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Nvidia won, we all lost

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Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#41

Post by porphyra »

The article complains about issues with consumer GPUs but those are nowadays relegated to being merely a side hobby project of Nvidia, whose core business is enterprise AI chips. Anyway Nvidia still has no significant competition from AMD on either front so they are still getting away with this.

Deceptive marketing aside, it's true that it's sad that we can't get 4K 60 Hz with ray tracing with current hardware without some kind of AI denoising and upscaling, but ray tracing is really just _profoundly_ hard so I can't really blame anyone for not having figured out how to put it in a consumer pc yet. There's a reason why pixar movies need huge render farms that take lots of time per frame. We would probably sooner get gaussian splatting and real time diffusion models in games than nice full resolution ray tracing tbh.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#42

Post by neuroelectron »

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 market is shrinking and whether it's by design or incompetence, this creates a new opportunity to acquire it wholesale for pennies on the dollar and build a wall around it and charge for entry. It's a natural result of games requiring NVidia developers for driver tuning, bitcoin/ai and buying out capacity to prevent competitors.

The wildcard I can't fit into this puzzle is Valve. They have a huge opportunity here but they also might be convinced that they have already saturated the market and will read the writing on the wall.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#43

Post by KerrAvon »

Nextgrid wrote: post #14

I wonder if the 12VHPWR connector is intentionally defective to prevent large-scale use of those consumer cards in server/datacenter contexts? The failure rate is just barely acceptable in a consumer use-case with a single card, but with multiple cards the probability of failure (which takes down the whole machine, as there's no way to hot-swap the card) makes it unusable. I can't otherwise see why they'd persevere o…

IANAL, but knowingly leaving a serious defect in your product at scale for that purpose would be very bad behavior and juries tend not like that sort of thing.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#44

Post by ohdeargodno »

kbolino wrote: post #22
bigyabai wrote: post #6

> Pretty much all upscalers force TAA for anti-aliasing and it makes the entire image on the screen look blurry as fuck the lower the resolution is. I feel like this is a misunderstanding, though I admit I'm splitting hairs here. DLSS is a form of TAA, and so is FSR and most other modern upscalers. You generally don't need an extra antialiasing pipeline if you're getting an artificially supersampled image. We've seen…

Every kind of TAA that I've seen creates artifacts around fast-moving objects. This may sound like a niche problem only found in fast-twitch games but it's cropped up in turn-based RPGs and factory/city builders. I personally turn it off as soon as I notice it. Unfortunately, some games have removed traditional MSAA as an option, and some are even making it difficult to turn off AA when TAA and FXAA are the only opti…

It's not that it's difficult to turn off TAA: it's that so many modern techniques do not work without temporal accumulation and anti-aliasing.

Ray tracing? Temporal accumulation and denoising. Irradiance cache? Temporal accumulation and denoising. most modern light rendering techniques cannot be done in time in a single frame. Add to that the fact that deferred or hybrid rendering makes implementing MSAA be anywhere between "miserable" and "impossible", and you have the situation we're in today.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#47

Post by transcriptase »

Nextgrid wrote: post #14

I wonder if the 12VHPWR connector is intentionally defective to prevent large-scale use of those consumer cards in server/datacenter contexts? The failure rate is just barely acceptable in a consumer use-case with a single card, but with multiple cards the probability of failure (which takes down the whole machine, as there's no way to hot-swap the card) makes it unusable. I can't otherwise see why they'd persevere o…

It boggles my mind that an army of the most talented electrical engineers on earth somehow fumble a power connector and then don’t catch it before shipping.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#48

Post by ohdeargodno »

dofubej wrote: post #32

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. Of course the fact that we overwhelmingly chose the better option means that… we are worse off or something?

Choosing the vendor locked in, standards hating brand does tend to mean that you inevitably get screwed when they decide do massively inflate their prices and there's nothing you can do about it does tend to make you worse off, yes.

Not that AMD was anywhere near being in a good state 10 years ago. Nvidia still fucked you over.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#49

Post by __turbobrew__ »

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us.

I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets.

I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooom and then cry and outrage when they are exploited instead of just walking away and doing something else.

Same with magic the gathering, the game went to shit and so many people got outraged and in a big huff but they still spend thousands on the hobby. I just stopped playing mtg.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#50

Post by Jabrov »

porphyra wrote: post #41

The article complains about issues with consumer GPUs but those are nowadays relegated to being merely a side hobby project of Nvidia, whose core business is enterprise AI chips. Anyway Nvidia still has no significant competition from AMD on either front so they are still getting away with this. Deceptive marketing aside, it's true that it's sad that we can't get 4K 60 Hz with ray tracing with current hardware withou…

I get ray tracing at 4K 60Hz with my 4090 just fine
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