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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?

#41

Post by cwzwarich »

fxtentacle wrote: post #27

I don’t think they can. NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU. The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce…

Nvidia doesn't share dies between their high-end datacenter products like B200 and consumer products. The high-end consumer dies have many more SMs than a corresponding datacenter die. Each has functionality that the other does not within an SM/TPC, nevermind the very different fabric and memory subsystem (with much higher bandwidth/SM on the datacenter parts). They run at very different clock frequencies. It just wouldn't make sense to share the dies under these constraints, especially when GPUs already present a fairly obvious yield recovery strategy.

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

#42

Post by ulrashida »

coldtea wrote: post #38
ulrashida wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was tempted to respond with an offhand comment about the size of the industry or similar, but what axe do you have to grind about PC gaming? You'd prefer folks go to the far more injurious mobile gaming space?

> You'd prefer folks go to the far more injurious mobile gaming space? No, I prefer them touching grass and talking to some people, or getting a less addictive and time-wasting hobby.

That's a worthwhile view, but unlikely to occur. You may as well wish away casinos and alcohol while you're at it.

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

#43

Post by Bridged7756 »

sombragris wrote: post #33

I doubt that this would ever happen. But... If it does, I think it would be a good thing. The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs. Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore…

True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware.

Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.

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

#44

Post by tavavex »

coldtea wrote: post #37
newsclues wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hate gamers? Why? Why can’t you let people enjoy their hobby?

For the same reason I don't like alcoholism or meth use or gambling or porn addiction, even when the person "enjoys them".

That's one hell of a long shot. Are your views applicable to the rest of the entertainment industry? There's plenty of people wasting away in front on Netflix, after all. Or why just entertainment, any "useless" hobbies that are repeatedly done for fun but have no real productive output. Is any comparable "pleasurable" activity that also hooks a minority of people in an unhealthy way bad, or just gaming?

But what's most insane is trying to draw any parallels between gaming and these other things - something that was literally engineered to ruin human lives, biologically (hard drugs) or psychologically (gambling). The harm and evil caused by these two industries is incomprehensible (especially the legal parts of them, like alcohol and casino gambling/sports betting/online gambling), and trying to fit gaming in among them both downplays the amount of suffering inflicted by gambling and hard drugs, as well as villainizes normal people - like the hundreds of millions of people who play games in a sane, non-problematic way or indie game devs who make games because they want to express themselves artistically.

Anyways, I gotta log off HN for a while. I can feel my gaming withdrawal kicking in. I've bankrupted myself four times by only spending my money on gaming, and I've been in and out of rehab centres and ERs as I've been slowly destroying my body with gaming in a spiral of deadly addiction. I think I'll have to panhandle and threaten strangers on the street to buy some Steam cards.

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

#45

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

newsclues wrote: post #18
pjmlp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real, CoD only appeals to a small community in the whole planet.

Millions of people.

CoD has less players than Team Fortress 2 currently, according to Valve's charts: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed . And TF2 has ancient graphics.

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

#47

Post by archagon »

Bridged7756 wrote: post #43
sombragris wrote: post #33

I doubt that this would ever happen. But... If it does, I think it would be a good thing. The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs. Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore…

True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.

I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.

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

#48

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

newsclues wrote: post #39
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a question of want. Gaming will exist in some form so I am simply uncertain what you are concerned about. Can you elaborate a little? What, exactly, is your concern here? That you won't have nvidia as a choice? That AMD will be the only game in town? That gpu market will move from duopoly ( for gaming specifically ) to monopoly? I have little to go on, but I don't really want to put words in your mouth base…

I want a local gaming machine that I control. Not a locked ecosystem console or a streaming service with lag! I think if nvidia leaves the market for AI, why wouldn’t AMD and intel, with the memory cartel. So DIY market is gone. That kills lots of companies and creators that rely on the gaming market. It’s a doom spiral for a lot of the industry. If gaming is just PlayStation and switch and iGPUs there is a lot less…

Interesting. Does nvidia offer control? Last time I checked they arbitrarily updated their drivers to degrade unwelcome use case ( in that case, for crypto ). It sounds to me like the opposite of that.

Separately, do you think they won't try to ingratiate themselves to gamers again once AI market changes?

Do you not think they are part of the cartel anyway ( and the DIY market exists despite that )?

How? One use case is gone. Granted, not a small one and one with an odd type of.. fervor, but relatively small nonetheless. At best, DIY market shifts to local inference machines and whatnot. Unless you specifically refer to gaming market..

Markets change all the time. EA is king of the mountain. EA is filing for bankruptcy. Circle of life.

Edit: ALso, upon some additional consideration and in the spirit of christmas, fuck the streamers ( aka creators ). With very, very limited exceptions, they actively drive what is mostly wrong with gaming these days. Fuck em. And that is before we get to the general retardation they contribute to.

How? For AAA? Good. Fuck em. We have been here before and were all better for it.

Am I reading it right? AMD and Intel is just for consoles?

It is an assertion without any evidence OR a logical cause and effect.

So far, I am not buying it.

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

#49

Post by shmeeed »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #28
snvzz wrote: post #20

If NVIDIA exits the market, there is still AMD, Intel and PowerVR (Imagination Technologies is back at making discrete PC GPUs, although currently only in China).

Unfortunately none of those are any use for video work.

Is that due to some kind of issue with the architecture, or just a matter of software support?

In the latter case, I'd expect patches for AMD or Intel to become a priority pretty quickly. After all, they need their products to run on systems that customers can buy.

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

#50

Post by ErroneousBosh »

shmeeed wrote: post #49
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately none of those are any use for video work.

Is that due to some kind of issue with the architecture, or just a matter of software support? In the latter case, I'd expect patches for AMD or Intel to become a priority pretty quickly. After all, they need their products to run on systems that customers can buy.

Well, they don't support CUDA and I don't see CUDA coming to AMD any time soon.

Intel is just plain not capable of it because it's not really a GPU, more a framebuffer with a clever blitter.

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