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The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?
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>What makes you think chinese firms wont also jump on the AI bandwagon? the bubble won't last that longThe only thing that will burst the bubble is electricity. The Dotcom bubble burst due to Dark Fiber, all because massive Internet backbones were easy to build, and the last mile to people's homes, was not. The current electrical grid cannot support the number of data centers being built. The ones that are planned on top of that... Well dark data centers will be the new dark fiber. There's more complexity to it all, but really it all boils down to power for this particular bubble.
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For accelerated rendering etc cuda is the standard, and because of it Nvidia. And it's like that for a lot of other niche areas. Accelerated encoding? NVIDIA, and CUDA again. Yes, AMD and Intel can generally do all that these days as well. But that's a much more recent thing. If all you want to do is game, sure that's not a big issue. But if you want to do anything more than gaming. Say video editing and rendering timelines. Nvidia had been the standard with a lot of inertia. To give an example of how badly AMD missed the boat. I have been using accelerated rendering on my gt 750 in blender for a decade now. The card came out early 2014. The first AMD card capable of that came out one month before the end of 2020. Nearly a 7 year difference! I'm looking at a recent Intel arc or battle mage card or a 6xxx series AMD ATM. Because I run BSD/Linux and Nvidia has traditionally been a necessary PITA. But with both of them now supporting my workflows. Nvidia is much less necessary. Others will eventually leave too. As long as AMD and Intel don't fuck it up for themselves.Yeah I mean you are preaching to the choir there. I picked up a used 3090 because rocm on the 7900 was in such a poor state. *** That being said, much of what you describe is just software obstinacy. AMD (for example) has had hardware encoding since early 2012, with the 7970, and Intel quicksync has long been a standard on laptops. It’s just a few stupid propriety bits that never bothered to support it. CUDA is indeed extremely entrenched in some areas, like anything involving PyTorch or Blender’s engines. But a lot has no good reason to not work on AMD/Intel.
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Games and gaming have fully become like Hollywood and Silicon Valley and I expect zero good things from them at this point. As with movies and music, now most of the good stuff will be from individuals and smaller enterprises. The fact is today's GPUs have enough power to do extraordinary things. The hardware these days moves so fast, no one is squeezing any performance out of anything like they used to have to do. And not every game needs photo realistic ray traced graphics, so these GPUs will be fine for many gamers so long as they remain supported through drivers.
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Seriously. Why would I care that a billion dollar corporation who exploited the market to maximize their revenue is leaving? "Bye bitch."I don't understand the hate on Nvidia. They raised their prices, people kept paying those prices. AMD has always been there, not quite as good. People who are willing to pay for the brand they want are the problem. Oh nooo I have to render at 2k instead of 4k how will my poor eyes survive?!?
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>What makes you think chinese firms wont also jump on the AI bandwagon? the bubble won't last that long
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Yeah I mean you are preaching to the choir there. I picked up a used 3090 because rocm on the 7900 was in such a poor state. *** That being said, much of what you describe is just software obstinacy. AMD (for example) has had hardware encoding since early 2012, with the 7970, and Intel quicksync has long been a standard on laptops. It’s just a few stupid propriety bits that never bothered to support it. CUDA is indeed extremely entrenched in some areas, like anything involving PyTorch or Blender’s engines. But a lot has no good reason to not work on AMD/Intel.Yes, the software will get there long before many people's hearts and minds. As you said already is in many cases. The inertia Nvidia got by being early is why they're so dominant now. But I think Nvidia's focus on crypto and now data center AI is set to hurt them long term. Only time will tell, and they're technically swimming in it ATM. But I'm getting out now.
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I don't understand the hate on Nvidia. They raised their prices, people kept paying those prices. AMD has always been there, not quite as good. People who are willing to pay for the brand they want are the problem. Oh nooo I have to render at 2k instead of 4k how will my poor eyes survive?!?That didn't happen in a vacuum. For a lot of us we do more than game. And there legitimately wasn't an alternative till much more recently. For instance, for Over a decade. If you were rendering out, a hardware accelerated video through Premiere. It was likely with an Nvidia card. Raytracing, Nvidia has been king at that since long before the 2000 series. It's changing slowly. Thank goodness. I'm more than happy to be able to ditch Nvidia myself.
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The bubble might burst, but there are real use cases for AI out there and therefore you will see AI in use even after the current ponzi scheme has collapsed. You can do great voice and handwriting recognition now and speech generation and that won't go away.
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- Nvidia abandons x86 desktop gamers - The only hardware that gamers own are ARM handhelds - Some gamers stream x86 games, but devs start selling ARM builds since the x86 market is shrinking - AI bubble pops - Nvidia tries to regain x86 desktop gamers - Gamers are almost entirely on ARM - Nvidia pulls an IBM and vanishes quietly into enterprise services and not much else
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The only thing that will burst the bubble is electricity. The Dotcom bubble burst due to Dark Fiber, all because massive Internet backbones were easy to build, and the last mile to people's homes, was not. The current electrical grid cannot support the number of data centers being built. The ones that are planned on top of that... Well dark data centers will be the new dark fiber. There's more complexity to it all, but really it all boils down to power for this particular bubble.or lack of use? the current trend is fueled by hype that AI can do everything and will sub 50% of the work force, another nightmare scenario… however, current AI may be an Ok tool for some jobs and not much more, dsthe world does not need 200 Gwatts of AI datacentres to produce memes
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Yes, the software will get there long before many people's hearts and minds. As you said already is in many cases. The inertia Nvidia got by being early is why they're so dominant now. But I think Nvidia's focus on crypto and now data center AI is set to hurt them long term. Only time will tell, and they're technically swimming in it ATM. But I'm getting out now.CUDA is actually pretty cool, especially in the early days when there was nothing like it. And Intel/AMD attempts at alternatives have been as mixed as their corporate dysfunction. And Nvidia has long has a focus on other spaces, like VR, AR, dataset generation, augmented reality and stuff. If every single LLM thing disappeared overnight in a puff of smoke, they’d be fine. It that I’m an apologist for them being total jerks, but I don’t want to act like CUDA isn’t useful, either.
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That didn't happen in a vacuum. For a lot of us we do more than game. And there legitimately wasn't an alternative till much more recently. For instance, for Over a decade. If you were rendering out, a hardware accelerated video through Premiere. It was likely with an Nvidia card. Raytracing, Nvidia has been king at that since long before the 2000 series. It's changing slowly. Thank goodness. I'm more than happy to be able to ditch Nvidia myself.I think "lot" is probably overstating but I don't have numbers. I don't know too much about ray tracing but I do know AMD is bad at it. But in the context of games I grew up with perfect dark. I can handle imperfect reflections and shadows. Really anyone can, but when you're shopping for things you tend to get caught up in wanting the best shiny new hotness and if you ignore the impacts of your choices and have infinite money, Nvidia is the clear winner. We just have now reached the inevitable outcome of that path.
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PC gaming itself will hardly change, because AMD cards work just fucking fine. They've only ever been a little bit behind on the high end. They've routinely been the better value for money, and offered a much lower low end. If they don't have to keep chasing the incomparable advantages Nvidia pulls out of their ass, maybe they can finally get serious about heterogenous compute. Or hey, maybe Nvidia ditching us would mean AMD finds the testicular fortitude to *clone CUDA already,* so we can end this farce of proprietary computation for your own god-damn code. Making any PC component single-vendor should've seen Nvidia chopped in half, long before this stupid bubble. Meanwhile: Cloud gaming isn't real. Anywhere after 1977, the idea that consumers would buy half a computer and phone in to a mainframe was a joke. The up-front savings were negligible and difference in capabilities did not matter. All you missed out on were your dungeon-crawlers being multiplayer, and mainframe operators kept trying to delete those programs anyway. Once home internet became commonplace even that difference vanished. As desktop prices rose and video encoding sped up, people kept selling the idea you'll buy a dumb screen and pay to play games somewhere else. You could even use your phone! Well... nowadays your phone can run Unreal 5. And a PS5 costs as much as my dirt-cheap eMachines from the AOL era, *before* inflation. That console will do raytracing, except games don't use it much, because it doesn't actually look better than how hard we've cheated with rasterization. So what the fuck is a datacenter going to offer, with 50ms of lag and compression artifacts? Who expects it's going to be cheaper, as we all juggle five subscriptions for streaming video?
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- Nvidia abandons x86 desktop gamers - The only hardware that gamers own are ARM handhelds - Some gamers stream x86 games, but devs start selling ARM builds since the x86 market is shrinking - AI bubble pops - Nvidia tries to regain x86 desktop gamers - Gamers are almost entirely on ARM - Nvidia pulls an IBM and vanishes quietly into enterprise services and not much elseNvidia does not care about the ISA of the CPU at all. They don't make it after all. Also not clear how they would kill x86. If they leave the market they cede it to AMD and Intel.