Nvidia won, we all lost • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#251

Post by mcdeltat » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:22 AM UTC

Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful. Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us) don't need it.

It's staggering that we are throwing so many resources at marginal improvements for things like gaming, and I say that as someone whose main hobby used to be gaming. Ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS, etc at a price point of $3000 just for the GPU - who cares when a 2010 cell shaded game running on an upmarket toaster gave me the utmost joy? And the AI use cases don't impress me either - seems like all we do each generation is burn more power to shove more data through and pray for an improvement (collecting sweet $$$ in the meantime).

Another commenter here said it well, there's just so much more you can do with your life than follow along with this drama.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#252

Post by JeremyNT » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:31 AM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #119

frollogaston wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also playing PC video games doesn't even require a Nvidia GPU. It does sorta require Windows. I don't want to use that, so guess I lost the ability to waste tons of time playing boring games, oh no.

> It does sorta require Windows. The vast majority of my gaming library runs fine on Linux. Older games might run better than on Windows, in fact.

True for single player, but if you're into multiplayer games anti-cheat is an issue.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#253

Post by Gracana » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:31 AM UTC

ryao wrote: post #197

Gracana wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still has no fusing, sensing, or load balancing for the individual wires. It is a fire waiting to happen.

It is a connector. None of the connectors inside a PC have those. They could add them to the circuitry on the PCB side of the connector, but that is entirely separate from the connector. That said, the industry seems to be moving to adding detection into the PSU, given seasonic’s announcement: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-supplies/se... Finally, I think there is a simpler solution, which is to cha…

Previous well-designed video cards used the technologies I described. Eliminating the sense circuits and fusing is a recent development.

I do like the idea of just using big wires. It’d be so much cleaner and simpler. Also using 24 or 48V would be nice, but that’d be an even bigger departure from current designs.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#254

Post by cherioo » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:32 AM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #166

strictnein wrote: post #105

This really makes no sense: > This in turn sparked rumors about NVIDIA purposefully keeping stock low to make it look like the cards are in high demand to drive prices. And sure enough, on secondary markets, the cards go way above MSRP Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP, but they get almost all the hate for it. Why would they set themselves up for that? Scalpers are a retail wide problem. A…

> Scalpers are a retail wide problem. Acting like Nvidia has the insight or ability to prevent them is just silly. Oh trust me, they can combat it. The easiest way, which is what Nintendo often does for the launch of its consoles, is produce an enormous amount of units before launch. The steady supply to retailers, absolutely destroys folks ability to scalp. Yes a few units will be scalped, but most scalpers will be…

Switch 2 inventory was amazing, but how did RX 9070 inventory remotely sufficient? News at the time were all about how limited its availability https://www.tweaktown.com/news/103716/amd-rx-9070-xt-stock-a...

Not to mention it's nowhere to be found on Steam Hardware Survey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#255

Post by bamboozled » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:39 AM UTC

mcdeltat wrote: post #251

Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful. Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us) don't need it. It's staggering that w…

I remember when it was a serious difference, like PS1-PS3 was absolutely miraculous and exciting to watch.

It's also fun that no matter how fast the hardware seems to get, we seem to fill it up with shitty bloated software.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#256

Post by WhereIsTheTruth » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:43 AM UTC

Call it delusions or conspiracy theories, what ever, I don't care, but it seems to me that NVIDIA wants to vendor lock the whole industry

If all game developers begin to rely on NVIDIA technology, the industry as a whole puts customers in a position where they are forced to give in

The public's perception of RTX's softwarization (DLSS) and them coining the technical terms says it all

They have a long term plan, and that plan is:

- make all the money possible

- destroy all competition

- vendor lock the whole world

When I see that, I can't help myself but to think something is fishy:

https://i.imgur.com/WBwg6qQ.png

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#257

Post by philistine » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:45 AM UTC

mcdeltat wrote: post #251

Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful. Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us) don't need it. It's staggering that w…

Your disillusionment is warranted, but I'll say that on the Mac side the grass has never been greener. The M chips are screamers year after year, the GPUs are getting ok, the ML cores are incredible and actually useful.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#258

Post by yalok » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

a friend of mine is a SW developer in Nvidia, working on their drivers. He was complaining lately that he is required to fix a few bugs in the drivers code for the new card (RTX?), while not provided with the actual hardware. His pleas to send him this HW were ignored, but the demand to fix by a deadline kept being pushed.

He actually ended up buying older but somewhat similar used hardware with his personal money, to be able to do his work.

Not even sure if he was eventually able to expense it, but wouldn't be surprised if not, knowing how big companies bureaucracy works...

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#259

Post by ThatPlayer » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:55 AM UTC

imiric wrote: post #202

ThatPlayer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Running games at a lower resolution isn't new. I remember changing the size of the viewport in the original DOOM 1993 to get it to run faster. Making a lower resolution look better without having to run at a higher resolution is the exact same problem anti-aliasing has been tackling forever. DLSS is just another form of AA that is now so advanced, you can go from an even lower resolution and still look good.…

It's one thing to rely on a technique like AA to improve visual quality with negligible drawbacks. DLSS is entirely different though, since upscaling introduces all kinds of graphical issues, and frame generation[1] even more so, while adding considerable input latency. NVIDIA will claim that this is offset by its Reflex feature, but that has its own set of issues. So, sure, we can say that all of this is ultimately…

I don't disagree about frame-gen, but upscaling and its artifacts are not new nor unique to DLSS. Even later PS3 games upscaled from 720p to 1080p.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#260

Post by 827a » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:06 AM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #66

The thing is, company culture is a real thing. And some cultures are invasive/contagious like kudzu both internally to the company and into adjacent companies that they get comped against. The people get to thinking a certain way, they move around between adjacent companies at far higher rates than to more distant parts of their field, the executives start sitting on one another's boards, before you know it a whole s…

> Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs

Dude, no one talks about this and it drives me up the wall. The only way to guarantee modern CPUs from any cloud provider is to explicitly provision really new instance types. If you use any higher-level abstracted services (Fargate, Cloud Run, Lambda, whatever) you get salvation army second-hand CPUs from 15 years ago, you're billed by the second so the slower, older CPUs screw you over there, and you pay a 30%+ premium over the lower-level instances because its a "managed service". Its insane and extremely sad that so many customers put up with it.