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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?

#101

Post by htrp »

wmf wrote: post #93
_23sd wrote: post #70

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.

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.

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

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

#102

Post by bitwize »

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.

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

#103

Post by makeitdouble »

throwaway613745 wrote: post #72
Apocryphon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but would Ghosts of Tsushima be any less immersive with PS4 graphics? Even max PS3 graphics?

Ghost of Tsushima already is a PS4 game???

Yes. Just to note, I was referring to the PC version, I don't know how much of a difference that makes.

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

#104

Post by PunchyHamster »

makeitdouble wrote: post #61
pjmlp wrote: post #7

It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs, instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.

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 enve…

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

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

#105

Post by pegasus »

bilegeek wrote: post #99
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…

> 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…

Is remote rendering a thing? I would have imagined the lag would make something like that impractical.

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

#106

Post by ryandrake »

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.

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

#107

Post by willis936 »

htrp wrote: post #101
wmf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It's a bad idea and yet everyone does it.

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

#108

Post by TehCorwiz »

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.

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

#109

Post by moffkalast »

jaapz wrote: post #12

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

AMD will certainly be very happy to raise prices significantly when they have a defacto monopoly over the market segment alright.

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

#110

Post by georgefrowny »

pjmlp wrote: post #7

It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs, instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.

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.
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