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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?

#111

Post by WackyFighter »

pegasus wrote: post #105
bilegeek wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#112

Post by baal80spam »

throwaway613745 wrote: post #68

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.

> 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?

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

#114

Post by mananaysiempre »

_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.

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.

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

#115

Post by forrestthewoods »

georgefrowny wrote: post #92
forrestthewoods wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

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.

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

#116

Post by dijit »

jeltz wrote: post #84
ronsor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs have become the norm now.

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.

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

#117

Post by duskwuff »

bombcar wrote: post #77
forrestthewoods wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wonder what Balatro dos that wouldn’t be possible on a 486.

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.)

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

#118

Post by vachina »

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.

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

#119

Post by kps »

j45 wrote: post #81

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 term…

Mac Eudora was the best email client ever. If it had got UTF8 support I'd probably still be running it in an emulator.

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

#120

Post by tinco »

bombcar wrote: post #80
batiudrami wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.
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