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The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

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Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#141

Post by treyd »

vachina wrote: post #118
sombragris wrote: post #33

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…

You wish. Games will just be published cloud-only and you can only play them via thin clients.

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.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#142

Post by thefaux »

tavavex wrote: post #44
coldtea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason I don't like alcoholism or meth use or gambling or porn addiction, even when the person "enjoys them".

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 m…

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?

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#143

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #108

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…

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.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#144

Post by preisschild »

sombragris wrote: post #33

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…

I agree re "optimizations", but I dont think there should be compromises on quality (if set to max/ultra settings)

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#145

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

treyd wrote: post #141
vachina wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wish. Games will just be published cloud-only and you can only play them via thin clients.

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…

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 :)

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#146

Post by futureshock »

nerdsniper wrote: post #133
mikepurvis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#147

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#148

Post by GaryBluto »

thefaux wrote: post #142
tavavex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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 o…

>functional gamer

Excellent satire.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#149

Post by oersted »

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.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#150

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

tinco wrote: post #120
bombcar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

>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.

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