Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 290 posts

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

#161

Post by WackyFighter »

filleduchaos wrote: post #134
WackyFighter wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hinging your impression of the domain on what Google (notoriously not really a player in the gaming world) tried and failed will not exactly give you the most accurate picture. You might as well hinge your impression of how successful a game engine can be on Amazon's attempts at it. GeForce NOW and Xbox Cloud are much more sensible projects to look at/evaluate than Stadia.

It doesn't matter who does it. To stream you need to send the player input across the net, process, render and then send that back to the client. There is no way to eliminate that input lag.

Any game that is requires high APM (Action Per Minute) will be horrible to play via streaming.

I feel as if I shouldn't really need to explain this on this site, because it should be blindingly obvious that this will always be an issue with any streamed games for the same reason you have a several seconds lag between what happening on a live sports event and what you see on the screen.

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

#162

Post by cyber_kinetist »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #145
treyd wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Current datacenter GPUs are optimized for LLM compute, not for real-time rendering. The economics for running such beefy GPUs just for game streaming won't add up.

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

#163

Post by venturecruelty »

ryandrake wrote: post #106

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 th…

We'd need our government to actually enforce antitrust laws that have been on the books for about a century. Good luck.

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

#164

Post by Animats »

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…

> It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in games anymore.

Have you seen the GTA VI trailer?

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

#165

Post by gmueckl »

dijit wrote: post #116
jeltz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how much work and effort a game requires these days to meet even the minimum expectations they have.

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

#166

Post by the_pwner224 »

mdip wrote: post #95
snvzz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RX 7900gre, can confirm as much.

Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after that. My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite,…

For games that have FSR built-in you can enable it in the game settings, then it'll only scale up the game content while rendering the HUD at native resolution. And can use the better upscaling algorithms that rely on internal game engine data / motion vectors, should reduce artifacts.

The other cool things is they also have Frame Gen available in the driver to apply to any game, unlike DLSS FG which only works on a few games. You can toggle it on in the AMD software just below the Super Res option. I quickly tried it in a few games and it worked great if you're already getting 60+ FPS, no noticeable artifacts. Though going from 30=>60 doesn't work, too many artifacts. And the extra FPS are only visible in the AMD software's FPS counter overlay, not in other FPS counter overlays.

I recently got a Asus Rog Flow Z13 gaming "tablet" with the AMD Strix Halo APU. It has a great CPU + shared RAM + ridiculously powerful iGPU. Doesn't have the brute power of my previous desktop with a 4090, but this thing can handle the same games at 4k with upscaling on high settings (no raytracing), it's shockingly capable for its compact form factor.

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

#167

Post by ogogmad »

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…

That might be a bit on the paranoid side. It could just be that it's far more profitable right now for companies to sell only to data centres. That way, they don't need to spend money on advertising, or share their revenues with third-party sellers.

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

#168

Post by venturecruelty »

_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.

Yeah, sure, every tech company now acts like a craven monopolist hellbent on destroying everything that isn't corporate-driven AI computing, but not this time! This time will be different!

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

#170

Post by thom »

Is there any path for Microsoft and NVIDIA to work together and resurrect some sort of transparent SLI layer for consumer workloads? It’d take the pressure off the high end of the market a little and also help old cards hold value for longer, which would be a boon if, for example, your entire economy happened to be balanced on top of a series of risky loans against that hardware.
Post reply on HN