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What's the use case for these high end graphics card? Is it for professional use or do gamers actually buy this? Which games require such high end graphics?

wmf 4y ago
I think the main use case of buying a 4090 on day one is to show that you have money to burn.
smoldesu 4y ago
Actual use cases? Ludicrously quick AI inferencing, media transcoding, 3D render offloading, SIMD-bound simulations and anything that uses CUDA. Dedicated graphics will dominate in these scenarios, and it's such a large market that the 4090 is hardly the tip of the iceberg. Nvidia's server-grade AI chips are genuine monsters. People definitely use these cards, and there's a demand to scale them for datacenters too. Gaming still drives the sales, but you'd be surprised by what you can do with a $500 GPU plugged into a Linux box.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Is there really datacenter demand for these anymore? In addition to the Nvidia EULA against "datacenter use" they (allegedly) shut down the last dual slot 3090 (with server compatible cooling configuration) because it was eating at higher margin datacenter SKUs[0]. I don't see a lot of datacenters making use of a 3.5U card with challenging power and cooling requirements but I certainly could be wrong. 0 - https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/gigabyte-axes-geforce-rtx-3090-turbo-disrupting-partner-server-plans https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/gigabyte-axe...
  - my123 4y ago
    The NVIDIA datacenter use clause is present in the license agreement for the Windows driver, but not on the Linux one.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      Do you have a reference? What’s the point of the infamous “No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.” clause if it only applies to Windows?
      - my123 4y ago
        Yes. Windows: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/geforce-license/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/geforce-license/ Linux: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/520.56.06/license.txt https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/520.56.06/l...
        kkielhofner 4y ago
        Wow, thanks! This is fascinating and now I'm really confused. Who is using CUDA on Windows in any datacenter application?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I wonder if it's the other way around... maybe this rule was grandfathered in from a time when Microsoft feared companies offering "DirectX as a Service" or whatever. It doesn't really seem like the sort of thing Nvidia would care about, especially considering the licensing of their Unix drivers and considerable enterprise support efforts.
IronWolve 4y ago
Lots of people playing with stable diffusion, 4090 has much more ram and speed for generating images.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Yeah, I was actually wanting to pick up a second 3090 recently to run Stable Diffusion faster. But it apparently doesn't support multi-GPU.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    if you're making multiple images in a batch, you should be able to run those in parallel. or have one GPU training concepts (e.g. textual inversion) while the other renders, or if you're doing style transfer you could do frames in parallel.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      hmm ok valid point. if I can run two instances of the software & configure it to use separate GPUs I should be OK. I'll have to see if I can try that out somehow.
ksec 4y ago
>do gamers actually buy this? They do. It is not like we cant push these GPU to the limit. 4K Ray Tracing 120 frames. And like I said when it was launched, $1599 4090 for N4 ~700mm2 Die + GDDR6 isn't expensive at all. Whether one can afford one is a different matter.
TillE 4y ago
No game "requires" a really high-end graphics card, but some can certainly take advantage of it if you're into pretty, high-resolution, high-framerate graphics.
parker_mountain 4y ago
"Had" to buy a 3090 at msrp during the pandemic, because everything else had big markups on it. It turns out, just being able to max everything out, have raytracing, and play at 4k/60 is just a much fancier but vapid way of accessorizing playing videogames. I really enjoy it though :)
HyperSane 4y ago
Playing games at 4k and at high frame rates.

wmf 4y ago

I think the main use case of buying a 4090 on day one is to show that you have money to burn.

smoldesu 4y ago

Actual use cases? Ludicrously quick AI inferencing, media transcoding, 3D render offloading, SIMD-bound simulations and anything that uses CUDA. Dedicated graphics will dominate in these scenarios, and it's such a large market that the 4090 is hardly the tip of the iceberg. Nvidia's server-grade AI chips are genuine monsters. People definitely use these cards, and there's a demand to scale them for datacenters too. Gaming still drives the sales, but you'd be surprised by what you can do with a $500 GPU plugged into a Linux box.

kkielhofner 4y ago
Is there really datacenter demand for these anymore? In addition to the Nvidia EULA against "datacenter use" they (allegedly) shut down the last dual slot 3090 (with server compatible cooling configuration) because it was eating at higher margin datacenter SKUs[0]. I don't see a lot of datacenters making use of a 3.5U card with challenging power and cooling requirements but I certainly could be wrong. 0 - https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/gigabyte-axes-geforce-rtx-3090-turbo-disrupting-partner-server-plans https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/gigabyte-axe...
- my123 4y ago
  The NVIDIA datacenter use clause is present in the license agreement for the Windows driver, but not on the Linux one.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Do you have a reference? What’s the point of the infamous “No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.” clause if it only applies to Windows?
    - my123 4y ago
      Yes. Windows: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/geforce-license/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/geforce-license/ Linux: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/520.56.06/license.txt https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/520.56.06/l...
      - kkielhofner 4y ago
        Wow, thanks! This is fascinating and now I'm really confused. Who is using CUDA on Windows in any datacenter application?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I wonder if it's the other way around... maybe this rule was grandfathered in from a time when Microsoft feared companies offering "DirectX as a Service" or whatever. It doesn't really seem like the sort of thing Nvidia would care about, especially considering the licensing of their Unix drivers and considerable enterprise support efforts.

IronWolve 4y ago

Lots of people playing with stable diffusion, 4090 has much more ram and speed for generating images.

sidewndr46 4y ago
Yeah, I was actually wanting to pick up a second 3090 recently to run Stable Diffusion faster. But it apparently doesn't support multi-GPU.
- sterlind 4y ago
  if you're making multiple images in a batch, you should be able to run those in parallel. or have one GPU training concepts (e.g. textual inversion) while the other renders, or if you're doing style transfer you could do frames in parallel.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    hmm ok valid point. if I can run two instances of the software & configure it to use separate GPUs I should be OK. I'll have to see if I can try that out somehow.

ksec 4y ago

>do gamers actually buy this? They do. It is not like we cant push these GPU to the limit. 4K Ray Tracing 120 frames. And like I said when it was launched, $1599 4090 for N4 ~700mm2 Die + GDDR6 isn't expensive at all. Whether one can afford one is a different matter.

TillE 4y ago

No game "requires" a really high-end graphics card, but some can certainly take advantage of it if you're into pretty, high-resolution, high-framerate graphics.

parker_mountain 4y ago

"Had" to buy a 3090 at msrp during the pandemic, because everything else had big markups on it. It turns out, just being able to max everything out, have raytracing, and play at 4k/60 is just a much fancier but vapid way of accessorizing playing videogames. I really enjoy it though :)

HyperSane 4y ago

Playing games at 4k and at high frame rates.