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Nvidia won, we all lost

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Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#151

Post by bigyabai »

gxs wrote: post #134
cherioo wrote: post #9

High end GPU has over the last 5 years slowly turning from an enthusiast product into a luxury product. 5 or maybe 10 years ago, high-end GPU are needed to run games at reasonably eye candy setting. In 2025, $500 mid-range GPUs are more than enough. Folks all over can barely tell between High and Ultra settings, DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling. There's just no point to compete at $500 price point any mor…

I think this is the even broader trend here In their never ending quest to find ways to suck more money out of people, one natural extension is to just turn the thing into a luxury good and that alone seems to justify the markup This is why new home construction is expensive - the layout of a home doesn’t change much but it’s trivial to throw on some fancy fixtures and slap the deluxe label on the listing. Or take a…

Nvidia's been doing this for a while now, since at least the Titan cards and technically the SLI/Crossfire craze too. If you sell it, egregiously-compensated tech nerds will show up with a smile and a wallet large enough to put a down-payment on two of them.

I suppose you could also blame the software side, for adopting compute-intensive ray tracing features or getting lazy with upscaling. But PC gaming has always been a luxury market, at least since "can it run Crysis/DOOM" was a refrain. The homogeneity of a console lineup hasn't ever really existed on PC.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#152

Post by kbolino »

georgeecollins wrote: post #126
kbolino wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video game industry has been through cycles like this before. One of them (the 1983 crash) was so bad it killed most American companies and caused the momentum to shift to Japan for a generation. Another one I can recall is the "death" of the RTS (real-time strategy) genre around 2010. They have all followed a fairly similar pattern and in none of them that I know of have things played out as the companies involv…

I worked in the video game industry from the 90s through to today. I think you are over generalizing or missing the original point. It's true that there have been boom and busts. But there are also structural changes. Do you remember CD-ROMs? Steam and the iPhone were structural changes. What Microsoft is trying to do with Gamepass is a structural change. It may not work out the way that they plan but the truth is th…

But the thing is that Steam didn't cause the death of physical media. I absolutely do remember PC gaming before Steam, and between the era when it was awesome (StarCraft, Age of Empires, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc.) and the modern Steam-powered renaissance, there was an absolutely dismal era of disappointment and decline. Store shelves were getting filled with trash like "40 games on one CD!" and each new console generation gave retailers an excuse to shrink shelf space for PC games. Yet during this time, all of Valve's games were still available on discs!

I think Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same result as Embracer Group. They've bought up lots of studios and they control a whole platform (by which I mean Xbox, not PC) but this doesn't give them that much power. Gaming does evolve and it often evolves to work around attempts like this, rather than in favor of them.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#153

Post by grg0 »

oilkillsbirds wrote: post #68
oilkillsbirds wrote: post #64

Nobody’s going to read this, but this article and sentiment is utter anti-corporate bullshit, and the vastly congruent responses show that none of you have watched the historical development of GPGPU, or do any serious work on GPUs, or keep up with the open work of nvidia researchers. The spoiled gamer mentality is getting old for those of us that actually work daily in GPGPU across industries, develop with RTX kit,…

And no I don’t work for nvidia. I’ve just been in the industry long enough to watch the immense contribution nvidia has made to every. single. field. The work of their researchers is astounding, it’s clear to anyone that’s honestly worked in this field long enough. It’s insane to hate on them.

Their contribution to various fields and the fact that they treat the average consumer like shit nowadays are not mutually exclusive.

Also, nobody ever said they hate their researchers.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#154

Post by spoaceman7777 »

grg0 wrote: post #147
spoaceman7777 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to the section header in this article. Youtubers are not a truly hegemonic group, but there's a set of ideas and narratives that pervade the group as a whole that different subsets buy into, and push, and that's one that exists in the overall sphere of people who discuss the use of hardware for gaming.

Well, I can't speak for all youtubers, but I do watch most GN and LTT videos and the complaints are legitimate, nor are they random jabronis yolo'ing hardware installations.

As far as I know, neither of them have had a card unintentionally light on fire.

The whole thing started with Derbauer going to bat for a cable from some 3rd party vendor that he'd admitted he'd already plugged in and out of various cards something like 50 times.

The actual instances that youtubers report on are all reddit posters and other random social media users who would clearly be better off getting a professional installation. The huge popularity for enthusiast consumer hardware, due to the social media hype cycle, has brought a huge number of naive enthusiasts into the arena. And they're getting burned by doing hardware projects on their own. It's entirely unsurprising, given what happens in all other realms of amateur hardware projects.

Most of those who are whinging about their issues are false positive user errors. The actual failure rates (and there are device failures) are far lower, and that's what warrantys are for.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#156

Post by gdbsjjdn »

oilkillsbirds wrote: post #64

Nobody’s going to read this, but this article and sentiment is utter anti-corporate bullshit, and the vastly congruent responses show that none of you have watched the historical development of GPGPU, or do any serious work on GPUs, or keep up with the open work of nvidia researchers. The spoiled gamer mentality is getting old for those of us that actually work daily in GPGPU across industries, develop with RTX kit,…

It pains me to be on the side of "gamers" but I would rather support spoiled gamers than modern LLM bros.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#157

Post by IgorPartola »

georgeecollins wrote: post #126
kbolino wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video game industry has been through cycles like this before. One of them (the 1983 crash) was so bad it killed most American companies and caused the momentum to shift to Japan for a generation. Another one I can recall is the "death" of the RTS (real-time strategy) genre around 2010. They have all followed a fairly similar pattern and in none of them that I know of have things played out as the companies involv…

I worked in the video game industry from the 90s through to today. I think you are over generalizing or missing the original point. It's true that there have been boom and busts. But there are also structural changes. Do you remember CD-ROMs? Steam and the iPhone were structural changes. What Microsoft is trying to do with Gamepass is a structural change. It may not work out the way that they plan but the truth is th…

Not in the game industry but as a consumer this is very true. One example: ubiquitous access to transactions and payment systems gave a huge rise to loot boxes.

Also mobile games that got priced at $0.99 meant that only the unicorn level games could actually make decent money so In-App Purchases were born.

But also I suspect it is just a problem where as consumers we spend a certain amount of money on certain kinds of entertainment and if as a content producer you can catch enough people’s attention you can get a slice of that pie. We saw this with streaming services where an average household spent about $100/month on cable so Netflix, Hulu, et al all decided to price themselves such that they could be a portion of that pie (and would have loved to be the whole pie but ironically studios not willing to license everything to everyone is what prevented that).

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#158

Post by grg0 »

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #154
grg0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can't speak for all youtubers, but I do watch most GN and LTT videos and the complaints are legitimate, nor are they random jabronis yolo'ing hardware installations.

As far as I know, neither of them have had a card unintentionally light on fire. The whole thing started with Derbauer going to bat for a cable from some 3rd party vendor that he'd admitted he'd already plugged in and out of various cards something like 50 times. The actual instances that youtubers report on are all reddit posters and other random social media users who would clearly be better off getting a professio…

I'm sure the failure rates are blown out of proportion, I agree with that.

But the fact of the matter is that Nvidia has shifted from a consumer business to b2b, and they don't even give a shit about pretending they care anymore. People take beef with that, understandably, and when you couple that with the false marketing, the lack of inventory, the occasional hardware failure, missing ROPs, insane prices that nobody can afford and all the other shit that's wrong with these GPUs, then this is the end result.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#159

Post by paulbgd »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #139
cherioo wrote: post #9

High end GPU has over the last 5 years slowly turning from an enthusiast product into a luxury product. 5 or maybe 10 years ago, high-end GPU are needed to run games at reasonably eye candy setting. In 2025, $500 mid-range GPUs are more than enough. Folks all over can barely tell between High and Ultra settings, DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling. There's just no point to compete at $500 price point any mor…

Just going to focus on this one: > DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling. I've used all of these (at 4K, 120hz, set to "balanced") since they came out, and I just don't understand how people say this. FSR is a vaseline-like mess to me, it has its own distinct blurriness. Not as bad as naive upscaling, and I'll use it if no DLSS is available and the game doesn't run well, but it's distracting. Lossless is borde…

I’ve used fsr 4 and dlss 4, I’d say fsr 4 is a bit ahead of dlss 3 but behind dlss 4. No more vaseline smear

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#160

Post by scrubs »

grg0 wrote: post #150
scrubs wrote: post #125

Another perspective: Nvidia customer support on their mellanox purchase ...is total crap. It's the worst of corporate America ... paper pushing beurceatric guys who slow roll stuff ... getting to a smart person behind the customer reps requires one to be an ape in a bad mood 5x ... I think they're so used to that now that unless you go crazy mode their take is ... well I guess he wasn't serious about his ask and he d…

Corporate America actually resembles the state of government a lot too. Deceptive marketing, inflated prices that leave the average Joe behind, and low quality products on top of all that.

In the 1980s maybe a course correction was needed to help capitalism. But it's over corrected by 30%. I'm not knocking corporate america or capitalism in absolute terms. I am saying customers have lost power... whether it's phone trees, right to fix, a lack of accountability (2008 housing crisis), the ability to play endless accounting games to pay lower taxes plus all the more mundane things ... it's gotten out of whack.
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