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Nvidia won, we all lost

blog.sebin-nyshkim.net

411–420 of 599 posts

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#411
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wait, what happened with EVGA? (guess I can search it up, of course) I was browsing gaming PC hardware recently and noticed none of the GPUs were from EVGA .. I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\

EVGA was angry because nVidia wouldn't pay them for attempts at scalping which failed.

I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give the benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing scalping with MSRP-baiting.

It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or even make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and develop the IP cores, and they contract with TSMC and others to make the chips, and they do make limited runs of "Founders Edition" cards, but most cards that are available to consumers undergo final assembly and retail boxing according to the specs of the partner -- ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc.

MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP without consulting any of its partners and then those partners go and assemble the graphics cards and have to charge more than that to make a reasonable profit. This has been going on for many GPU generations now, but it's not scalping. We can question why this "partnership" model even exists in the first place, since these middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand here and thus the lion's share of the blame.

Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices, causing a supply shortage, so that they can resell the cards at higher prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct control over this (though I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out that there was some insider involvement), they also never do very much to address it either. Getting all the hate for this without directly reaping the monetary benefit sounds irrational at first, but artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are real business tactics.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#413
It has been decades since I did any electronics, and even then only as a hobby doing self-build projects, but the power feed management (obviously a key part of such a high current and expensive component in a system) is shameful.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#414
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

`I think it also has a way to automatically translate CUDA calls` I suspect the thing you're referring to is ZLUDA[0], it allows you to run CUDA code on a range of non NVidia hardware (for some value of "run"). [0] https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

For an extremely flexible value of "run" that you would be extremely unwise to allow anywhere near a project whose success you have a stake in.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#415

Why was the title of this post changed long after posting to something that doesn't match the article title? This editorializing goes directly against HN Guidelines (but was presumably done by the HN team?)

+1. "Nvidia won, we all lost" sets a very different tone than "NVIDIA is full of shit". It's clearly not the tone the author intended to set.

Even more concerning is that, by editorializing the title of an article that is (in part) about how Nvidia uses their market dominance to pressure reviewers and control the narrative, we must question whether or not the mod team is complicit in this effort.

Is team green afraid that a title like "NVIDIA is full of shit" on the front page of HN is bad for their image or stock price? Was HN pressured to change the name?

Sometimes, editorialization is just a dumb and lazy mistake. But editorializing something like this is a lot more concerning. And it's made worse by the fact that the title was changed by the mods.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#416
post #378

I'm a gamer and love my AMD gpu. I do not give a shit about ray tracing, frame generation, or 4k gaming. I can play all modern fps at 500fps+. I really wish the market wasn't so trendy and people bought what worked for them.

Yeah I was exactly the same as you for years, holding out against what I considered to be unecessary exrtravagence. That was until I got a 4k monitor at work and experienced 4k HDR gaming. I immediately went out and bought an RTX 4070 and a 4k monitor and I will never be going back. The experience is glorious and I was a fool for not jumping sooner.

4K HDR gaming is not the future, is has been the standard for many years now for good reason.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#417
post #403

Jenson has managed to kneel into every market boom in a reasonable amount of time with his GPUs and tech (hardware and software). No doubt he will be there when the next boom kicks off too. Microsoft fails consistently ... even when offered a lead on the plate... it fails, but these failures are eventually corrected for by the momentum of its massive business units. Apple is just very very late... but this failure ca…

What is the next boom? I honestly can’t think of one. Feels like we are just at the Age of the Plateau, which will be quite painful for markets and the world.

Re: Nvidia won, we all lost

#418

Why was the title of this post changed long after posting to something that doesn't match the article title? This editorializing goes directly against HN Guidelines (but was presumably done by the HN team?)

+1. "Nvidia won, we all lost" sets a very different tone than "NVIDIA is full of shit". It's clearly not the tone the author intended to set. Even more concerning is that, by editorializing the title of an article that is (in part) about how Nvidia uses their market dominance to pressure reviewers and control the narrative, we must question whether or not the mod team is complicit in this effort. Is team green afraid…

Okay let’s take off the tin foil hat for a second. HN has a very strong moderation team with years and years of history letting awkward (e.g. criticism of YC, YC companies) things stand.
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