Nvidia won, we all lost • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#311

Post by chris11 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:19 AM UTC

alright2565 wrote: post #223

ryao wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone made 12VHPWR cables that replace the 12 little wires with 2 large gauge wires yet? That would prevent the wires from becoming unbalanced, which should preempt the melting connector problem. As a bonus, if the gauge is large enough, the cable would actually cool the connectors, although that should not be necessary since the failure appears to be caused by overloaded wires dumping heat into the connector as…

Might help a little bit, by heatsinking the contacts better, but the problem is the contact resistance, not the wire resistance. The connector itself dangerously heats up. Or at least I think so? Was that a different 12VHPWR scandal?

I think it's both contact and wire resistance.

It is technically possible to solder a new connector on. LTT did that in a video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzwrLLg1RR4

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#312

Post by Rapzid » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:19 AM UTC

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #135

The real issue here is actually harebrained youtubers stirring up drama for views. That's 80% of the problem. And their viewers (and readers, for that which makes it into print) eat it up. Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly, posting to social media, and youtubers jumping on the trend for likes. These are 99% user error issues drummed up by non-professionals (a…

GN were the OG "fake framers" going back to their constant casting shade on DLSS, ignoring it on their reviews, and also crapping on RT.

AI upscaling, AI denoising, and RT were clearly the future even 6 years ago. CDPR and the rest of the industry knew it, but outlets like GN pushed a narrative(borderline conspiracy) the developers were somehow out of touch and didn't know what they were talking about?

There is a contingent of gamers who play competitive FPS. Most of which are, like in all casual competitive hobbies, not very good. But they ate up the 240hz rasterization be-all meat GN was feeding them. Then they think they are the majority and speak for all gamers(as every loud minority on the internet does).

Fast forward 6 years and NVidia is crushing the Steam top 10 GPU list, AI rendering techniques are becoming ubiquitous, and RT is slowly edging out rasterization.

Now that the data is clear the narrative is most consumers are "suckers" for purchasing NVidia, Nintendo, and etc. And the content creator economy will be there to tell them they are right.

Edit: I believe too some of these outlets had chips on their shoulder regarding NVidia going way back. So AMDs poor RT performance and lack of any competitive answer the the DLSS suite for YEARS had them lying to themselves about where the industry was headed. Essentially they were running interference for AMD. Now that FSR4 is finally here it's like AI upscaling is finally ok.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#313

Post by SSLy » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:24 AM UTC

datagram wrote: post #309

darkoob12 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a gamer and don't why AMD GPUs aren't good enough. It's weird since both Xbox and PlayStation are using AMD GPUs. I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and ignore large console market.

AMD cards are fine from a raw performance perspective, but Nvidia has built themselves a moat of software/hardware features like ray-tracing, video encoding, CUDA, DLSS, etc where AMD's equivalents have simply not been as good. With their current generation of cards AMD has caught up on all of those things except CUDA, and Intel is in a similar spot now that they've had time to improve their drivers, so it's pretty e…

AMD RT is still slower than Nvidia's.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#314

Post by simonh » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:25 AM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #183

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I purchased "approximately $0.00" in TF2 loot boxes. How much exactly? Left as an exercise to the reader.

This is too clever for me, I think - 0?

Approximately. +/- 0

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#315

Post by datagram » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:28 AM UTC

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…

The fact that we're calling $500 GPUs "midrange" is proof that Nvidia's strategy is working.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#316

Post by Rapzid » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:35 AM UTC

yunyu wrote: post #13

If you are a gamer, you are no longer NVIDIA's most important customer.

Sounds like an opening for AMD then. But as long as NVidia has the best tech I'll keep buying it when it's time to upgrade.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#317

Post by Kon5ole » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:37 AM UTC

TSMC can only make about as many Nvidia chips as OpenAI and the other AI guys wants to buy. Nvidia releases gpus made from basically the shaving leftovers from the OpenAI products, which makes them limited in supply and expensive.

So gamers have to pay much more and wait much longer than before, which they resent.

Some youtubers make content that profit from the resentment so they play fast and loose with the fundamental reasons in order to make gamers even more resentful. Nvidia has "crazy prices" they say.

But they're clearly not crazy. 2000 dollar gpus appear in quantities of 50+ from time to time at stores here but they sell out in minutes. Lowering the prices would be crazy.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#318

Post by ehnto » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:39 AM UTC

MangoToupe wrote: post #173

neuroelectron wrote: post #42

Seems a bit calculated and agreed across the industry. What can really make sense of Microsoft's acquisitions and ruining of billion dollar IPs? It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming industry. They want to centralize control of the market and make it a service based (rent seeking) sector. I'm not saying they all got together and decided this together but their wonks are probably all saying the same thing. The ma…

> It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming industry. They want to centralize control of the market and make it a service based (rent seeking) sector. It also won’t work, and Microsoft has developed no way to compete on actual value. As much as I hate the acquisitions they’ve made, even if Microsoft as a whole were to croak tomorrow I think the game industry would be fine.

New stars would arise, others suggesting the games industry would collapse and go away is like saying the music industry collapsing would stop people from making music.

Yes games can be expensive to make, but they don't have to be, and millions will still want new games to play. It is actually a pretty low bar for entry to bring an indie game to market (relative to other ventures). A triple A studio collapse would probably be an amazing thing for gamers, lots of new and unique indie titles. Just not great for profit for big companies, a problem I am not concerned with.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#319

Post by izacus » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:39 AM UTC

lukeschlather wrote: post #224

rkagerer wrote: post #163

I am a volunteer firefighter and hold a degree in electrical engineering. The shenanigans with their shunt resistors, and ensuing melting cables, is in my view criminal. Any engineer worth their salt would recognize pushing 600W through a bunch of small cables with no contingency if some of them have failed is just asking for trouble. These assholes are going to set someone's house on fire. I hope they get hit with a…

Also, like, I kind of want to play with these things, but also I'm not sure I want a computer that uses 500W+ in my house, let alone just a GPU. I might actually be happy to buy one of these things, at the inflated price, and run it at half voltage or something... but I can't tell if that is going to fix these concerns or they're just bad cards.

With 5080 using 300W, talking about 500W is a bit of an exaggeration, isn't it?

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#320

Post by jezze » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 7:43 AM UTC

datagram wrote: post #309

darkoob12 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a gamer and don't why AMD GPUs aren't good enough. It's weird since both Xbox and PlayStation are using AMD GPUs. I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and ignore large console market.

AMD cards are fine from a raw performance perspective, but Nvidia has built themselves a moat of software/hardware features like ray-tracing, video encoding, CUDA, DLSS, etc where AMD's equivalents have simply not been as good. With their current generation of cards AMD has caught up on all of those things except CUDA, and Intel is in a similar spot now that they've had time to improve their drivers, so it's pretty e…

I have no experience of using it so I might be wrong but AMD has ROCm which has something called HIP that should be comparable to CUDA. I think it also has a way to automatically translate CUDA calls into HIP as well so it should work without the need to modify your code.