8 ms·

I'm sure NVIDIA is a serious pain in the ass to deal with (Linus_middle_finger.gif), but perhaps one of the unspoken reasons is that, as suggested by the rumor

by qzw 4y ago

I'm sure NVIDIA is a serious pain in the ass to deal with (Linus_middle_finger.gif), but perhaps one of the unspoken reasons is that, as suggested by the rumor mill, there's a serious oversupply problem with next gen GPUs. NVIDIA and AMD placed orders with the foundries based on the ridiculous demand levels they were seeing in the last couple of years, but now demand has cooled off from both crypto (Ethereum merge) and gamers (waiting for new gen), so there's still plenty of current gen stock sitting around. Supposedly they tried to cancel some of the volume with the foundries, but were not allowed to. So maybe EVGA is seeing the writing on the wall and getting out ahead of the game. I'm sure putting up with all of NVIDIA's crap is barely worth it even when making a decent profit. But it's definitely not worth it to EVGA if their cards will just to end up languishing in the bargain bin along with everyone else's.

mattigames 4y ago
Who would have imagined that adjusting your production rates over the most volatile and unstable asset AKA Cryptocoins would be a bad idea.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  And that's the second time they've done this, after 2018 crypto crash.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    third. there was another mining boom back in 2014 when it was bitcoin being gpu-mined. It fucked with AMD's Hawaii/290X launch really badly back then - the cards were unobtanium for months and months which gave NVIDIA an opening to launch Maxwell. Then the prices crashed and miners dumped their inventory, so you had new aftermarket 290Xs being sold for $250-300 to try and compete with mining cards, with used/refurb 290 non-X bottoming out around $175. I'm sure the idea that infinity cache decreases the relative mining performance was in everyone's minds at AMD when they were designing RDNA2 - by that point they'd had two major launches (vega too) fucked up by mining, and using more cache/less VRAM bandwidth makes your mining performance worse relative to raster, because mining loads aren't cachable.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I mean, the supply shortage was a big problem for people that just wanted to play a game. My GPU died and I had to buy a used RTX Titan (in the 3090 era) just to have anything. (It's great though, I use it for gaming, ray tracing, and machine learning. Still looking forward to the 40xx series though.)
marricks 4y ago
That lines up with the impression I got. They lose money CURRENTLY on the high end cards, it sure wasn’t going to get any better. Might as well get out while the getting is good.
- vkou 4y ago
  Unsurprising, considering the stupid games NVIDIA was playing during the past two years. There are no cards, but vendors aren't allowed to raise prices. Thus creating a cottage industry of zero-value-add scalpers. It's not shocking that the vendors aren't interested in getting zero of the upsides, but all of the downsides of the bullwhip effect.
- Matthias247 4y ago
  I was actually suprised to hear that high end cards are the ones where money is lost. Typically high end products are the ones with by far the biggest margins. They might just not be worth the R&D effort - but in this case I doubt that one is the problem. To lose money, it seems like the raw chip price differences between mid level and high end cards would need to be even higher than what the MSRP differences are. But if that's the case, why not just sell midrange cards? Or just a tiny amount of high end ones for advertising purposes.
  - RulerOf 4y ago
    >To lose money, it seems like the raw chip price differences between mid level and high end cards would need to be even higher than what the MSRP differences are. NVidia's datacenter products seem to charge for GDDR like it's made from gold. Memory prices may play a role.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > I was actually suprised to hear that high end cards are the ones where money is lost. Typically high end products are the ones with by far the biggest margins. two things: first, high-end cards are the ones that miners liked, so, partners really loaded up on orders of those cards. They sold a huge number of high-end cards relative to previous generations. And now the mining market has crashed, and they're stuck with a huge number of high-end cards (relative to actual sustainable demand) both at the vendor (NVIDIA) level and the partner (EVGA, et al) level. And miners are dumping their cards, so you have a huge number of high-end cards flowing back into the market too. secondly, the card he cites as being "their highest-margin card" is a model that was a bad deal at launch and has seen virtually no price reduction since then. I have actually seen quite a few people commenting on just how little prices of that specific model have dropped, with the 3060 Ti and 3070 pushing downwards (and those are significantly faster than the base 3060). On the AMD side, you can now get a 6700XT (which again, significantly faster) for the same price, which is a performance bracket higher. It's an oddity of that specific model. so, what he's saying is, an overpriced card that has seen no price reduction while much faster cards crash around it, has high margins - "no shit", as they say. Doesn't mean anybody is really buying it though. the whole thing is very much "true, from a certain point of view"... like his "wow we're losing money!". Yeah, now that the GPU market is crashing you're losing money... and during those years, the company as a whole lost money because this CEO has been doing all sorts of zany business ventures that ended up in massive losses... the GPU division made money hand-over-fist for the last 2 years, and he's lost money hand-over-fist by trying to break into the enthusiast monitor market and enthusiast motherboards (both extremely support, warranty, and R&D intensive markets) and doing a ton of branding deals where he sticks EVGA logos on hdmi capture devices and pcie sound cards (in 2020, seriously) on products licensed from other vendors (who it turns out were skeezes and EVGA was on the hook for a ton of defective and falsely-marketed products). https://youtu.be/QsICWRnj-60 https://youtu.be/QsICWRnj-60 he ran the company into the ground and is trying to shift blame to NVIDIA. Yeah, the board-partner thing is predatory, but partners don't really add significant value to the product anymore, and middlemen get squeezed out of business everywhere. Yeah, EVGA is in deep shit, and he's lying when he says they're not going to go under, the writing has been on the wall for months now. The GPU market crashing is almost certainly the last straw for EVGA and they won't be able to pivot to their remaining markets. But like, he did make a ton of money on GPUs over the last 2 years, he just lost a ton of money on other stuff, and that's not NVIDIA's fault. Partners in general ordered way too much (and again, particularly the high-end stuff) trying to cash in, they make fucktons of margin on it during 2020-2021, and now they are lobbying NVIDIA to cover their downside and buy back all the chips they have left over. This is part of that push, and they know the public generally doesn't like NVIDIA, so it's worth a go. And it's true that unless NVIDIA buys back the chips from EVGA, they probably go under. I imagine that's not a very pleasant conference room to be in during the negotiations. GN notes the extremely "personal" tenor of this guy's affront. If NVIDIA doesn't cave, his company goes under, and he's toast because EVGA is a pillar of the fucking community. Super tempting to try and go around the negotiations and take your case to the public, try and cash in on anti-NVIDIA sentiment (which is broad and intense), and try to appear to be the good guy. Partners tried to pull this same stunt in 2018... they ran to tech media framing it as "NVIDIA is forcing us to buy obsolete chips if we want next-gen ones!" and if you read the details, what actually happened is partners wanted to cancel their contractually-agreed orders after mining tanked, and NVIDIA said no, if you do that it's over, we're not giving you 20-series chips if you break your contract on the previous batch. https://www.techspot.com/news/76103-nvidia-putting-squeeze-aib-partners.html https://www.techspot.com/news/76103-nvidia-putting-squeeze-a... I bet NVIDIA wishes they could cancel their contractually-agreed orders from TSMC too. That's not how it works unfortunately. But NVIDIA did knuckle under in 2018 and bought chips back from Gigabyte and perhaps other vendors, and now the board partners are hoping for a repeat. But that was 300k chips, which, while it's a lot, was tractable. The current overstock is like, millions of chips, all in the high end. That's why both NVIDIA and AMD are launching top-first this generation... the lower chips would compete with those massively-overstocked 30-series cards. So, launch the high-end stuff over the top and let the 30-series inventory burn through.
pas 4y ago
can't they "easily" retool for "AI cards"?
- wmf 4y ago
  I don't think AIBs like EVGA are allowed to make server cards and the demand for those is not unlimited.
  - 0x457 4y ago
    It's not like they are not allowed, it's that no one will sell them actual chips to make them.
    - wmf 4y ago
      There are server cards that use GA102, GA104, etc. which EVGA has a glut of.
      - 0x457 4y ago
        It's not the same variant of a chip, though. A10 uses GA102-890-A1 and there is no retail card on that variant. Variant is very important because Nvidia drivers are...well...not consumer friendly? For example, Nvidia vGPU only works on certain cards if you ignore ways that break EULA. I don't remember the exact details, but there was also a software lock that prevented using some optimized paths on the consumer's GA102, but used the optimized path for GA102-890-A1. If Nvidia is great at anything, that would be hostile market segmentation by their drivers.
        jnwatson 4y ago
        Nvidia has control to fix that though.
        danuker 4y ago
        I gave up playing around with AI partly because the drivers are proprietary and not too good. Only in the past year or two has Nouveau developed well enough that some games are playable. But only on cards not enforcing signed firmware. How much more anti-consumer can you get after requiring signed firmware? That is when I started my boycott.
wmf 4y ago
Yeah, this is a case where money is inevitably going to be lost and everyone is saying "not it". It's not clear that there's any "fair" way to allocate the losses that will result from massive GPU oversupply.
- SllX 4y ago
  There is a fair way: it’s the open market.
- danuker 4y ago
  For what it's worth, the Ethereum merge was planned years ago (but the concrete release date may have been unknown until recently). Enjoy the GPU glut. I for one am thinking of having fun with Stable Diffusion and the like.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Same here, I can finally get a cheap GPU worker for my weekend project (https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io, if anyone cares).
    - mnahkies 4y ago
      Have you crunched the numbers on how many users you need to justify renting a VM with an A100 or similar? From my brief research they seem to be available for about $30 / hour, and can run 50 iterations in roughly 6 seconds. One of the missing pieces for me is how many parallel requests they can serve, and whether it's feasible to start/stop the machines based on demand (it sounds like some providers don't allow the stopped machines to retain state long enough for this to be practical) Would be interested in your thoughts, have been tinkering using my laptop GPU but it's dog slow and I have a vague idea for an online game that I might try out if I can summon enough mental energy one weekend
      - stavros 4y ago
        I didn't look for an A100 specifically, but the cheapest GPU spot instance on AWS is around $200/mo, if I remember correctly. Since this is a hobby project, I probably will never be able to break even on that. I'm thinking of writing a bit of code that will use GPU spot instances to perform the computation, and turn it off when the queue is emptyish. You don't really need any state on the machines, the worker communicates with a broker, receives a very small bit of JSON containing the parameters, does the work and uploads the image to R2. Then, it sends a message back saying that image is done. That way, you don't even care if you get interrupted mid-generation, since the work is idempotent. I can just spin up a machine whenever available and tear it down whenever. It will be nice to try, though I think I'll use my desktop for a while yet due to a lack of users. That one takes around a minute to generate an image, and can't run while I'm using it.
qball 4y ago
>I'm sure putting up with all of NVIDIA's crap is barely worth it even when making a decent profit It's illustrative to remember who and what started this: nVidia's practice of intentionally undercutting their manufacturing partners. See, manufacturing partners tend to apply secondary binning of their cards and sell them with an overclock thus delaying their obsolescence for a year or so, and that's bad when you're in the business of selling the chips themselves (while neutral to the secondary manufacturers; you just buy a new GPU from them a year later, who cares). So it really isn't a surprise that that, combined with artificially limiting supply for the 40-series GPUs (and most of that allocation is likely going to be to, well, themselves), and now the fact that the price that nVidia likely demanded for those GPUs is coming around to bite the secondary manufacturers, meaning that they all bought (or were required to buy) the GPUs at inflated prices, they're leaving the business. And guess what manufacturer wasn't forced to pay that premium? That's right, nVidia! So they alone have room to drop prices and still make a profit, while making the value proposition even worse for the secondaries (price premiums for overclocking make less sense as they diverge from the base model and those improved coolers are more expensive to make than nVidia's solutions). EVGA is understandably the first to bow out; they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), and if they say it's no longer profitable even before a primary usecase for GPU compute vanished overnight I'm inclined to believe them. And sure, there are still going to be secondary manufacturers producing cards, but most of the other manufacturers are either do-all companies (large OEMs more famous for motherboards and laptops), produce AMD cards too (Zotac-Sapphire-Inno3D), or are otherwise diverse enough (PNY) that ramping down production wouldn't kill them as a company...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), Yep. AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives, their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards, they're nearly useless for computational stuff because most everyone goes for CUDA, and AMD cheated on benchmarks by overclocking/overvolting their cards and slapping huge heatsinks on them so that they'd last just long enough for a benchmark to run before starting to overheat. There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. AMD is properly fucked in the GPU market now that Apple is no longer using discreet GPUs unless they manage to bring to bear the sort of enginering might they did for Ryzen (where they're also slipping as Intel pushes back.) NVIDIA can carry on with all their datacenter-class ML products and lose a bunch of money on the consumer side. The problem is...if AMD drops out of the GPU market, that leaves NVIDIA and Intel, and reportedly Intel's product is even worse than AMD. If NVIDIA is insufferable now, imagine them when they're the only game in town...
devwastaken 4y ago
Their lack of profits from high end video cards also existed in the 2000 series. No doubt worse with the 3000 series, but this is a long term war not a short term battle. People will pay more for EVGA, because they were the only company that respected their customers. The only company you could actually get a decent RMA from and didn't continually break the law. But Nvidia says no, there's max cap on prices. Nvidia also competes with their partners with their founders edition series. It's a whole around win-win for Nvidia. I can't imagine why Nvidia would let one of their most respected partners go. Unless, Nvidia plans to shove out their partners and sell direct as they did with founders edition.
- deaddodo 4y ago
  > Unless, Nvidia plans to shove out their partners and sell direct as they did with founders edition. It’s important to remember that this was a major contribution to the downfall of 3DFX. A good chunk of which was cannibalized by nVidia.
  - AmVess 4y ago
    It was a contributing factor, not a major one. Their products were not competitive with Nvidia after 3DFX completed the purchase of STB and started producing their own boards.
    - deaddodo 4y ago
      Not competitive how? The only card to consistently outperform the 5500 was the GeForce 2 GTS[1], which was a half generation ahead. 3DFX fans would also argue that T-Buffering and other unique technologies made the image quality better. What killed 3DFX was a combination of no AIB boards to push the architecture past reference; their Sega deal falling through and the delay (and eventual cancellation) of the 6000 as a competitor to the GeForce 2 and Radeon 7000 series’ (later tests of engineering samples showed it outperformed both). The latter being a direct result of the two former problems. 1 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/580/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/580/7
deaddodo 4y ago
> Supposedly they tried to cancel some of the volume with the foundries, but were not allowed to. I would hope so, considering the big chip producers bought out the majority of the supply throughout COVID. Allowing them to bail out on that contract without providing an alternate buyer would set a bad precedent and allow them to monopolize resources whenever they desired.

by qzw 4y ago

mattigames 4y ago

Who would have imagined that adjusting your production rates over the most volatile and unstable asset AKA Cryptocoins would be a bad idea.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
And that's the second time they've done this, after 2018 crypto crash.
- paulmd 4y ago
  third. there was another mining boom back in 2014 when it was bitcoin being gpu-mined. It fucked with AMD's Hawaii/290X launch really badly back then - the cards were unobtanium for months and months which gave NVIDIA an opening to launch Maxwell. Then the prices crashed and miners dumped their inventory, so you had new aftermarket 290Xs being sold for $250-300 to try and compete with mining cards, with used/refurb 290 non-X bottoming out around $175. I'm sure the idea that infinity cache decreases the relative mining performance was in everyone's minds at AMD when they were designing RDNA2 - by that point they'd had two major launches (vega too) fucked up by mining, and using more cache/less VRAM bandwidth makes your mining performance worse relative to raster, because mining loads aren't cachable.
jrockway 4y ago
I mean, the supply shortage was a big problem for people that just wanted to play a game. My GPU died and I had to buy a used RTX Titan (in the 3090 era) just to have anything. (It's great though, I use it for gaming, ray tracing, and machine learning. Still looking forward to the 40xx series though.)

marricks 4y ago

That lines up with the impression I got. They lose money CURRENTLY on the high end cards, it sure wasn’t going to get any better. Might as well get out while the getting is good.

vkou 4y ago
Unsurprising, considering the stupid games NVIDIA was playing during the past two years. There are no cards, but vendors aren't allowed to raise prices. Thus creating a cottage industry of zero-value-add scalpers. It's not shocking that the vendors aren't interested in getting zero of the upsides, but all of the downsides of the bullwhip effect.
Matthias247 4y ago
I was actually suprised to hear that high end cards are the ones where money is lost. Typically high end products are the ones with by far the biggest margins. They might just not be worth the R&D effort - but in this case I doubt that one is the problem. To lose money, it seems like the raw chip price differences between mid level and high end cards would need to be even higher than what the MSRP differences are. But if that's the case, why not just sell midrange cards? Or just a tiny amount of high end ones for advertising purposes.
- RulerOf 4y ago
  >To lose money, it seems like the raw chip price differences between mid level and high end cards would need to be even higher than what the MSRP differences are. NVidia's datacenter products seem to charge for GDDR like it's made from gold. Memory prices may play a role.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > I was actually suprised to hear that high end cards are the ones where money is lost. Typically high end products are the ones with by far the biggest margins. two things: first, high-end cards are the ones that miners liked, so, partners really loaded up on orders of those cards. They sold a huge number of high-end cards relative to previous generations. And now the mining market has crashed, and they're stuck with a huge number of high-end cards (relative to actual sustainable demand) both at the vendor (NVIDIA) level and the partner (EVGA, et al) level. And miners are dumping their cards, so you have a huge number of high-end cards flowing back into the market too. secondly, the card he cites as being "their highest-margin card" is a model that was a bad deal at launch and has seen virtually no price reduction since then. I have actually seen quite a few people commenting on just how little prices of that specific model have dropped, with the 3060 Ti and 3070 pushing downwards (and those are significantly faster than the base 3060). On the AMD side, you can now get a 6700XT (which again, significantly faster) for the same price, which is a performance bracket higher. It's an oddity of that specific model. so, what he's saying is, an overpriced card that has seen no price reduction while much faster cards crash around it, has high margins - "no shit", as they say. Doesn't mean anybody is really buying it though. the whole thing is very much "true, from a certain point of view"... like his "wow we're losing money!". Yeah, now that the GPU market is crashing you're losing money... and during those years, the company as a whole lost money because this CEO has been doing all sorts of zany business ventures that ended up in massive losses... the GPU division made money hand-over-fist for the last 2 years, and he's lost money hand-over-fist by trying to break into the enthusiast monitor market and enthusiast motherboards (both extremely support, warranty, and R&D intensive markets) and doing a ton of branding deals where he sticks EVGA logos on hdmi capture devices and pcie sound cards (in 2020, seriously) on products licensed from other vendors (who it turns out were skeezes and EVGA was on the hook for a ton of defective and falsely-marketed products). https://youtu.be/QsICWRnj-60 https://youtu.be/QsICWRnj-60 he ran the company into the ground and is trying to shift blame to NVIDIA. Yeah, the board-partner thing is predatory, but partners don't really add significant value to the product anymore, and middlemen get squeezed out of business everywhere. Yeah, EVGA is in deep shit, and he's lying when he says they're not going to go under, the writing has been on the wall for months now. The GPU market crashing is almost certainly the last straw for EVGA and they won't be able to pivot to their remaining markets. But like, he did make a ton of money on GPUs over the last 2 years, he just lost a ton of money on other stuff, and that's not NVIDIA's fault. Partners in general ordered way too much (and again, particularly the high-end stuff) trying to cash in, they make fucktons of margin on it during 2020-2021, and now they are lobbying NVIDIA to cover their downside and buy back all the chips they have left over. This is part of that push, and they know the public generally doesn't like NVIDIA, so it's worth a go. And it's true that unless NVIDIA buys back the chips from EVGA, they probably go under. I imagine that's not a very pleasant conference room to be in during the negotiations. GN notes the extremely "personal" tenor of this guy's affront. If NVIDIA doesn't cave, his company goes under, and he's toast because EVGA is a pillar of the fucking community. Super tempting to try and go around the negotiations and take your case to the public, try and cash in on anti-NVIDIA sentiment (which is broad and intense), and try to appear to be the good guy. Partners tried to pull this same stunt in 2018... they ran to tech media framing it as "NVIDIA is forcing us to buy obsolete chips if we want next-gen ones!" and if you read the details, what actually happened is partners wanted to cancel their contractually-agreed orders after mining tanked, and NVIDIA said no, if you do that it's over, we're not giving you 20-series chips if you break your contract on the previous batch. https://www.techspot.com/news/76103-nvidia-putting-squeeze-aib-partners.html https://www.techspot.com/news/76103-nvidia-putting-squeeze-a... I bet NVIDIA wishes they could cancel their contractually-agreed orders from TSMC too. That's not how it works unfortunately. But NVIDIA did knuckle under in 2018 and bought chips back from Gigabyte and perhaps other vendors, and now the board partners are hoping for a repeat. But that was 300k chips, which, while it's a lot, was tractable. The current overstock is like, millions of chips, all in the high end. That's why both NVIDIA and AMD are launching top-first this generation... the lower chips would compete with those massively-overstocked 30-series cards. So, launch the high-end stuff over the top and let the 30-series inventory burn through.

pas 4y ago

can't they "easily" retool for "AI cards"?

wmf 4y ago
I don't think AIBs like EVGA are allowed to make server cards and the demand for those is not unlimited.
- 0x457 4y ago
  It's not like they are not allowed, it's that no one will sell them actual chips to make them.
  - wmf 4y ago
    There are server cards that use GA102, GA104, etc. which EVGA has a glut of.
    - 0x457 4y ago
      It's not the same variant of a chip, though. A10 uses GA102-890-A1 and there is no retail card on that variant. Variant is very important because Nvidia drivers are...well...not consumer friendly? For example, Nvidia vGPU only works on certain cards if you ignore ways that break EULA. I don't remember the exact details, but there was also a software lock that prevented using some optimized paths on the consumer's GA102, but used the optimized path for GA102-890-A1. If Nvidia is great at anything, that would be hostile market segmentation by their drivers.
      - jnwatson 4y ago
        Nvidia has control to fix that though.
      - danuker 4y ago
        I gave up playing around with AI partly because the drivers are proprietary and not too good. Only in the past year or two has Nouveau developed well enough that some games are playable. But only on cards not enforcing signed firmware. How much more anti-consumer can you get after requiring signed firmware? That is when I started my boycott.

wmf 4y ago

Yeah, this is a case where money is inevitably going to be lost and everyone is saying "not it". It's not clear that there's any "fair" way to allocate the losses that will result from massive GPU oversupply.

SllX 4y ago
There is a fair way: it’s the open market.
danuker 4y ago
For what it's worth, the Ethereum merge was planned years ago (but the concrete release date may have been unknown until recently). Enjoy the GPU glut. I for one am thinking of having fun with Stable Diffusion and the like.
- stavros 4y ago
  Same here, I can finally get a cheap GPU worker for my weekend project (https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io, if anyone cares).
  - mnahkies 4y ago
    Have you crunched the numbers on how many users you need to justify renting a VM with an A100 or similar? From my brief research they seem to be available for about $30 / hour, and can run 50 iterations in roughly 6 seconds. One of the missing pieces for me is how many parallel requests they can serve, and whether it's feasible to start/stop the machines based on demand (it sounds like some providers don't allow the stopped machines to retain state long enough for this to be practical) Would be interested in your thoughts, have been tinkering using my laptop GPU but it's dog slow and I have a vague idea for an online game that I might try out if I can summon enough mental energy one weekend
    - stavros 4y ago
      I didn't look for an A100 specifically, but the cheapest GPU spot instance on AWS is around $200/mo, if I remember correctly. Since this is a hobby project, I probably will never be able to break even on that. I'm thinking of writing a bit of code that will use GPU spot instances to perform the computation, and turn it off when the queue is emptyish. You don't really need any state on the machines, the worker communicates with a broker, receives a very small bit of JSON containing the parameters, does the work and uploads the image to R2. Then, it sends a message back saying that image is done. That way, you don't even care if you get interrupted mid-generation, since the work is idempotent. I can just spin up a machine whenever available and tear it down whenever. It will be nice to try, though I think I'll use my desktop for a while yet due to a lack of users. That one takes around a minute to generate an image, and can't run while I'm using it.

qball 4y ago

>I'm sure putting up with all of NVIDIA's crap is barely worth it even when making a decent profit It's illustrative to remember who and what started this: nVidia's practice of intentionally undercutting their manufacturing partners. See, manufacturing partners tend to apply secondary binning of their cards and sell them with an overclock thus delaying their obsolescence for a year or so, and that's bad when you're in the business of selling the chips themselves (while neutral to the secondary manufacturers; you just buy a new GPU from them a year later, who cares). So it really isn't a surprise that that, combined with artificially limiting supply for the 40-series GPUs (and most of that allocation is likely going to be to, well, themselves), and now the fact that the price that nVidia likely demanded for those GPUs is coming around to bite the secondary manufacturers, meaning that they all bought (or were required to buy) the GPUs at inflated prices, they're leaving the business. And guess what manufacturer wasn't forced to pay that premium? That's right, nVidia! So they alone have room to drop prices and still make a profit, while making the value proposition even worse for the secondaries (price premiums for overclocking make less sense as they diverge from the base model and those improved coolers are more expensive to make than nVidia's solutions). EVGA is understandably the first to bow out; they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), and if they say it's no longer profitable even before a primary usecase for GPU compute vanished overnight I'm inclined to believe them. And sure, there are still going to be secondary manufacturers producing cards, but most of the other manufacturers are either do-all companies (large OEMs more famous for motherboards and laptops), produce AMD cards too (Zotac-Sapphire-Inno3D), or are otherwise diverse enough (PNY) that ramping down production wouldn't kill them as a company...

KennyBlanken 4y ago
> they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), Yep. AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives, their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards, they're nearly useless for computational stuff because most everyone goes for CUDA, and AMD cheated on benchmarks by overclocking/overvolting their cards and slapping huge heatsinks on them so that they'd last just long enough for a benchmark to run before starting to overheat. There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. AMD is properly fucked in the GPU market now that Apple is no longer using discreet GPUs unless they manage to bring to bear the sort of enginering might they did for Ryzen (where they're also slipping as Intel pushes back.) NVIDIA can carry on with all their datacenter-class ML products and lose a bunch of money on the consumer side. The problem is...if AMD drops out of the GPU market, that leaves NVIDIA and Intel, and reportedly Intel's product is even worse than AMD. If NVIDIA is insufferable now, imagine them when they're the only game in town...

devwastaken 4y ago

Their lack of profits from high end video cards also existed in the 2000 series. No doubt worse with the 3000 series, but this is a long term war not a short term battle. People will pay more for EVGA, because they were the only company that respected their customers. The only company you could actually get a decent RMA from and didn't continually break the law. But Nvidia says no, there's max cap on prices. Nvidia also competes with their partners with their founders edition series. It's a whole around win-win for Nvidia. I can't imagine why Nvidia would let one of their most respected partners go. Unless, Nvidia plans to shove out their partners and sell direct as they did with founders edition.

deaddodo 4y ago
> Unless, Nvidia plans to shove out their partners and sell direct as they did with founders edition. It’s important to remember that this was a major contribution to the downfall of 3DFX. A good chunk of which was cannibalized by nVidia.
- AmVess 4y ago
  It was a contributing factor, not a major one. Their products were not competitive with Nvidia after 3DFX completed the purchase of STB and started producing their own boards.
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    Not competitive how? The only card to consistently outperform the 5500 was the GeForce 2 GTS[1], which was a half generation ahead. 3DFX fans would also argue that T-Buffering and other unique technologies made the image quality better. What killed 3DFX was a combination of no AIB boards to push the architecture past reference; their Sega deal falling through and the delay (and eventual cancellation) of the 6000 as a competitor to the GeForce 2 and Radeon 7000 series’ (later tests of engineering samples showed it outperformed both). The latter being a direct result of the two former problems. 1 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/580/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/580/7

deaddodo 4y ago

> Supposedly they tried to cancel some of the volume with the foundries, but were not allowed to. I would hope so, considering the big chip producers bought out the majority of the supply throughout COVID. Allowing them to bail out on that contract without providing an alternate buyer would set a bad precedent and allow them to monopolize resources whenever they desired.