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Nvidia is dragging the entire gaming industry forward with ray/path tracing and AI-based resolution and frame scaling. Everyone else (I.e., AMD) is following Nv

Nvidia is dragging the entire gaming industry forward with ray/path tracing and AI-based resolution and frame scaling. Everyone else (I.e., AMD) is following Nvidia’s lead. In what way has Nvidia “forgotten” gamers with the rise of their datacenter business?

solardev 3y ago
Gamers don't have datacenter budgets
- ancientworldnow 3y ago
  Gamers like to ignore inflation and increasing fab costs and pretend cards should cost the same forever with double performance gains every 1.5 years.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    For much of tech hardware world, declining costs and increasing performance have been the general trends for as long as most of us have been alive.
    - sgarman 3y ago
      Off the top of my head the only thing I can think of that did that was TVs.
      - buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
        Personal computers have plummeted in price over the decades
      - HDThoreaun 3y ago
        CPU's are cheaper adjusted for inflation before even considering performance. Ram and SSDs are much much cheaper than they were 5 years ago.
        paulmd 3y ago
        RAM was much cheaper 7 years ago than 5 years ago. There was another DRAM cartel action and prices tripled in less than 6 months back in 2017.
      - distances 3y ago
        As far as I can tell computers are still cheaper than they were in the 90s. And that's in absolute numbers, not even accounting for inflation.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Why do GPUs get so much more expensive compared to the rest of the system? CPUs, hard drives, prebuilt systems, laptops etc. haven't gotten ridiculously more expensive. It used to be that $200 would get you a low-range GPU, $400 a midrange, and $600 a pretty darned good one. The 1070 launched at $379 (or $480 in 2023 dollars), the 2070 at $499, the 3070 at $499, then all of a sudden the 4070 now is $599. That's a big difference, even accounting for inflation. The 1080 Ti was $699, an already-unfathomable price back then that cost more than a whole console setup. Today? The 4080 is $1200. That's often more than the rest of the system put together.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      It’s because CPUs tend to be fundamentally limited in the ways they can efficiently utilize transistors to scale performance, by things like cache latency, reorder depth, branch prediction, etc. While gpus have always been god’s strongest soldier for putting transistors on silicon scalably. They were the perfect machine for a world where transistors per dollar doubled every 18 months. On the other hand now that it’s stopped, so has raw performance scaling. There was a few generations of cleanup, but you can’t squeeze blood from a stone forever. Maxwell arguably cut too far and pascal had to start adding functionality back. Gpus are like e-cores, large powerful cores mean you get fewer of them and that often works out to a lower PPA. There aren’t many opportunities for cool tricks and the model doesn’t favor using lots of area. The coding is written for extreme parallelism already, so, that’s not a problem, it’s inherent to the platform. Transistor per $ growth hasn’t completely stopped but it’s certainly nowhere near what it was 10 years ago, even if you factor in things like packaging/stacking the total wafer area still runs up a big bill that offset most of the density gains. And that’s what we’ve been seeing over the last 10 years in gpus too. 4070 is about the same area and cutdown as GTX 1070 but wafers cost like 8x as much. What you have to do in this operating regime is find ways to get more performance per transistor - and that’s exactly what Jensen made a big bet on 5 years ago with dlss. 7% more transistors that with DLSS 2.5 give 30% speedup at native quality and 50-70% speedup at iso-quality with FSR2 Quality mode. That’s what the future looks like - rewriting your applications to take advantage of new accelerators that provide large speedups. And the rewriting is very minimal for any application that uses TAAU already. It sucks but if cost/transistor is not going to come down you have to get more out of the transistors you have. Work smarter not harder.
  - jules22 3y ago
    That's fine, and gamers can no longer be expected to upgrade every generation or two, like they used to, if the improvements are going to be marginal between generations. The enthusiast market will just shrink and of course that no longer matters to Nvidia as they are playing in bigger leagues now. GPUs will be bought like TVs. It took 4060, about 6 years to double the Passmark score over 1060.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- samspenc 3y ago
  I think both this comment and GP comment are true in their own ways. Nvidia is still pushing the gaming / 3D industry faster than its competitors and I would still recommend an Nvidia card for reliability and performance over others. BUT that comes at a price - Nvidia consumer chips are also notoriously expensive, but if you want best-of-breed for gaming, it does come at a price. I am hoping that AMD and Intel will be able to compete with Nvidia someday but I'm not holding my breath.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
The card prices have gone up pretty significantly and availability has been bad for the last few years, they also have been segmenting their product line in ways where some of the lower tier cards are not very compelling vs previous release cycles. I don't know if that's attributable to them "forgetting about gamers" but it's what people are upset about.
- cma 3y ago
  Compare price performance and it isn't so bad, assuming you add in an adjustment for AMD's lack of features.
- rvz 3y ago
  So even without crypto, the prices of GPUs are still expensive regardless. The hoarding isn't going to stop unless there are either efficient alternatives that are competitive on performance and price. Perhaps that is why I keep seeing gamers crying over GPU prices and unable to find cheap Nvidia cards due to the AI bros hoarding them for their 'deep learning' pet projects. So they settle with AMD instead.
- TillE 3y ago
  Prices are high, but the cards are fantastic. The only thing you can really complain about is that they're stingy with VRAM. Supply issues should be gone too; I got a 4070 Ti shortly after launch, no problem.
epolanski 3y ago
Raw performance isn't increasing much, price/performance under the 700$ has barely increased both now and in 2000 series.
- cma 3y ago
  It's a combination of algorithms and hardware, but raytracing has gone from path traced quake 1 to path traced Cyberpunk 2077 in just a few years. The raytracing side of things hardware wise has doubled in perf for the same tier card each generation.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Yes, the RT part did improve but the raw part not much. Thus only gamers that care about RT and only in the games that make a good use of it (virtually none) have any serious benefit.
- paulmd 3y ago
  In a world where transistor-per-$ growth is running at most 10-20% per generation, you have to get more out of the transistors you have, or else prices go up. Or both. So raw performance has stagnated and gains have been concentrated in things like DLSS 2.5 that let you get native quality at a 30% speedup or better than native DLAA at 0% speedup, or FSR2 Quality level quality at 50-70% speedup. Cause that gets you more performance out of a small increase of transistors/cost.
wudangmonk 3y ago
Raytracing isn't a thing no matter how much nvidia wants to push it. The performance penalty is too big for what amounts to something that takes a trained eye to notice. AI-resolution scaling is nice to have on lower end devices but the max resolution people actually use is 4k and I can only think of VR where having more than 4k would be nice to have. My main gripe is that at 4k resolution, top of the line GPUs shouldn't be using AI frame scaling to get decent fps unless you are taking the raytracing penalty for funsies.
- TechnicolorByte 3y ago
  Feels like this comment is stuck in 2019 or something. Have you seen DLSS3.5 announced yesterday with ray reconstruction? Have you seen path tracing in CP2077? Seems like you’re really dismissing the massive speed ups these past few years. Agreed that ray tracing in games is only at the beginning. A lot of that is gated by the consoles/AMD but that’s generally how it goes. Would love to see Nvidia in one of the powerful consoles to accelerate adoption of these technologies.
- broodbucket 3y ago
  Agree on raytracing, disagree on upscaling. DLSS/FSR are gamechangers. They do annoyingly muddy the waters for all the claims of "we run X game at Y FPS on Z resolution" though.
- redox99 3y ago
  This comment will age like milk, when in a few years (nvidia 50 series I'd say) path tracing becomes the norm for high end gaming.

solardev 3y ago

Gamers don't have datacenter budgets

ancientworldnow 3y ago
Gamers like to ignore inflation and increasing fab costs and pretend cards should cost the same forever with double performance gains every 1.5 years.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  For much of tech hardware world, declining costs and increasing performance have been the general trends for as long as most of us have been alive.
  - sgarman 3y ago
    Off the top of my head the only thing I can think of that did that was TVs.
    - buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
      Personal computers have plummeted in price over the decades
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      CPU's are cheaper adjusted for inflation before even considering performance. Ram and SSDs are much much cheaper than they were 5 years ago.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        RAM was much cheaper 7 years ago than 5 years ago. There was another DRAM cartel action and prices tripled in less than 6 months back in 2017.
    - distances 3y ago
      As far as I can tell computers are still cheaper than they were in the 90s. And that's in absolute numbers, not even accounting for inflation.
- solardev 3y ago
  Why do GPUs get so much more expensive compared to the rest of the system? CPUs, hard drives, prebuilt systems, laptops etc. haven't gotten ridiculously more expensive. It used to be that $200 would get you a low-range GPU, $400 a midrange, and $600 a pretty darned good one. The 1070 launched at $379 (or $480 in 2023 dollars), the 2070 at $499, the 3070 at $499, then all of a sudden the 4070 now is $599. That's a big difference, even accounting for inflation. The 1080 Ti was $699, an already-unfathomable price back then that cost more than a whole console setup. Today? The 4080 is $1200. That's often more than the rest of the system put together.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    It’s because CPUs tend to be fundamentally limited in the ways they can efficiently utilize transistors to scale performance, by things like cache latency, reorder depth, branch prediction, etc. While gpus have always been god’s strongest soldier for putting transistors on silicon scalably. They were the perfect machine for a world where transistors per dollar doubled every 18 months. On the other hand now that it’s stopped, so has raw performance scaling. There was a few generations of cleanup, but you can’t squeeze blood from a stone forever. Maxwell arguably cut too far and pascal had to start adding functionality back. Gpus are like e-cores, large powerful cores mean you get fewer of them and that often works out to a lower PPA. There aren’t many opportunities for cool tricks and the model doesn’t favor using lots of area. The coding is written for extreme parallelism already, so, that’s not a problem, it’s inherent to the platform. Transistor per $ growth hasn’t completely stopped but it’s certainly nowhere near what it was 10 years ago, even if you factor in things like packaging/stacking the total wafer area still runs up a big bill that offset most of the density gains. And that’s what we’ve been seeing over the last 10 years in gpus too. 4070 is about the same area and cutdown as GTX 1070 but wafers cost like 8x as much. What you have to do in this operating regime is find ways to get more performance per transistor - and that’s exactly what Jensen made a big bet on 5 years ago with dlss. 7% more transistors that with DLSS 2.5 give 30% speedup at native quality and 50-70% speedup at iso-quality with FSR2 Quality mode. That’s what the future looks like - rewriting your applications to take advantage of new accelerators that provide large speedups. And the rewriting is very minimal for any application that uses TAAU already. It sucks but if cost/transistor is not going to come down you have to get more out of the transistors you have. Work smarter not harder.
- jules22 3y ago
  That's fine, and gamers can no longer be expected to upgrade every generation or two, like they used to, if the improvements are going to be marginal between generations. The enthusiast market will just shrink and of course that no longer matters to Nvidia as they are playing in bigger leagues now. GPUs will be bought like TVs. It took 4060, about 6 years to double the Passmark score over 1060.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
samspenc 3y ago
I think both this comment and GP comment are true in their own ways. Nvidia is still pushing the gaming / 3D industry faster than its competitors and I would still recommend an Nvidia card for reliability and performance over others. BUT that comes at a price - Nvidia consumer chips are also notoriously expensive, but if you want best-of-breed for gaming, it does come at a price. I am hoping that AMD and Intel will be able to compete with Nvidia someday but I'm not holding my breath.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

The card prices have gone up pretty significantly and availability has been bad for the last few years, they also have been segmenting their product line in ways where some of the lower tier cards are not very compelling vs previous release cycles. I don't know if that's attributable to them "forgetting about gamers" but it's what people are upset about.

cma 3y ago
Compare price performance and it isn't so bad, assuming you add in an adjustment for AMD's lack of features.
rvz 3y ago
So even without crypto, the prices of GPUs are still expensive regardless. The hoarding isn't going to stop unless there are either efficient alternatives that are competitive on performance and price. Perhaps that is why I keep seeing gamers crying over GPU prices and unable to find cheap Nvidia cards due to the AI bros hoarding them for their 'deep learning' pet projects. So they settle with AMD instead.
TillE 3y ago
Prices are high, but the cards are fantastic. The only thing you can really complain about is that they're stingy with VRAM. Supply issues should be gone too; I got a 4070 Ti shortly after launch, no problem.

epolanski 3y ago

Raw performance isn't increasing much, price/performance under the 700$ has barely increased both now and in 2000 series.

cma 3y ago
It's a combination of algorithms and hardware, but raytracing has gone from path traced quake 1 to path traced Cyberpunk 2077 in just a few years. The raytracing side of things hardware wise has doubled in perf for the same tier card each generation.
- epolanski 3y ago
  Yes, the RT part did improve but the raw part not much. Thus only gamers that care about RT and only in the games that make a good use of it (virtually none) have any serious benefit.
paulmd 3y ago
In a world where transistor-per-$ growth is running at most 10-20% per generation, you have to get more out of the transistors you have, or else prices go up. Or both. So raw performance has stagnated and gains have been concentrated in things like DLSS 2.5 that let you get native quality at a 30% speedup or better than native DLAA at 0% speedup, or FSR2 Quality level quality at 50-70% speedup. Cause that gets you more performance out of a small increase of transistors/cost.

wudangmonk 3y ago

Raytracing isn't a thing no matter how much nvidia wants to push it. The performance penalty is too big for what amounts to something that takes a trained eye to notice. AI-resolution scaling is nice to have on lower end devices but the max resolution people actually use is 4k and I can only think of VR where having more than 4k would be nice to have. My main gripe is that at 4k resolution, top of the line GPUs shouldn't be using AI frame scaling to get decent fps unless you are taking the raytracing penalty for funsies.

TechnicolorByte 3y ago
Feels like this comment is stuck in 2019 or something. Have you seen DLSS3.5 announced yesterday with ray reconstruction? Have you seen path tracing in CP2077? Seems like you’re really dismissing the massive speed ups these past few years. Agreed that ray tracing in games is only at the beginning. A lot of that is gated by the consoles/AMD but that’s generally how it goes. Would love to see Nvidia in one of the powerful consoles to accelerate adoption of these technologies.
broodbucket 3y ago
Agree on raytracing, disagree on upscaling. DLSS/FSR are gamechangers. They do annoyingly muddy the waters for all the claims of "we run X game at Y FPS on Z resolution" though.
redox99 3y ago
This comment will age like milk, when in a few years (nvidia 50 series I'd say) path tracing becomes the norm for high end gaming.