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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?

#231

Post by eek2121 »

wnevets wrote: post #171
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…

You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.

That may or may not be an INTERNAL NVIDIA goal, or even a goal for multiple companies, however, that is NOT how the situation will play out.

The ecosystem isn't closed. TSMC doesn't exist in a vacuum. They may be the most advanced, however, there are a few reasons this will never work:

1) older fabs can be built in a garage by a smart person (it's been done a few times, I'd link the articles, but I don't have them handy)

2) Indie devs exist and often provide better gaming experience than AAA developers.

3) Old hardware/consoles exist, and will continue to exist for many decades to come (my Atari 2600 still works, as an example, and it it is older than I)

Sure, they MAY attempt to grab the market in this way. The attempt will backfire. Companies will go under, including possibly team green if they actually do exit the gaming market (because let's be real, at least in the U.S. a full blown depression is coming. When? No idea. However, yes, it's coming unless folks vote out the garbage.), and the player that doesn't give in, or possibly a chinese player that has yet to enter the market, will take over.

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

#232

Post by lotusw0w »

zozbot234 wrote: post #217
mikepurvis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity. You can argue that 1440p is a genuine (slight) improvement for super crisp text, but not for a game. HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

You sounded like someone who doesn’t have 1440p or 2160p.

I have a 77’ S95D and my 1080p Switch looked horrible. Try it also with a 1080p screen bigger than 27 inch.

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

#233

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #217
mikepurvis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity. You can argue that 1440p is a genuine (slight) improvement for super crisp text, but not for a game. HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

> 1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity.

Wow, what a load of bullshit. I bet you also think the human eye can't see more than 30 fps?

If you're sitting 15+ feet away from your screen, yeah, you can't tell the difference. But for most people, with their eyes only being 2-3 feet away from their monitor, the difference is absolutely noticeable.

> HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

HDR is an absolute game-changer, for sure. Ray-tracing is as well, especially once you learn to notice the artifacts created by shortcuts required to get reflections in raster-based rendering. It's like bad kerning. Something you never noticed before will suddenly stick out like a sore thumb and will bother the hell out of you.

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

#234

Post by TheAmazingRace »

ssl-3 wrote: post #195
guerrilla wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already here right now, unironically. There's no need for Windows for gaming now. I just build a new rig with a 7900 XTX and with Steam on Arch Linux everything just works with absolutely no hassle or thinking. This was the only value Windows still had and now that's over.

I broadly concur. These days, gaming is usually very easy on Linux. Except: If I want to kill some time being chaotic in GTA:V Online, and do that in Linux, then that is forbidden. Single player mode works beautifully, but multiplayer is verboten. (And I'm sure that there are other games that similarly feature very deliberate brokenness, but that's my example.)

This is the part where I just stick with console for specific titles, like the GTA franchise. I feel like Rockstar treats the PC as a second class citizen anyway.

I bought my PS5 Pro in anticipation of GTA 6 and the (hopefully) upcoming DragonQuest 12. May my prayers be answered.

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

#235

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

tinco wrote: post #120
bombcar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it still ran fine (20+ fps)

20 fps is not fine. I would consider that unplayable.

I expect at least 60, ideally 120 or more, as that's where the diminishing returns really start to kick in.

I could tolerate as low as 30 fps on a game that did not require precise aiming or reaction times, which basically eliminates all shooters.

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

#236

Post by senectus1 »

wnevets wrote: post #171
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…

You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.

I figured this out about 5 years ago. Its why each of my kids and my wife all have decent spec desktop PC's, and half of us use linux (I'll migrate the others later)

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

#237

Post by makeitdouble »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #104
makeitdouble wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mone…

> VR

To note, cost and hardware availability is I think one half of the critical reasons people don't get into VR (other half being the bulkiness and puke ?). In a roundabout way, GPU melting games helped get better hardware at mainstream prices. Until crypto and AI happened. And now the Steam Frame faced with the RAM price situation.

> 5 years

I don't play it, but Infinite Nikki comes to mind, and the visuals are the core experience. I wonder how much a game like Arcknight Enfield taxes the player hardware, given they're pushing the 3D modelling side.

I agree with you on the plateauing part, in that the gaming industry seems to have mostly shoved HDPI in the corner. It costs so much more to produce a game at that visual quality in the first place, and PC makers and benchmarks focus on FHD performance, so ROI is that lower on the marketing side.

It kinda makes me sad, like being told "8-bit art is enough for images, we should focus on composition, how many Vermeer or DaVinci like painters do we expect anyway ?"

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

#238

Post by thenthenthen »

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…

Wait what? Mac and ps5 can ‘crossplay’ video games? Or is ps5 a game?

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

#239

Post by encrypted_bird »

futureshock wrote: post #146
nerdsniper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without disagreeing with the broad strokes of your comment, it feels like 4K should be considered standard for consoles nowadays - a very usable 4K HDR TV can be had for $150-500.

Thats a waste of image quality for most people. You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. On PC you could be 2 feet from a huge gaming monitor, but an extremely small percentage of console players have the tv size and distance ratio where they would get much out of full 4k. Much better to spend the compute on higher framerate or higher detail settings.

> You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution.

Wait, are you sure you don't have that backward? IIUC, you don't[] notice the difference between a 2K display and a 4K display until you get up to larger screen sizes (say 60+ inches give or take a dozen inches; I don't have exact numbers :) ) and with those the optimal viewing range is like 4-8 feet away (depending on the screen size).

Either that or am I missing something...

[]Generally, anyway. A 4K resolution should definitely be visible at 1-2 feet away as noticeably crisper, but only slightly.

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