The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by vachina » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:30 PM UTC

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.

It will be if personal computing becomes unaffordable. The lag is simply mitigated by having PoP everywhere.

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

#122

Post by Animats » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

webdevver wrote: post #113

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.

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-...

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

#123

Post by internet101010 » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:32 PM UTC

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

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.

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

#124

Post by j45 » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

kps wrote: post #119

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.

I just learned today that there has been some efforts underway: https://hermes.cx/

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

#125

Post by speedgoose » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #109

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.

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.

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

#126

Post by oivey » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

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.

Virtually all the graphics? Modern computers are very fast.

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

#127

Post by SkyMarshal » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

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.

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

#128

Post by kitsune1 » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

jonway wrote: post #9

newsclues wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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:…

[dead]

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

#129

Post by mikepurvis » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#130

Post by mikepurvis » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #127

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 creat…

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.