[HN Gopher] The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gam...
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The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?
Author : taubek
Score : 115 points
Date : 2025-12-20 10:25 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcworld.com)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm also curious what this could mean for Nintendo.
| xattt wrote:
| NVIDIA would still have service contract obligations to fulfil,
| and would provide support for its existing products for a
| period of time.
|
| Don't worry about Nintendo. Their pockets are deep and they are
| creative enough to pivot. They would retool their stack to
| support another ARM chip, or another arch entirely.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| What goes into a Nintendo console is not prime silicon. When
| it's time to design the next console, I am sure Nvidia will
| still be more than happy to give them a design that they have
| laying around somewhere in a drawer if it means they ship 100M
| units.
| eucryphia wrote:
| More children born?
| 0dayz wrote:
| It remains to be seen to be fair.
|
| But if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a
| slow death of the democratization of tech.
|
| At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even
| that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the
| very raw tech (chips).
| butterknife wrote:
| Is it better to go short on them or buy AMD?
| internet101010 wrote:
| Betting on AMD's continued success in CPUs is far safer than
| Nvidia's demise.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs,
| instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.
| newsclues wrote:
| It means lots of people will give up the hobby.
|
| Let's be real, the twitch FPS CoD players aren't going to give
| that up and play a boring life simulator.
|
| This has the potential to harm a lot of businesses from
| hardware to software companies, and change the lives of
| millions of people.
| jonway wrote:
| That doesn't sem very plausible, how many people are driven
| away from CounterStrike or like League of Legends because the
| graphics weren't as good as Cyberpunk or whatever?
|
| Theres a LOT of games that compete with AAA-massive-budget
| games on aggregate like Dwarf Fortress, CS, League, Fortnite,
| people are still playing arma 2, dayz, rust, etc Rainbow Six:
| Siege still has adherents and even cash-payout tournaments.
| EvE: Online, Ultima Online, Runescape, still goin'
|
| These games have like no advertising and are still
| moneymakers. Eve and UO are like 20 and 30 years old. Heck,
| Classic WoW!
| deaux wrote:
| I wonder if all the games you named combined surpass what
| Mihoyo makes off the likes of Genshin Impact.
| jonway wrote:
| Dunno (maybe wow?) but is it the most expensive graphics
| hardware giving AAA all the money/air or because they
| have a great reputation as games, solid consistent
| advertising, a strong network effect and a spot on the
| top of new release lists?
|
| I feel like league of legends has, wrt the genshin $s, I
| honestly haven't checked!
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Do gacha mobile games even require high-end graphics?
| Genshin Impact doesn't support native ray tracing.
| re-thc wrote:
| Plenty of titles that support ray tracing eg wuthering
| waves.
|
| Many gacha titles now offer amazing pc graphics on nvidia
| cards compared to mobile.
| baobun wrote:
| PC gaming will be fine even without 8K 120fps raytracing. It
| will be fine even if limited to iGPUs. Maybe even better off
| if it means new titles are actually playable on an average
| new miniPC. More realistically I guess we get an AMD/Intel
| duopoly looking quite similar instead.
|
| It will probably be a bigger blow to people who want to run
| LLMs at home.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Huh? No? It means that the overall platform is already at
| 'good enough' level. There can always be an improvement, but
| in terms of pure visuals, we are already past at a point,
| where some studios choose simple representations ( see some
| 2d platformers ) as a stylistic choice.
|
| It gonna be ok.
| newsclues wrote:
| My pc is good enough for now but it's years old and when it
| dies, then what? You want me to give up gaming and start
| hanging out at your local bar?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It is not a question of want. Gaming will exist in some
| form so I am simply uncertain what you are concerned
| about.
|
| Can you elaborate a little? What, exactly, is your
| concern here? That you won't have nvidia as a choice?
| That AMD will be the only game in town? That gpu market
| will move from duopoly ( for gaming specifically ) to
| monopoly? I have little to go on, but I don't really want
| to put words in your mouth based on minimal post.
| newsclues wrote:
| I want a local gaming machine that I control.
|
| Not a locked ecosystem console or a streaming service
| with lag!
|
| I think if nvidia leaves the market for AI, why wouldn't
| AMD and intel, with the memory cartel. So DIY market is
| gone. That kills lots of companies and creators that rely
| on the gaming market.
|
| It's a doom spiral for a lot of the industry. If gaming
| is just PlayStation and switch and iGPUs there is a lot
| less innovation in pushing graphics.
|
| It will kill the hobby.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Interesting. Does nvidia offer control? Last time I
| checked they arbitrarily updated their drivers to degrade
| unwelcome use case ( in that case, for crypto ). It
| sounds to me like the opposite of that.
|
| Separately, do you think they won't try to ingratiate
| themselves to gamers again once AI market changes?
|
| Do you not think they are part of the cartel anyway ( and
| the DIY market exists despite that )?
|
| << So DIY market is gone.
|
| How? One use case is gone. Granted, not a small one and
| one with an odd type of.. fervor, but relatively small
| nonetheless. At best, DIY market shifts to local
| inference machines and whatnot. Unless you specifically
| refer to gaming market..
|
| << That kills lots of companies and creators that rely on
| the gaming market.
|
| Markets change all the time. EA is king of the mountain.
| EA is filing for bankruptcy. Circle of life.
|
| Edit: ALso, upon some additional consideration and in the
| spirit of christmas, fuck the streamers ( aka creators ).
| With very, very limited exceptions, they actively drive
| what is mostly wrong with gaming these days. Fuck em. And
| that is before we get to the general retardation they
| contribute to.
|
| << It's a doom spiral for a lot of the industry.
|
| How? For AAA? Good. Fuck em. We have been here before and
| were all better for it.
|
| << If gaming is just PlayStation and switch and iGPUs
| there is a lot less innovation in pushing graphics.
|
| Am I reading it right? AMD and Intel is just for
| consoles?
|
| << It will kill the hobby.
|
| It is an assertion without any evidence OR a logical
| cause and effect.
|
| So far, I am not buying it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There was no DIY market on 8 and 16 bit home computers
| with fixed hardware, yet bedroom coding (aka indies) not
| only did thrive, they were the genesis of many AAA
| publishers, and to this day those restrictions keep the
| Demoscene alive and recognised as World culture heritage.
|
| PC was largely ignored for gaming, until finally EGA/VGA
| card, alongside AdLib/Soundblaster, became widespread in
| enough households to warrant development costs.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Who cares about "innovation in pushing graphics"? It's
| arguable that video game graphics reached 'good enough' a
| couple of console generations ago. Maybe as early as
| seventh gen.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| Panasonic left the MLCC market and yet you can still buy
| capacitors.
| acheron wrote:
| Why would nvidia not making gaming cards make you "give
| up gaming"?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Let's be real, CoD only appeals to a small community in the
| whole planet.
| newsclues wrote:
| Millions of people.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| But if it didn't exist, those people would likely be
| playing something else.
| newsclues wrote:
| If no pc hardware exists eventually there will be no
| games to play. Then you will have a bunch of angry gamers
| at the park pissing everyone off.
|
| If my hobby is ruined and I can't have fun, I'm going to
| be an asshole and make everyone else unhappy.
| lolc wrote:
| Ahaha are you trolling for entitled gamers? Yeah wouldn't
| want the real world having to face those. No worries: as
| long as there are people willing to drop money into
| expensive gear, somebody will sell it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There are many more millions of gamers that don't even
| care CoD exists, it fits a small percentage on the world
| of gaming.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| CoD has less players than Team Fortress 2 currently,
| according to Valve's charts:
| https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed . And
| TF2 has ancient graphics.
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| Steam isn't a good metric because they sell the game on
| Battle.Net.
|
| CoD is also huge on Playstation.
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| It's only one of if not the best selling game every year.
|
| Totally niche appeal, yeah right.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _It means lots of people will give up the hobby._
|
| Oh, we can only hope!
|
| > _This has the potential to harm a lot of businesses from
| hardware to software companies, and change the lives of
| millions of people._
|
| Including millions of gamers, but for the better.
| newsclues wrote:
| You hate gamers? Why?
|
| Why can't you let people enjoy their hobby?
| coldtea wrote:
| For the same reason I don't like alcoholism or meth use
| or gambling or porn addiction, even when the person
| "enjoys them".
| tavavex wrote:
| That's one hell of a long shot. Are your views applicable
| to the rest of the entertainment industry? There's plenty
| of people wasting away in front on Netflix, after all. Or
| why just entertainment, any "useless" hobbies that are
| repeatedly done for fun but have no real productive
| output. Is any comparable "pleasurable" activity that
| also hooks a minority of people in an unhealthy way bad,
| or just gaming?
|
| But what's most insane is trying to draw any parallels
| between gaming and these other things - something that
| was literally engineered to ruin human lives,
| biologically (hard drugs) or psychologically (gambling).
| The harm and evil caused by these two industries is
| incomprehensible (especially the legal parts of them,
| like alcohol and casino gambling/sports betting/online
| gambling), and trying to fit gaming in among them both
| downplays the amount of suffering inflicted by gambling
| and hard drugs, as well as villainizes normal people -
| like the hundreds of millions of people who play games in
| a sane, non-problematic way or indie game devs who make
| games because they want to express themselves
| artistically.
|
| Anyways, I gotta log off HN for a while. I can feel my
| gaming withdrawal kicking in. I've bankrupted myself four
| times by only spending my money on gaming, and I've been
| in and out of rehab centres and ERs as I've been slowly
| destroying my body with gaming in a spiral of deadly
| addiction. I think I'll have to panhandle and threaten
| strangers on the street to buy some Steam cards.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _That 's one hell of a long shot. Are your views
| applicable to the rest of the entertainment industry?_
|
| Yes.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| You must be the life of the party, if the party was a
| funeral.
| thefaux wrote:
| I had a roommate who failed out of college because he was
| addicted to Everquest (yes, Everquest, and yes I am
| middle-aged). Your last paragraph is barely even
| hyperbolic. Do you think unemployed young men who live at
| home with their parents, do little to no physical
| activity, spending most of their time playing videogaming
| and/or trolling on the internet are not stuck destroying
| their bodies (and minds) in a spiral of deadly addiction?
| Maybe you are a functional gamer, but there are many,
| many gamers who are not and this technology is maybe a
| quasi effective cope for our punishing society writ
| large, but from the outside, gaming addicts appear to be
| living a sad and limited life.
|
| Or to put it more succinctly, would you want your
| obituary to lead with your call of duty prowess?
| GaryBluto wrote:
| >functional gamer
|
| Excellent satire.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I don't like football. Can we add football fans into the
| mix of people we're punching down on, alongside the
| gamers and the meth heads?
|
| Thank you for your consideration.
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| Cod devs aren't stupid. They will design a game for the
| hardware their target market can get their hands on.
| ikamm wrote:
| Most CoD players are on console or mobile, not PC
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| CoD is currently 300GB on disk due to all the textures. I
| suspect a lot of players would be happy with a modest
| regression in fidelity if it means the game can run smoothly
| on affordable devices and leave some room for their other
| games too.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| On graphics: there is a threshold where realistic graphics make
| the difference.
|
| Not all games need to be that, but Ghost of Tsushima in GBA
| Pokemon style is not the same game at all. And is it badly
| designed ? I also don't think so. Same for many VR games which
| make immersion meaningful in itself.
|
| We can all come up with a litany of bad games, AAA or indie,
| but as long as there's a set of games fully pushing the
| envelope and bringing new things to the table, better hardware
| will be worth it IMHO.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Sure, but would Ghosts of Tsushima be any less immersive with
| PS4 graphics? Even max PS3 graphics?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The whole point is to convey details of an area you never
| lived in, of an actual place you never visited.
|
| I'd make the same argument for Half-Life Alyx or BioHazard,
| the visceral reaction you get from a highly detailed and
| textured world works at a different level than just
| "knowing" what you have in front of your eyes.
|
| Your brain is not filling the gaps, it is taking in the art
| of the creator.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Eh, eye of the beholder. It's made all the funnier that
| Ghosts of Tsushima has a Kurosawa Mode that converts all
| that detail into monochrome.
|
| RE 7 Biohazard was made for the PS4! And its VR version
| and Half-Life Alyx probably do require higher graphical
| fidelity, as VR games are not exactly the same thing as
| regular video games.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > VR games are not exactly the same thing as regular
| video games.
|
| That might be the fundamental divide, for that category
| of games I'm more on the VR camp and will settle for 2D
| only for convenience or availability.
|
| I see it with different expectations than games like
| Persona or Zelda (or GTA?) which could compete solely on
| the mechanics and a lot more, and I get the feeling
| you're comparing it more to these genres?
|
| Biohazard on PS4 was very meh to me, at that level I feel
| it could get down to Switch graphics to prioritize better
| game mechanics and more freedom of play. I never loved
| the clunkiness, as an action games it's pretty
| frustrating, and the VR game is even worse in gameplay
| quality. The immersiveness in VR is the only redeeming
| quality IMHO.
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| Ghost of Tsushima already is a PS4 game???
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes. Just to note, I was referring to the PC version, I
| don't know how much of a difference that makes.
| bitwize wrote:
| Daikatana in GBC style turned into a good game, lol.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I can't name one in last 5 that has been "pushing the
| envelope" that would actually wow me. And the ones that did,
| did it by artstyle, not sheer amount of polygons pushed to
| the screen.
|
| VR, sure, you want a lot of frames on 2 screens, that
| requires beef so the visual fidelity on same GPU will be
| worse than on screen, but other than that if anything
| graphical part of games have flatlined for me.
|
| Also, putting the money literally anywhere else gonna have
| better results game quality wise. I want better stories and
| more complex/interesting systems, not few more animated hairs
| georgefrowny wrote:
| Man, I remember playing UT GOTYE back in the 00s and the
| graphics blew us away when we fired it up and then Return to
| Castle Wolfenstein made my brother cry from the "realistic"
| zombies (on a CRT even!). It's amazing what you can take for
| granted when even a fraction of a modern card would have been
| called "photorealistic" back then.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What about Radeon cards, or consoles?
| jaapz wrote:
| AMD will be very happy when they do. They are already making
| great cards, currently running an RX7800XT (or something like
| that), and it's amazing. Linux support is great too
| snvzz wrote:
| RX 7900gre, can confirm as much.
| mdip wrote:
| Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the
| new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after
| that.
|
| My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at
| everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just
| comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution
| correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as
| mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite,
| not Cyberpunk 2077)
|
| There are many caveats there, of course. AMD's biggest
| problem is in the drivers/implementation for that card.
| Unlike NVidia's similar technology, it requires setting the
| game at a lower resolution which it then "fixes" and it tends
| to produce artifacts depending on the game/how high those
| settings go. It's a lot harder to juggle the settings between
| the driver and the game than it should be.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| For games that have FSR built-in you can enable it in the
| game settings, then it'll only scale up the game content
| while rendering the HUD at native resolution. And can use
| the better upscaling algorithms that rely on internal game
| engine data / motion vectors, should reduce artifacts.
|
| The other cool things is they also have Frame Gen available
| in the driver to apply to any game, unlike DLSS FG which
| only works on a few games. You can toggle it on in the AMD
| software just below the Super Res option. I quickly tried
| it in a few games and it worked great if you're already
| getting 60+ FPS, no noticeable artifacts. Though going from
| 30=>60 doesn't work, too many artifacts. And the extra FPS
| are only visible in the AMD software's FPS counter overlay,
| not in other FPS counter overlays.
|
| I recently got a Asus Rog Flow Z13 gaming "tablet" with the
| AMD Strix Halo APU. It has a great CPU + shared RAM +
| ridiculously powerful iGPU. Doesn't have the brute power of
| my previous desktop with a 4090, but this thing can handle
| the same games at 4k with upscaling on high settings (no
| raytracing), it's shockingly capable for its compact form
| factor.
| acheron wrote:
| I got an.. AMD (even today I still almost say "ATI" every time)
| RX6600 XT I think, a couple years ago? It's been great. I
| switched over to Linux back in the spring and yes the
| compatibility has been fine and caused no issues. Still amazed
| I can run "AAA" games, published by Microsoft even, under
| Linux.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My very gaming experienced and data oriented 13 year old wants
| to switch from Nvidia to AMD. I don't understand all his
| reasons/numbers but I suppose that's as good an endorsement as
| any for AMDs GPUs.
| moffkalast wrote:
| AMD will certainly be very happy to raise prices significantly
| when they have a defacto monopoly over the market segment
| alright.
| speedgoose wrote:
| If it's too expensive, I will play on my phone or my macbook
| instead of a gaming pc. They can't increase the prices too
| much.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Similar with nvidia, you've got to consider what partner
| companies AMD likes working with. AMD/nvidia design chips,
| contract TSMC to make them, then sell the chips to the likes of
| ASUS/MSI/gigabyte/etc to put them on cards the consumer buys.
| The other market AMD serves is Sony/MS for their consoles and
| I'd argue they're a major motivator driving radeon development
| as they pay up-front to get custom APU chips, and there's
| synergy there with Zen and more recently the AI demand. Ever
| since ATi bought up the company (ArtX) that made the Gamecube
| GPU it seems to me that the PC side is keeping the motor
| running in-between console contracts as far as gaming demands
| go, given their low market share they definitely don't seem to
| prioritize or depend on it to thrive.
| snvzz wrote:
| If NVIDIA exits the market, there is still AMD, Intel and PowerVR
| (Imagination Technologies is back at making discrete PC GPUs,
| although currently only in China).
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Unfortunately none of those are any use for video work.
| shmeeed wrote:
| Is that due to some kind of issue with the architecture, or
| just a matter of software support?
|
| In the latter case, I'd expect patches for AMD or Intel to
| become a priority pretty quickly. After all, they need their
| products to run on systems that customers can buy.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Well, they don't support CUDA and I don't see CUDA coming
| to AMD any time soon.
|
| Intel is just plain not capable of it because it's not
| really a GPU, more a framebuffer with a clever blitter.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great opportunity to adopt Khronos APIs.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Isn't OpenCL is a widely supported compute platform
| alternative to CUDA? Not sure if it's fair comparison.
| iszomer wrote:
| ZLUDA?
| pdpi wrote:
| Presumably you mean Intel's integrated GPUs? They do have
| the Arc line of discrete GPUs now, and those are a bit
| more than a frame buffer with a clever blitter.
| grim_io wrote:
| Shrug and buy the next best thing?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I don't think they can.
|
| NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware
| defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like
| modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute
| units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102
| gaming GPU.
|
| The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective
| chips. There's no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce
| revenue without reducing costs.
| jsheard wrote:
| You can't turn a GB200 into a GB202 (which I assume is what you
| meant since GP102 is from 2016), they are completely different
| designs. That kind of salvage happens between variants of the
| same design, for example the RTX Pro 6000 and RTX 5090 both use
| GB202 in different configurations, and chips which don't make
| the cut for the former get used for the latter.
| cwzwarich wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't share dies between their high-end datacenter
| products like B200 and consumer products. The high-end consumer
| dies have many more SMs than a corresponding datacenter die.
| Each has functionality that the other does not within an
| SM/TPC, nevermind the very different fabric and memory
| subsystem (with much higher bandwidth/SM on the datacenter
| parts). They run at very different clock frequencies. It just
| wouldn't make sense to share the dies under these constraints,
| especially when GPUs already present a fairly obvious yield
| recovery strategy.
| woah wrote:
| Why don't they sell these to datacenters as well, which could
| run a "low core section" with reduced power and cooling?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are
| faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming
| GPU.
|
| B200 doesn't have any graphics capabilities. The datacenter
| chips don't have any graphical units, it's just wasted die
| space.
|
| As long as gaming GPUs will compete for same wafer space that
| AI chips use, the AI chips will be far more profitable to
| NVIDIA
| iwontberude wrote:
| Well the good thing for NVIDIA AI business is that most of your
| chips can sit unused in warehouses and still get rich. 6
| million H100s sold but infrastructure (water cooled dc) for
| only a third of them exists in the world.
| sombragris wrote:
| I doubt that this would ever happen. But...
|
| If it does, I think it would be a good thing.
|
| The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to
| be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements,
| enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.
|
| Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on
| Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine
| devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end and
| thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of
| devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even
| for the lowest settings.
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days
| of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy
| graphics for the current hardware.
|
| Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally
| unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade
| your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.
| archagon wrote:
| I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize
| again.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers
| building their business on older mobile hardware.
| batiudrami wrote:
| Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be
| obsolete 9 months after buying. The "optimisation" you talk
| about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech
| was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would
| easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for
| that generation.
| ronsor wrote:
| > Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be
| obsolete 9 months after buying.
|
| Not because the developers were lazy, but because newer
| GPUs were that much better.
| jeltz wrote:
| There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs
| have become the norm now.
| dijit wrote:
| I work in gamedev, historically AAA gamedev.
|
| If you think that the programmers are unmotivated (lazy)
| or incompetent; you're wrong on both counts.
|
| The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my
| professional career, and they are often working from
| incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed
| deadline across multiple hardware targets.
|
| The issue is that games have such high expectations that
| they didn't have before.
|
| There are very few "yearly titles" that allow you to nail
| down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a
| mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project
| that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where
| unit/integration tests would be completely useless the
| minute they were built.
|
| The industry will end, but not because of "lazy devs",
| its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue
| opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological
| contingent of people using games as a (bad) political
| vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be
| laid off if they can't eventually generate revenue.
|
| ---
|
| Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game
| didn't work, you assumed you needed better hardware and
| you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or
| even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it
| doesn't work on something from before COVID the consensus
| is that it is not optimised enough. I'm not casting
| aspersions at the mindset, but it's a different
| mentality.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how
| much work and effort a game requires these days to meet
| even the minimum expectations they have.
| imcritic wrote:
| That's bullshit. I don't care about graphics, I play lots
| of indie games, some of them are made by a single person.
| There are free game engines, so basically all one needs
| for a successful game is just a good idea for the game.
|
| And a friend of mine still mostly plays the goddamn
| Ultima Online, the game that was released 28 years ago.
| sombragris wrote:
| > The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my
| professional career, and they are often working from
| incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed
| deadline across multiple hardware targets.
|
| I fully agree and I really admire people working on the
| industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in
| the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware
| requirements, I understand game devs are simply
| responding to internal trends within the industry, and
| especially going for a practical outcome by using an
| established game engine (such as Unreal 5).
|
| But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same
| industry to allocate time and resources either at the
| engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a
| realistic low end.
| dijit wrote:
| the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the
| low end).
|
| I don't think any company that has given up their
| internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without
| even having revenue from a game to show for it.
|
| So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and
| Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will
| release their engines on license... but Unreal will eat
| them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is
| much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME).
| Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are
| gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue
| (against investment for any other purpose).
|
| All this to say, I'm sorry to disappoint you, its very
| unlikely.
|
| Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.
| sombragris wrote:
| I'm not implying at all that every game company should
| develop their own in-house engine.
|
| But maybe, just maybe, they could request Epic or Unity
| to optimize their engines better for the lower end.
| dijit wrote:
| You cant optimise the general case
|
| Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.
|
| If you are a general engine, you can't easily make those
| tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and
| tooling for _many_ cases, slowing things down further.
|
| The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools
| from Epic, but they've been doing that for the last
| couple of years since borderlands.
| bombcar wrote:
| Obsolete in that you'd probably not BUY it if building new,
| and in that you'd probably be able to get a _noticeably_
| better one, but even then games were made to run in a wide
| gamut of hardware.
|
| For awhile there you did have noticeable gameplay
| differences- those with GL quake could _play_ better kind
| of thing.
| tinco wrote:
| The GP was talking about Unreal Engine 5 as if that
| engine doesn't optimize for low end. That's a wild take,
| I've been playing Arc Raiders with a group of friends in
| the past month, and one of them hadn't upgraded their PC
| in 10 years, and it still ran fine (20+ fps) on their
| machine. When we grew up it would be absolutely
| unbelievable that a game would run on a 10 year old
| machine, let alone at bearable FPS. And the game is even
| on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even
| employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine,
| they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at
| Embark Studios.
|
| Perhaps, but they also turned off Nanite, Lumen and
| virtual shadow maps. I'm not a UE5 hater but using its
| main features does currently come at a cost. I think
| these issues will eventually be fixed in newer versions
| and with better hardware, and at that point Nanite and
| VSM will become a no-brainer as they do solve real
| problems in game development.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying
|
| Or even before hitting the shelves, cue Trio3D and
| Mystique, but tha's another story.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| > Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the
| devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware.
|
| DOOM and Battlefield 6 are praised for being surprisingly
| well optimized for the graphics they offer, and some people
| bought these games for that reason alone. But I guess in the
| good old days good optimization would be the norm, not the
| exception.
| djmips wrote:
| A lot of people who were good at optimizing games have aged
| out and/or 'got theirs' and retired early or just got out of
| the demanding job and secured a better paying job in a sector
| with more economic upside and less churn. On the other side
| there's an unending almost exponential group of newcomers
| into the industry who are believe the hype given by engine
| makers who hide the true cost of optimimal game making and
| sell on 'ease'.
| cycomanic wrote:
| This is such a funny take, I remember all throughout the 90s
| and 00s (and maybe even 10s, not playing much then anymore)
| you often could new games on acceptable settings with a 1-2
| year old high spec machine, in fact to play at highest
| settings you often needed ridiculously spec'ed machines. Now
| you can play the biggest titles (CP77, BG3 ...) on 5-10 year
| old hardware (not even top spec), with non or minimal
| performance/quality impact. I mean I've been playing BG3 and
| CP77 on highest settings on a PC that I bought 2 years ago
| used for $600 (BG3 I was playing when it had just come out).
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > I think it would be a good thing.
|
| This is an insane thing to say.
|
| > Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize
| for the low end
|
| All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You
| can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage
| onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience
| that spend a lot of money on games.
|
| It's totally fine and good to build premium content that
| requires premium hardware.
|
| It's also good to run on low-end hardware to increase the TAM.
| But there are limits. Building a modern game and targeting a
| 486 is a wee bit silly.
|
| If Nvidia gamer GPUs disappear and devs were forced to build
| games that are capable of running on shit ass hardware the net
| benefit to gamers would be very minimal.
|
| What would _actually_ benefit gamers is making good hardware
| available at an affordable price!
|
| Everything about your comment screams "tall poppy syndrome".
| </rant>
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder what Balatro dos that _wouldn't_ be possible on a
| 486.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The swirly background (especially on the main screen),
| shiny card effects, and the CRT distortion effect would be
| genuinely difficult to implement on a system from that era.
| Balatro does all three with a couple hundred lines of GLSL
| shaders.
|
| (The third would, of course, be redundant if you were
| actually developing for a period 486. But I digress.)
| oivey wrote:
| Virtually all the graphics? Modern computers are very fast.
| woah wrote:
| I always chuckle when I see an entitled online rant from a
| gamer. Nothing against them, it's just humorous. In this one,
| we have hard-nosed defense of free market principles in the
| first part worthy of Reagan himself, followed by a Marxist
| appeal for someone (who?) to "make hardware available at an
| affordable price!".
| filleduchaos wrote:
| ...what exactly about "make hardware available at an
| affordable price" is "Marxist"?
| venturecruelty wrote:
| TIL: being anti-monopoly is both entitled and Marxist.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| > This is an insane thing to say.
|
| I don't think it's insane. In that hypothetical case, it
| would be a slightly painful experience for some people that
| the top end is a bit curtailed for a few years while game
| developers learn to target other cards, hopefully in some
| more portable way. But also feeling hard done by because your
| graphics hardware is stuck at 2025 levels for a bit is not
| that much of hardship really, is it? In fact, if more time is
| spent optimising for non-premium cards, perhaps the premium
| card that you already have will work better then the next
| upgrade would have.
|
| It's not inconceivable that the overall result is a better
| computing ecosystem in the long run. The open source space in
| particular, where Nvidia has long been problematic. Or maybe
| it'll be a multi decade gaming winter, but unless gamers stop
| being willing to throw large amounts of money chasing the top
| end, someone will want that money even if Nvidia didn't.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| There is a full actual order of magnitude difference
| between a modern discrete GPU and a high end card. Almost
| two orders of magnitude (100x) compare to an older (~2019)
| integrated GPU.
|
| > In fact, if more time is spent optimising for non-premium
| cards, perhaps the premium card that you already have will
| work better then the next upgrade would have.
|
| Nah. The stone doesn't have nearly that much blood to
| squeeze. And optimizations for ultralow-end may or may not
| have any benefit to high end. This isn't like optimizing
| CPU instruction count that benefits everyone.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| One wonders what would happen in a SHtF situation or someone
| stubs their toe on the demolition charges switch at TSMC and
| all the TwinScans get minced.
|
| Would there be a huge drive towards debloating software to run
| again on random old computers people find in cupboards?
| gunalx wrote:
| Until we end up spending trillions recreating the fab
| capacity of tsmc, they dont have a full monppoly (yet)
| bilegeek wrote:
| > The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers
| to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements,
| enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.
|
| They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe
| to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new
| improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail
| our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the
| unwashed masses.
|
| Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd
| probably follow Nvidia's lead.
| pegasus wrote:
| Is remote rendering a thing? I would have imagined the lag
| would make something like that impractical.
| WackyFighter wrote:
| The lag is high. Google was doing this with stadia. A huge
| amount of money comes from online multiplayer games and
| almost all of them require minimal latency to play well. So
| I doubt EA, Microsoft, Activision is going to effectively
| kill those cash cows.
|
| Game streaming works well for puzzle, story-esque games
| where latency isn't an issue.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Hinging your impression of the domain on what _Google_
| (notoriously not really a player in the gaming world)
| tried and failed will not exactly give you the most
| accurate picture. You might as well hinge your impression
| of how successful a game engine can be on Amazon 's
| attempts at it.
|
| GeForce NOW and Xbox Cloud are much more sensible
| projects to look at/evaluate than Stadia.
| WackyFighter wrote:
| It doesn't matter who does it. To stream you need to send
| the player input across the net, process, render and then
| send that back to the client. There is no way to
| eliminate that input lag.
|
| Any game that is requires high APM (Action Per Minute)
| will be horrible to play via streaming.
|
| I feel as if I shouldn't really need to explain this on
| this site, because it should be blindingly obvious that
| this will always be an issue with any streamed games for
| the same reason you have a several seconds lag between
| what happening on a live sports event and what you see on
| the screen.
| vachina wrote:
| It will be if personal computing becomes unaffordable. The
| lag is simply mitigated by having PoP everywhere.
| gs17 wrote:
| GeForce NOW is supposedly decent for a lot of games
| (depending on connection and distance to server), although
| if Nvidia totally left gaming they'd probably drop the
| service too.
| vachina wrote:
| You wish. Games will just be published cloud-only and you can
| only play them via thin clients.
| iwontberude wrote:
| This hurt my soul. Kudos.
| treyd wrote:
| It's pretty consistently been shown that this just can't
| provide low-enough latency for gamers to be comfortable with
| it. Every attempt at providing this has experience has
| failed. There's few games where this can even theoretically
| be viable.
|
| The economics of it also have issues, as now you have to run
| a bunch more datacenters full of GPUs, and with an
| inconsistent usage curve leaving a bunch of them being left
| idle at any given time. You'd have to charge a subscription
| to justify that, which the market would not accept.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am pretty sure that the current demand of gpu's can
| pretty much eat the left idle time issue at major
| datacenters because of the AI craze.
|
| Not that its good or bad tho but we could probably have
| something more akin to spot instances of gpu being given
| for gaming purposes.
|
| I do see a lot of company are having GPU access costs per
| second/instant shutdown/restart I suppose but overall I
| agree
|
| My brother recently came for the holidays and I played ps5
| for the first time on his mac connected to his room 70-100
| kms away and honestly, the biggest factor of latency was
| how far the wifi connection (which was his phone's carrier)
| and overall, it was a good enough experience but I only
| played mortal kombat for a few minutes :)
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Current datacenter GPUs are optimized for LLM compute,
| not for real-time rendering. The economics for running
| such beefy GPUs just for game streaming won't add up.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| They're not targeting high-end PCs. They're targeting current
| generation consoles, specifically the PS5 + 1080p. It just
| turns out that when you take those system requirements and put
| them on a PC--especially a PC with a 1440p or 2160p ultrawide--
| it turns out to mean pretty top of the line stuff. Particularly
| if as a PC gamer you expect to run it at 90fps and not the
| 30-40 that is typical for consoles.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Without disagreeing with the broad strokes of your comment,
| it feels like 4K should be considered standard for consoles
| nowadays - a very usable 4K HDR TV can be had for $150-500.
| futureshock wrote:
| Thats a waste of image quality for most people. You have to
| sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the
| full resolution. On PC you could be 2 feet from a huge
| gaming monitor, but an extremely small percentage of
| console players have the tv size and distance ratio where
| they would get much out of full 4k. Much better to spend
| the compute on higher framerate or higher detail settings.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think higher detail is where most of it goes. A lower
| resolution, upscaled image of a detailed scene, at medium
| framerate reads to most normal people as "better" than a
| less-detailed scene rendered at native 4k, _especially_
| when it 's in motion.
| Retric wrote:
| Assuming you can render natively at high FPS, 4k makes a
| bigger difference on rendered images than live action
| because it essentially brute forces antialiasing.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is
| already at the level of human visual acuity. You can argue
| that 1440p is a genuine (slight) improvement for super crisp
| text, but not for a game. HDR and more ray tracing/path
| tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality
| higher.
| preisschild wrote:
| I agree re "optimizations", but I dont think there should be
| compromises on quality (if set to max/ultra settings)
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I haven't been on HN even 60 seconds this morning and I've
| already found a pro-monopoly take. Delightful.
| sombragris wrote:
| I fail to see how my comment could be construed as being pro-
| monopoly.
|
| There are a huge number of onboard GPUs being left out of
| even minimum requirements for most recent games. I'm just
| saying that maybe this situation could led game devs to
| finally consider such devices as legitimate targets and thus
| make their games playable on such devices. This is by no
| means a pro-monopolistic take.
| g947o wrote:
| Gaming performance is so much more than hardware specs.
| Thinking that game devs optimizing their games on their own
| could fundamentally change the gaming experience is delusional.
|
| And anyone who knows just a tiny bit of history of nvidia would
| know how much investment they have put into gaming and the
| technology they pioneered.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I have a 9 year old gaming PC with an RX480 and it is only now
| starting to not be able to run certain games at all (recent
| ones that require ray tracing). It can play Cyberpunk and
| Starfield on low settings very acceptably.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Consoles and their install base set the target performance
| envelope. If your machine can't keep up with a 5 year old
| console then you should lower expectations.
|
| And like, when have onboard GPUs ever been good? The fact that
| they're even feasible these days should be praised but you're
| imagining some past where devs left them behind.
| m4rtink wrote:
| We can really hope they do it and fast!
|
| That way they will not only burn the most good will but will also
| get themselves entangled even more into the AI bubble - hopefully
| enough to go down with it.
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| I've always been an AMD customer because I've despised Nvidia's
| business practices for 10+ years.
|
| It would still suck if they left the market because who does AMD
| have to compete with with? Intel? LOL
|
| Increased prices for everyone. Lovely. I can't despise AI enough.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > I've always been an AMD customer because I've despised
| Nvidia's business practices for 10+ years.
|
| I am 100% sure AMD would have done the exact same thing as
| NVIDIA does right now, given the chance.
|
| Are you saying they wouldn't have milked the market to the last
| drop? Do you really believe it?
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| Of course they would have milked us that's why I want Nvidia
| to stick around, to keep AMD in check.
| keyringlight wrote:
| If you look at AMD's CPUs there's indications they do that.
| When Zen1/1+/2 came out they were priced below intel's
| products as they needed to rebuild mindshare with their
| promising new chips, from Zen3 onwards where they started
| building a performance lead in many categories as well as
| core count they jacked the prices up because they could
| demand it.
| resfirestar wrote:
| This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of
| hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the
| "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has
| Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the
| data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming
| chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.
| wmf wrote:
| It's not related to the DRAM shortage. Gaming dropped to ~10%
| of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI and there was
| controversy years before that about most "gaming" GPUs going to
| crypto miners. They won't exit the gaming market but from a
| shareholder perspective it does look like a good idea.
| htrp wrote:
| yet another reason to not listen to your shareholders.
|
| if it were up to them, cuda would be a money losing
| initiative that was killed in 2009
| willis936 wrote:
| It's a bad idea and yet everyone does it.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Furthermore, I would wager a giant portion of people who
| have entered the ML space in the last five years started
| out by using CUDA on their gaming rigs. Throwing away that
| entrenchment vector seems like a terrible idea.
| Animats wrote:
| > Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two
| ago due to AI
|
| Well, actually it's that the AI business made NVidia 10x
| bigger. NVidia now has a market cap of $4.4 trillion. That's
| six times bigger than General Motors, bigger than Apple, and
| the largest market cap in the world. For a GPU maker.
| rhco wrote:
| If Nvidia did drop their gaming GPU lineup, it would be a huge
| re-shuffling in the market: AMD's market share would 10x over
| night, and it would open a very rare opportunity for minority
| (or brand-new?) players to get a foothold.
|
| What happens then if the AI bubble crashes? Nvidia has given up
| their dominant position in the gaming market and made room for
| competitors to eat some (most?) of their pie, possibly even
| created an ultra-rare opportunity for a new competitor to pop
| up. That seems like a very short-sighted decision.
|
| I think that we will instead see Nvidia abusing their dominant
| position to re-allocate DRAM away from gaming, as a sector-wide
| thing. They'll reduce gaming GPU production while
| simultaneously trying to prevent AMD or Intel from ramping up
| their own production.
|
| It makes sense for them to retain their huge gaming GPU market
| share, because it's excellent insurance against an AI bust.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Took what, four years for PC cases to get back to reasonable
| prices after COVID? And that's a relatively low-tech field that
| (therefore) admits new entrants. I don't know, I'm not feeling
| much optimism right now (haven't at any point after the crypto
| boom), perhaps because I've always leaned towards stocking up
| on (main) RAM as a cheap way to improve a PC's performance.
| asdff wrote:
| The fact that a case is literally a sheet metal box and can
| cost $150 is so bewildering to me. All those $400 nas builds
| like 25% of the cost is literally just the case. CPU might be
| only $25 and requires an advanced fab lab not just someone
| with a lasercutter.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Yeah, sure, every tech company now acts like a craven
| monopolist hellbent on destroying everything that isn't
| corporate-driven AI computing, but not _this_ time! This time
| will be different!
| ZiiS wrote:
| Then Intel and AMD carry on, tbh having sewn up handhelds and
| consoles and made gaming on integrated graphics mainstream many
| won't notice. An AI bubble burst leaving loads of GPU laden
| datacenters is much more likely to hasten cloud gaming.
| j45 wrote:
| It wouldn't be unheard of.
|
| Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a
| pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora.
|
| Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well.
|
| More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most
| demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade
| silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going.
|
| Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those
| insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may
| have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming
| and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually
| immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting.
|
| Update: Adding
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| I had completely forgotten about the existence of Eudora.
| Thanks friend, that lead me down a mental rabbit hole.
| kps wrote:
| Mac Eudora was the best email client ever. If it had got UTF8
| support I'd probably still be running it in an emulator.
| j45 wrote:
| I just learned today that there has been some efforts
| underway: https://hermes.cx/
| dhosek wrote:
| If the AI bubble doesn't burst is carrying an awful lot of water
| there...
| bitwize wrote:
| Look.
|
| Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones.
| The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a
| niche of a niche.
|
| Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche
| markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable
| market: enterprises and especially AI companies.
|
| PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like
| smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but
| they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want
| to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity?
| Cloud stream them.
|
| I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one
| thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not
| when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other
| side.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It would be great if _more_ GPU competition would enter the field
| instead of less. The current duopoly is pretty boring and
| stagnant, with prices high and each company sorta-kinda doing the
| same thing and milking their market.
|
| I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip
| manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI,
| but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all
| doing their own thing and there were so many options.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| We'd need our government to actually enforce antitrust laws
| that have been on the books for about a century. Good luck.
| fruitworks wrote:
| there's intel and they're not bad
| weaksauce wrote:
| pretty sure i heard that they were stepping down from doing
| discrete graphics in the next year or two
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill
| off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others
| want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more
| backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate
| partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy
| one day has everything tightly integrated with no user
| serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering
| lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise
| the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC
| market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There is definitely a part of me which feels like with the
| increasing ram prices and similar. Its hard for people to have
| a home lab.
|
| To me what also feels is that there becomes more friction in an
| already really competitive and high-friction business of
| creating cloud.
|
| With increasing ram prices which I (from my knowledge) would
| only decrease in 2027-2028 or when this bubble pops, It would
| be extremely expensive for a new entry of cloud provider in
| this space.
|
| When I mention cloud provider, what I mean aren't the trifecta
| of AWS,Azure or GCP but rather all the other providers who
| bought their own hardware and are co-locating it to a
| datacenter and selling their services targeted at low/mid-range
| vps/vds servers
|
| I had previously thought about creating cloud but in this
| economy and the current situations, I'd much rather wait.
|
| The best bet right now for most people creating cloud
| /providing such services is probably whitewashing any other
| brand and providing services on top that make you special.
|
| The servers are still rather cheap but the mood that I can see
| in providers right now is that they are willing to hold the
| costs for some time to not create a frenzy (so they still have
| low prices) but they are cautiously waiting and looking for the
| whole situation and if recent developments continue happening
| in such a way, I wouldn't be surprised if server providers
| might raise some prices because the effective underlying
| hardware's ram/prices increased too.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Feel the same way here. Can't help but get the vibe that big
| tech wants to lock consumers out, eliminate the ability to
| have personal computing/self-hosted computing. Maybe in
| tandem with governments, not sure, but it's certainly
| appetizing to them from a profit perspective.
|
| The end goal is the elimination of personal ownership over
| any tech. They want us to have to rent everything.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Honestly its not the fact that they want us to rent
| everything but rather that effectively an AI tax is
| happening on us general public (or even hobbyists) where
| the price of hardware/ram is increasing because of AI
| demands.
|
| I don't exactly think that they did it on purpose to
| chokehold the supply but it sure damn happened and that
| doesn't change the fact that prices of hardware might /
| (already?) increase
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| I think China will then try to sell their own PC parts instead,
| their semiconductor industry is catching up so who knows in a
| decade.
|
| But perhaps then the US will probably reply with tariffs on the
| PC parts (or even ban them!) Which is slowly becoming the norm
| for US economic policy, and which won't reverse even after
| Trump.
| ogogmad wrote:
| That might be a bit on the paranoid side. It could just be that
| it's far more profitable right now for companies to sell only
| to data centres. That way, they don't need to spend money on
| advertising, or share their revenues with third-party sellers.
| wnevets wrote:
| You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming
| (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Maybe then the year of Linux (or OpenBSD?) on the desktop
| would finally arrive. Maybe anti-trust could get used. Maybe
| parts could get scrapped from data centres.
|
| Interesting times they would be!
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's already here right now, unironically. There's no need
| for Windows for gaming now. I just build a new rig with a
| 7900 XTX and with Steam on Arch Linux everything just works
| with absolutely no hassle or thinking. This was the only
| value Windows still had and now that's over.
| ogogmad wrote:
| There are still some pain points with Linux distros: With
| some, an upgrade can leave you unable to boot into a
| graphical login screen. This can also happen if you leave
| a Linux installation, like Manjaro, alone for a year and
| then do an update.
| weaksauce wrote:
| manjaro is arch under the hood and arch is supposed to be
| updated fairly frequently.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Every Linux distro has a line about how "you're doing it
| wrong" when it fails. You never get this with anything
| else.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| That is a problem if you happen to have a nvidia GPU,
| and, as the article says, by nvidia forcing it, you will
| not be able to have that brand of customer gamer GPU
| anymore.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I broadly concur. These days, gaming is usually very easy
| on Linux.
|
| Except: If I want to kill some time being chaotic in
| GTA:V Online, and do that in Linux, then that is
| forbidden. Single player mode works beautifully, but
| multiplayer is verboten.
|
| (And I'm sure that there are other games that similarly
| feature very deliberate brokenness, but that's my
| example.)
| bluescrn wrote:
| Linux isn't much use if you can't get hold of (non-locked-
| down) hardware to run it on
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| FOSS is more divided than ever, which is an interesting
| situation given the timing when they should be a solid
| place for individuals to turn to against the centralization
| of control. It's quite convenient that so many petty little
| wars have broken out across the FOSS landscape at just the
| right time.
| reactordev wrote:
| This. Your home PC is just another appliance now. Welcome to
| your Copilot future.
| pepperball wrote:
| Even bigger than that, it's all a slow march to a sort of
| narcissistic feudalism.
| upboats wrote:
| Yeah they want a return to TV era where censors curtail
| content
|
| Everyone will own a presentation layer device. Anyone who can
| only afford the 1GB model can only get SNES quality visuals.
|
| Snow Crash and Neuromancer have displaced the Bible as
| cognitive framework for tech rich.
|
| Am working on an app that generates and syncs keys 1:1 over
| local BT and then syncs them again to home PC (if desired).
| The idea being cut out internet middle men and go back to
| something like IRC direct connect, that also requires real
| world "touch grass" effort to complicate greedy data
| collectors.
|
| Testing now by sharing IP over Signal and then 1:1'ing over
| whatever app. Can just scaffold all new protocols on top of
| TCP/IP again.
| conductr wrote:
| It's not really about censorship though, it's about having
| control over a rent economy where there is no ownership. It
| provides maximum profit potential
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Different entities have different goals but are
| cooperating in making this happen so they each get what
| they want. Global corporations get guaranteed income
| streams from most of the population while governments and
| ideological groups get control over the flow of
| communication between people to ensure correct think.
| fragmede wrote:
| Stadia worked, when conditions were good, Geforce Now exists.
| No cheaters in multiplayer (though there are always new
| ones), it's a way to go. They're even doing a thing with
| cellphones as merely devices playing a full screen video
| stream that you can interact with.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| See, I wrote that out but then I thought, "Nah, that's too
| conspiracy for this crowd." But lo! Yeah. Not excited about
| the emerging status quo.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| If they do it all gamers will boycott LLMs. Which would be a
| godsend. Decades trying to save power, moving to LED, trying to
| improve efficiency everywhere, and now... We are wasting
| terawatts in digital parrots.
| sorushn wrote:
| You are vastly overestimating the standards of the median
| gamer.
| webdevver wrote:
| the pc gaming market is a hobbyist niche compared to the ongoing
| infrastructure projects.
|
| i predict that the "pc" is going to be slowly but surely eaten
| bottom-up by increasingly powerful SoCs.
| Animats wrote:
| From the article: "(NVidia) AI data center revenue reached
| $51.2 billion versus just $4.3 billion from gaming in Q3 2025."
|
| Moore Threads in China just announced a new GPU.[1] Announced,
| not shipped.
|
| [1] https://wccftech.com/moore-threads-lushan-gaming-huashan-
| ai-...
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I'm not sure it would matter. It doesn't seem that graphics are
| the limiting factor in games anymore. Plenty of popular games use
| variations on cartoon-style graphics, for example - Fortnight,
| Overwatch, Valorant, etc. Seems gameplay, creativity, and player
| community are more determining factors.
|
| That said, things like improved environmental physics and
| NPC/enemy AI might enable new and novel game mechanics and
| creative game design. But that can come from AMD and others too.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Notably the games you listed are all f2p/esports games, and
| that does matter in terms of how much budget developers have to
| polish a realistic look vs ship a cartoon and call it the "art
| style".
|
| I just upgraded to 9700 XT to play ARC Raiders and it's
| absolutely a feast for the eyes while also pioneering on
| several fronts especially around the bot movement and
| intelligence.
| Animats wrote:
| > It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in
| games anymore.
|
| Have you seen the GTA VI trailer?
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| AMD would do the same thing as Nvidia but $50 cheaper.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Game graphics are still a high margin silicon business. Someone
| will do it.
|
| Frankly, the graphics chops are plenty strong for a decade of
| excellent games. The big push in the next couple decades will
| probably be AI generated content to make games bigger and more
| detailed and more immersive
| oersted wrote:
| I don't understand why most people in this thread think that this
| would be such a big deal. It will not change the market in
| significant negative or positive ways. AMD has been at their
| heals for a couple of decades and is more competitive than ever,
| they will simply fill their shoes. Most games consoles have been
| AMD centric for a long time regardless, they've always been
| fairly dominant in the mid range and they have a longstanding
| reputation of having the best price/performance value for gamers.
|
| Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than
| their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel
| on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer
| segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years,
| depending on how the AI bubble develops.
| asdff wrote:
| Why would AMD shareholders tolerate them engaging in gaming pc
| market if Nvidia drops out? They might last a couple years but
| I mean the writing will be on the wall for them to chase
| enterprise sales and abandon gamers. Especially when game
| console manufacturers would prefer you spend $25 a month for
| life instead of buying a $500 console every 8 years. There
| won't be an xbox or playstation in your house before long.
| yegle wrote:
| I've heard good things about Moore Threads. Who knows, maybe the
| consumer GPU market is not a duopoly after all, Nvidia exiting
| the market would be a good thing longer term by introducing more
| competitions.
|
| My general impression is that the US technology companies either
| treat competition from China seriously and actively engage, or
| Chinese tech companies will slowly and surely eat the cake.
|
| There are numerous examples: the recent bankruptcy of iRobot, the
| 3D printer market dominated by Bambu Labs, the mini PC market
| where Chinese brands dominates.
| t1234s wrote:
| Looks like an hit piece to trigger some people to dump their
| $NVDA stock. They worked phrases like "abandon" and "AI Bubble"
| into the title/subtitle. Authors other articles look like
| clickbait crap https://www.pcworld.com/author/jon-martindale
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Some of the pro-monopoly takes in this thread are _mindblowing_.
| We get precisely what we deserve.
| thom wrote:
| Is there any path for Microsoft and NVIDIA to work together and
| resurrect some sort of transparent SLI layer for consumer
| workloads? It'd take the pressure off the high end of the market
| a little and also help old cards hold value for longer, which
| would be a boon if, for example, your entire economy happened to
| be balanced on top of a series of risky loans against that
| hardware.
| partomniscient wrote:
| They probably won't. They'll just change things so their hardware
| becomes a subscription-style model rather than proper outright
| ownership by the purchaser, which is to a limited degree the case
| when it comes to their hardware drivers anyway.
|
| Fuck this future.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If a $100B/year company closes a $1B/year division, they are
| doing something much worse than losing $1B/year: they are giving
| $1B in funding to a new competitor which can grow to threaten the
| major part.
| cmxch wrote:
| Then Intel and AMD take what NVIDIA won't.
| Insanity wrote:
| I've switched away from Nvidia around 2008 due to poor Linux
| support. Been on AMD ever since (now running the flagship model
| from a year ago, the 7900xtx or whatever it's called).
|
| Won't personally miss Nvidia, but we need competition in the
| space to keep prices 'reasonable' (although they haven't been
| reasonable for some years), and to push for further innovation.
| cycomanic wrote:
| What I don't really understand is why the big data centre
| operators destroy their old cards instead of selling them off.
| What are the downsides for them? Apart from the obvious, i.e. it
| would bring in money, would it not also drive down the cost for
| brand new cards? I.e. Nvidia can currently overcharge
| dramatically because there is such a shortage. If the data centre
| operators would dump large numbers of used cards on the market
| would that not increase supply and drive down cost?
| sgillen wrote:
| Who is buying the old cards? They can't be used for gaming, if
| there was money to be made I think they would be doing it.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Most data center GPUs don't have display outputs and some use
| exotic connectors (not PCIe x16 slots), making them worth next
| to nothing as conventional graphics cards.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Its just easier to write off the full value as e-waste than to
| try to turn a profit selling a meager amount of used hardware.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| You don't "write off" the full value, you fiddle the
| amortization so they go to zero accounting value exactly when
| you want them to. They're playing this exact game with
| datacentre GPUs right now.
|
| You can still have a tax implication when you sell the fully
| depreciated item but in theory it should only be a benefit
| unless your company has a 100% marginal tax rate somehow.
|
| Of course it can cost more to store the goods and administer
| the sale then you recoup. And the manufacturer may do or even
| require a buyback to prevent the second hand market
| undercutting their sales. Or you may be disinclined to
| provide cheap hardware to your competitors.
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