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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?

#91

Post by bitwize »

makeitdouble wrote: post #61
pjmlp wrote: post #7

It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs, instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.

On graphics: there is a threshold where realistic graphics make the difference. Not all games need to be that, but Ghost of Tsushima in GBA Pokemon style is not the same game at all. And is it badly designed ? I also don't think so. Same for many VR games which make immersion meaningful in itself. We can all come up with a litany of bad games, AAA or indie, but as long as there's a set of games fully pushing the enve…

Daikatana in GBC style turned into a good game, lol.

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

#92

Post by georgefrowny »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #74
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…

> I think it would be a good thing. This is an insane thing to say. > Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience that spend a lot of money on games. It’s totally fine and good to build premium content…

> This is an insane thing to say.

I don't think it's insane. In that hypothetical case, it would be a slightly painful experience for some people that the top end is a bit curtailed for a few years while game developers learn to target other cards, hopefully in some more portable way. But also feeling hard done by because your graphics hardware is stuck at 2025 levels for a bit is not that much of hardship really, is it? In fact, if more time is spent optimising for non-premium cards, perhaps the premium card that you already have will work better then the next upgrade would have.

It's not inconceivable that the overall result is a better computing ecosystem in the long run. The open source space in particular, where Nvidia has long been problematic. Or maybe it'll be a multi decade gaming winter, but unless gamers stop being willing to throw large amounts of money chasing the top end, someone will want that money even if Nvidia didn't.

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

#93

Post by wmf »

_23sd wrote: post #70

This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.

It's not related to the DRAM shortage. Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI and there was controversy years before that about most "gaming" GPUs going to crypto miners. They won't exit the gaming market but from a shareholder perspective it does look like a good idea.

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

#94

Post by pdpi »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #50
shmeeed wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Presumably you mean Intel’s integrated GPUs? They do have the Arc line of discrete GPUs now, and those are a bit more than a frame buffer with a clever blitter.

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

#95

Post by mdip »

snvzz wrote: post #21
jaapz wrote: post #12

AMD will be very happy when they do. They are already making great cards, currently running an RX7800XT (or something like that), and it's amazing. Linux support is great too

RX 7900gre, can confirm as much.

Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after that.

My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite, not Cyberpunk 2077)

There are many caveats there, of course. AMD's biggest problem is in the drivers/implementation for that card. Unlike NVidia's similar technology, it requires setting the game at a lower resolution which it then "fixes" and it tends to produce artifacts depending on the game/how high those settings go. It's a lot harder to juggle the settings between the driver and the game than it should be.

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

#96

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

> 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.

B200 doesn't have any graphics capabilities. The datacenter chips don't have any graphical units, it's just wasted die space.

As long as gaming GPUs will compete for same wafer space that AI chips use, the AI chips will be far more profitable to NVIDIA

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

#97

Post by makeitdouble »

Apocryphon wrote: post #66
makeitdouble wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The whole point is to convey details of an area you never lived in, of an actual place you never visited. I'd make the same argument for Half-Life Alyx or BioHazard, the visceral reaction you get from a highly detailed and textured world works at a different level than just "knowing" what you have in front of your eyes. Your brain is not filling the gaps, it is taking in the art of the creator.

Eh, eye of the beholder. It's made all the funnier that Ghosts of Tsushima has a Kurosawa Mode that converts all that detail into monochrome. RE 7 Biohazard was made for the PS4! And its VR version and Half-Life Alyx probably do require higher graphical fidelity, as VR games are not exactly the same thing as regular video games.

> VR games are not exactly the same thing as regular video games.

That might be the fundamental divide, for that category of games I'm more on the VR camp and will settle for 2D only for convenience or availability.

I see it with different expectations than games like Persona or Zelda (or GTA?) which could compete solely on the mechanics and a lot more, and I get the feeling you're comparing it more to these genres?

Biohazard on PS4 was very meh to me, at that level I feel it could get down to Switch graphics to prioritize better game mechanics and more freedom of play. I never loved the clunkiness, as an action games it's pretty frustrating, and the VR game is even worse in gameplay quality. The immersiveness in VR is the only redeeming quality IMHO.

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

#98

Post by ssl-3 »

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".

I don't like football. Can we add football fans into the mix of people we're punching down on, alongside the gamers and the meth heads?

Thank you for your consideration.

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

#99

Post by bilegeek »

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…

> 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.

They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses.

Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.

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

#100

Post by rhco »

_23sd wrote: post #70

This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.

If Nvidia did drop their gaming GPU lineup, it would be a huge re-shuffling in the market: AMD's market share would 10x over night, and it would open a very rare opportunity for minority (or brand-new?) players to get a foothold.

What happens then if the AI bubble crashes? Nvidia has given up their dominant position in the gaming market and made room for competitors to eat some (most?) of their pie, possibly even created an ultra-rare opportunity for a new competitor to pop up. That seems like a very short-sighted decision.

I think that we will instead see Nvidia abusing their dominant position to re-allocate DRAM away from gaming, as a sector-wide thing. They'll reduce gaming GPU production while simultaneously trying to prevent AMD or Intel from ramping up their own production.

It makes sense for them to retain their huge gaming GPU market share, because it's excellent insurance against an AI bust.

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