrade," it won't be
| NVIDIA. I'll probably go back to AMD or Intel.
|
| I would love to see Intel continue to develop video cards that
| are high performance and affordable. There is a huge market for
| those unicorns. AMDs model seems to be slightly less performance
| for slightly less money. Intel on the other hand is offering
| performance on par with AMD and sometimes NVIDIA for far less
| money - a winning formula.
|
| NVIDIA got too greedy. They overplayed their hand. Time for Intel
| to focus on development and fill the gaping void of price for
| performance metrics.
| tricheco wrote:
| > The RTX 4090 was massive, a real heccin chonker
|
| Every line of the article convinces me I'm reading bad rage bait,
| every comment in the thread confirms it's working.
|
| The article provides a nice list of grievances from the
| "optimized youtube channel tech expert" sphere ("doink" face and
| arrow in the thumbnail or GTFO), and none of them really stick.
| Except for the part where nVidia is clearly leaving money on the
| table... From 5080 up no one can compete, with or without "fake
| frames", at no price, I'd love to take the dividends on the sale
| of the top 3 cards, but that money is going to scalpers.
|
| If nvidia is winning, it's because competitors and regulators are
| letting them.
| xgkickt wrote:
| AMD's openness has been a positive in the games industry. I only
| wish they too made ARM based APUs.
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