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Nvidia won, we all lost

• d00mB0t 1y ago
  Sounds about right :D
• leakycap 1y ago
  This article goes much deeper than I expected, and is a nice recap of the last few years of "green" gpu drama. Liars or not, the performance has not been there for me in any of my usecases, from personal to professional. A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080 performs so closely to the top end, expensive systems today that it makes almost no sense to upgrade at MSRP+markup unless your system is older than this. Unless you need specific features only on more recent cards, there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than a 30 series card right now.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    I mean, most people probably won't directly upgrade. Their old card will die, or eventually nvidia will stop making drivers for it. Unless you're looking around for used cards, the price difference between something low end like a 3060 isn't that much less in price for the length of support you're going to get. Unless nvidia's money printing machine breaks soon, expect the same to continue for the next 3+ years. Crappy expensive cards with a premium on memory with almost no actual video rendering performance increase.
    • leakycap 1y ago
      > Unless you're looking around for used cards, the price difference between something low end like a 3060 isn't that much less in price for the length of support you're going to get. This does not somehow give purchasers more budget room now, but they can buy 30-series cards in spades and not have to worry about the same heating and power deliveries as a little bonus.
  • theshackleford 1y ago
    > A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080 performs so closely to the top end, expensive systems today This is in no way true and is quite an absurd claim. Unless you meant for some specific isolated purposed restricted purely to yourself and your performance needs. > there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than a 30 series card right now. How about I like high refresh and high resolutions? I'll throw in VR to boot. Which are my real use cases. I use a high refresh 4K display and VR, both have benefited hugely from my 2080Ti > 4090 Shift.
    • Der_Einzige 1y ago
      I have this exact CPU sans a 3090 (I started with 2080 but upgraded due to local AI needs). 8700k is perfectly fine for todays workloads. CPUs have stagnated and also the amount of RAM in systems has too (Apple still macbook air defaults of 8 GB in 2025??????)
      • theshackleford 1y ago
        It wasn’t “workloads” being talked about, it was gaming performance, the one area in which there is an absolutely huge difference mainly on the GPU side. We are taking a difference of close too if not 100%. And despite CPUs stagnating it’s absolutely still possible to be held back on a stronger GPU with an older CPU especially in areas such as 1% lows, stuttering etc.
        • leakycap 1y ago
          > This is in no way true and is quite an absurd claim. You provided no evidence to back up this very strong statement; should we just take your word for it? > especially in areas such as 1% lows, stuttering etc. Oh, if you're willing to spend $1k to improve your 1% lows, I guess your argument makes sense.
          • theshackleford 1y ago
            > You provided no evidence to back up this very strong statement; should we just take your word for it? Where is your evidence? You were the one making grand claims entirely unsupported by reality. Should we just take your word for it? It seems to have been your expectation given you backed it with literally nothing. My evidence would be literally any benchmark in existence and the fact I actually owned the 2080ti and now own modern a modern high end GPU. They are not even remotely in the same class of performance in anything other than your head. But hey if that isn’t enough: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5080-founders-edition/34.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5080-f... Now go on, I eagerly await any evidence that supports your claim. Take all the time you need.
• AStonesThrow 1y ago
  [dead]
• ryao 1y ago
  > The RTX 50 series are the second generation of NVIDIA cards to use the 12VHPWR connector. This is wrong. The 50 series uses 12V-2x6, not 12VHPWR. The 30 series was the first to use 12VHPR. The 40 series was the second to use 12VHPWR and first to use 12V-2x6. The 50 series was the second to use 12V-2x6. The female connectors are what changed in 12V-2x6. The male connectors are identical between 12V-2x6 and 12VHPWR.
  • ohdeargodno 1y ago
    Nitpicking it doesn't change the fact that the 12v2x6 connector _also_ burns down.
    • ryao 1y ago
      The guy accuses Nvidia of not doing anything about that problem, but ignored that they did with the 12V-2x6 connector, which as far as I can tell, has had far fewer issues.
      • Gracana 1y ago
        It still has no fusing, sensing, or load balancing for the individual wires. It is a fire waiting to happen.
        • ryao 1y ago
          It is a connector. None of the connectors inside a PC have those. They could add them to the circuitry on the PCB side of the connector, but that is entirely separate from the connector. That said, the industry seems to be moving to adding detection into the PSU, given seasonic’s announcement: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-supplies/seasonics-next-generation-prime-psus-to-will-try-to-stop-connectors-from-melting https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-supplies/se... Finally, I think there is a simpler solution, which is to change the cable to use two large gauge wires instead of 12 individual ones to carry current. That would eliminate the need for balancing the wires in the first place.
• bigyabai 1y ago
  > Pretty much all upscalers force TAA for anti-aliasing and it makes the entire image on the screen look blurry as fuck the lower the resolution is. I feel like this is a misunderstanding, though I admit I'm splitting hairs here. DLSS is a form of TAA, and so is FSR and most other modern upscalers. You generally don't need an extra antialiasing pipeline if you're getting an artificially supersampled image. We've seen this technique variably developed across the lifespan of realtime raster graphics; first with checkerboard rendering, then TAA, then now DLSS/frame generation. It has upsides and downsides, and some TAA implementations were actually really good for the time.
  • kbolino 1y ago
    Every kind of TAA that I've seen creates artifacts around fast-moving objects. This may sound like a niche problem only found in fast-twitch games but it's cropped up in turn-based RPGs and factory/city builders. I personally turn it off as soon as I notice it. Unfortunately, some games have removed traditional MSAA as an option, and some are even making it difficult to turn off AA when TAA and FXAA are the only options (though you can usually override these restrictions with driver settings).
    • ohdeargodno 1y ago
      It's not that it's difficult to turn off TAA: it's that so many modern techniques do not work without temporal accumulation and anti-aliasing. Ray tracing? Temporal accumulation and denoising. Irradiance cache? Temporal accumulation and denoising. most modern light rendering techniques cannot be done in time in a single frame. Add to that the fact that deferred or hybrid rendering makes implementing MSAA be anywhere between "miserable" and "impossible", and you have the situation we're in today.
      • kbolino 1y ago
        A lot of this is going to come down to taste so de gustibus and all that, but this feels like building on a foundation of sand. If the artifacts can be removed (or at least mitigated), then by all means let's keep going with cool new stuff as long as it doesn't detract from other aspects of a game. But if they can't be fixed, then either these techniques ought to be relegated to special uses (like cutscenes or the background, kinda like the pre-rendered backdrops of FF7) or abandoned/rethought as pretty but impractical.
• cherioo 1y ago
  High end GPU has over the last 5 years slowly turning from an enthusiast product into a luxury product. 5 or maybe 10 years ago, high-end GPU are needed to run games at reasonably eye candy setting. In 2025, $500 mid-range GPUs are more than enough. Folks all over can barely tell between High and Ultra settings, DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling. There's just no point to compete at $500 price point any more, that Nvidia has largely given up and relegating to the AMD-built Consoles, and integrated graphics like AMD APU, that offer good value in low-end, medium-end, and high-end. Maybe the rumored Nvidia PC, or the Switch 2, can bring some resurgence.
  • ohdeargodno 1y ago
    Not quite $500, but at $650, the 9070 is an absolute monster that outperforms Nvidia's equivalent cards in everything but ray tracing (which you can only turn on with full DLSS framegen and get a blobby mess anyways) AMD is truly making excellent cards, and with a bit of luck UDNA is even better. But they're in the same situation as Nvidia: they could sell 200 GPUs, ship drivers, maintain them, deal with returns and make $100k... Or just sell a single MI300X to a trusted partner that won't make any waves and still make $100k. Wafer availability unfortunately rules all, and as it stands, we're lucky neither of them have abandoned their gaming segments for massively profitable AI things.
    • enraged_camel 1y ago
      I have a 2080 that I'm considering upgrading but not sure which 50 series would be the right choice.
      • thway15269037 1y ago
        Grab a used/refurb 3090 then. Probably as legendary card as a 1080Ti.
        • k12sosse 1y ago
          Just pray that it's a 3090 under that lid when you buy it second hand
• ionwake 1y ago
  I don’t want to jump on nvidia but I found it super weird when they clearly remote controlled a Disney bot onto the stage and claimed it was all using real time AI which was clearly impossible due to no latency and weirdly the bot verifying correct stage position in relation to the presenter. It was obviously the Disney bot just being controlled by someone off stage. I found it super alarming because why would they fake something on stage to the extent of just lying.i know Steve jobs had backup phones but jsut claiming a robot is autonomous when it isn’t I just feel it was scammy. It reminded me of when Tesla had remote controlled Optimus bots. I mean I think that’s awesome like super cool but clearly the users thought the robots were autonomous during that dinner party. I have no idea why I seem to be the only person bothered by “stage lies” to this level. Tbh even the Tesla bots weren’t claimed to be autonomous so actually I should never have mentioned them but it explains the “not real” vibe. Not meaning to disparage just explaining my perception as a European maybe it’s just me though! EDIT > Im kinda suprised by the weak arguments in the replies, I love both companies, I am just offering POSITIVE feedback, that its important ( in my eyes ) to be careful not to pretend in certain specific ways or it makes the viewer question the foundation ( which we all know is SOLID and good ). EDIT 2 >There actually is a good rebuttal in the replies, although apparently I have "reading comprehension skill deficiencies" its just my pov that they were insinuating the robot was aware of its surroundings, which is fair enough.
  • elil17 1y ago
    As I understand it the Disney bots do actually use AI in a novel way: https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/design-and-control-of-a-bipedal-robotic-character/ https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/design-and-control... So there’s at least a bit more “there” there than the Tesla bots.
    • ionwake 1y ago
      I believe its RL trained only. See this snipet : "Operator Commands Are Merged: The control system blends expressive animation commands (e.g., wave, look left) with balance-maintaining RL motions" I will print a full retraction if someone can confirm my gut feeling is correct
• yunyu 1y ago
  If you are a gamer, you are no longer NVIDIA's most important customer.
  • bigyabai 1y ago
    A revelation on-par with Mac users waking up to learn their computer was made by a phone company.
    • ravetcofx 1y ago
      Barely even a phone company, more like a app store and microtransactions services company
    • hot_gril 1y ago
      Aside from iTunes getting gimped, I don't feel like the Mac is neglected at all. Was annoyed about the 2016-2019 MBPs though.
  • dcchambers 1y ago
    Haven't been for a while. Not since crypto bros started buying up GPUs for coin mining.
  • theshackleford 1y ago
    Yes but why should I care provided the product they have already sold me continues to work? How does this materially change my life because Nvidia doesnt want to go steady with me anymore?
  • Rapzid 1y ago
    Sounds like an opening for AMD then. But as long as NVidia has the best tech I'll keep buying it when it's time to upgrade.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• Nextgrid 1y ago
  I wonder if the 12VHPWR connector is intentionally defective to prevent large-scale use of those consumer cards in server/datacenter contexts? The failure rate is just barely acceptable in a consumer use-case with a single card, but with multiple cards the probability of failure (which takes down the whole machine, as there's no way to hot-swap the card) makes it unusable. I can't otherwise see why they'd persevere on that stupid connector when better alternatives exist.
  • mjevans 1y ago
    Sunk cost fallacy and a burning (literal) desire to have small artistic things. That's probably also the reason the connector was densified so much, and clearly, released with so VERY little tolerance for error human and otherwise.
  • KerrAvon 1y ago
    IANAL, but knowingly leaving a serious defect in your product at scale for that purpose would be very bad behavior and juries tend not like that sort of thing.
    • thimabi 1y ago
      However, as we’ve learned from the Epic vs Apple case, corporations don’t really care about bad behavior — as long as their ulterior motives don’t get caught.
  • transcriptase 1y ago
    It boggles my mind that an army of the most talented electrical engineers on earth somehow fumble a power connector and then don’t catch it before shipping.
  • ls612 1y ago
    They use the 12VHPWR on some datacenter cards too.
• monster_truck 1y ago
  Remember when nvidia got caught dropping 2 bits of color information to beat ati in benchmarks? I still can't believe anyone has trusted them since! That is an insane thing to do considering the purpose of the product. For as long as they have competition, I will support those companies instead. If they all fail, I guess I will start one. My spite for them knows no limits
  • ragequittah 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • Spivak 1y ago
      > https://linustechtips.com/topic/1497989-amd-caught-cheating-in-synthetic-benchmarks/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/1497989-amd-caught-cheating-... The forum post you linked was an april fools joke.
      • qualeed 1y ago
        It's sort of funny, because the second comment is: "Kinda rather not do april 1st jokes like this as it does get cached and passed around after the fact without it being clear."
      • ulrashida 1y ago
        Egg, meet face. Pretty funny that this was obviously "Google, find posts that prove my point" with nary a further shred of investigation.
  • 827a 1y ago
    People need to start asking more questions about why the RTX 50 series (Blackwell) has almost no performance uplift over the RTX 40 series (Ada/Hopper), and also conveniently its impossible to find B200s.
    • monster_truck 1y ago
      Nvidia is quietly having their Intel moment. The 1080ti can be analogized to Sandy Bridge/The 2600k: Insane performance per dollar, generous binning, and plenty of room left for overclocking. Held up with minimal concessions for a decade, still fine with mild compromises past that. Every generation since? Gives less and less, all Nvidia can do is all they've ever done: press up against the aspect limit of the dies and lean into their massive scale. What's fun about this go round is that the lines are far blurrier between Consumer & Enterprise, a bunch of 5090s is not hamstrung from doing the things a B200 can in the way a 2600k or i9 is compared to a xeon processor. On top of this, there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to adding additional VRAM to old cards and harvesting GPUs from otherwise broken video cards and swapping them onto new boards.
• alganet 1y ago
  Right now, all silicon talk is bullshit. It has been for a while. It became obvious when old e-waste Xeons were turned into viable, usable machines, years ago. Something is obviously wrong with this entire industry, and I cannot wait for it to pop. THIS will be the excitement everyone is looking for.
  • gizajob 1y ago
    Do you have a timeframe for the pop? I need some excitement.
    • alganet 1y ago
      More a sequence of potential events than a timeframe. High-end GPUs are already useless for gaming (a low-end GPU is enough), their traditional source of demand. They're floating on artificial demand for a while now. There are two markets that currently could use them: LLMs and Augmented Reality. Both of these are currently useless, and getting more useless by the day. CPUs are just piggybacking on all of this. So, lots of things hanging on unrealized promises. It will pop when there is no next use for super high-end GPUs. War is a potential user of such devices, and I predict it could be the next thing after LLMs and AR. But then if war breaks out in such a scale to drive silicon prices up, lots of things are going to pop, and food and fuel will boom to such a magnitude that will make silicon look silly. I think it will pop before it comes to the point of war driving it, and it will happen within our lifetimes (so, not a Nostradamus-style prediction that will only be realized long-after I'm dead).
      • rightbyte 1y ago
        I don't see how GPU factories could be running in the event of war "in such a scale to drive silicon prices up". Unless you mean that supply will be low and people scavanging TI calculators for processors to make boxes playing Tetris and Space Invaders.
        • alganet 1y ago
          Why not? This is the exact model in which WWII operated. Car and plane supply chains were practically nationalized to support the military industry. If drones, surveillance, satellites become the main war tech, they'll all use silicon, and things will be fully nationalized. We already have all sorts of hints of this. Doesn't need a genius to predict that it could be what happens to these industries. The balance with food and fuel is more delicate though. A war with drones, satellites and surveillance is not like WWII, there's a commercial aspect to it. If you put it on paper, food and fuel project more power and thus, can move more money. Any public crisis can make people forget about GPUs and jeopardize the process of nationalization that is currently being implemented, which still depends on relatively peaceful international trade.
• system2 1y ago
  Why does the hero image of this website says "Made with GIMP"? I've never seen a web banner saying "Made with Photoshop" or anything similar.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • reddalo 1y ago
    I don't know why it says that, but GIMP is an open-source project so it makes sense for fans to advertise it.
  • goalieca 1y ago
    Were you on the internet in the 90s? Lots of banners like that on every site.
    • system2 1y ago
      I do web development for the last 25 years and yes I was there before .com boom. Gifs maybe were marked but not banners like this.
• ls-a 1y ago
  Finally someone
• honeybadger1 1y ago
  A bit hyperbolic
• dofubej 1y ago
  > With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. Of course the fact that we overwhelmingly chose the better option means that… we are worse off or something?
  • atq2119 1y ago
    That bit does seem a bit whiney. AMD's latest offerings are quite good, certainly better value for money. Why not buy that? The only shame is that they don't sell anything as massive as Nvidia's high end.
  • ohdeargodno 1y ago
    Choosing the vendor locked in, standards hating brand does tend to mean that you inevitably get screwed when they decide do massively inflate their prices and there's nothing you can do about it does tend to make you worse off, yes. Not that AMD was anywhere near being in a good state 10 years ago. Nvidia still fucked you over.
  • johnklos 1y ago
    Many of you chose Windows, so, well, yes.
• mococa 1y ago
  Nothing new, it is just Enshittification
• porphyra 1y ago
  The article complains about issues with consumer GPUs but those are nowadays relegated to being merely a side hobby project of Nvidia, whose core business is enterprise AI chips. Anyway Nvidia still has no significant competition from AMD on either front so they are still getting away with this. Deceptive marketing aside, it's true that it's sad that we can't get 4K 60 Hz with ray tracing with current hardware without some kind of AI denoising and upscaling, but ray tracing is really just _profoundly_ hard so I can't really blame anyone for not having figured out how to put it in a consumer pc yet. There's a reason why pixar movies need huge render farms that take lots of time per frame. We would probably sooner get gaussian splatting and real time diffusion models in games than nice full resolution ray tracing tbh.
  • Jabrov 1y ago
    I get ray tracing at 4K 60Hz with my 4090 just fine
    • trynumber9 1y ago
      Really? I can't even play Minecraft (DXR: ON) at 4K 60Hz on a RTX 5090... Maybe another regression in Blackwell.
    • marcellus23 1y ago
      What game? And with no upscaling or anything?
• neuroelectron 1y ago
  Seems a bit calculated and agreed across the industry. What can really make sense of Microsoft's acquisitions and ruining of billion dollar IPs? It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming industry. They want to centralize control of the market and make it a service based (rent seeking) sector. I'm not saying they all got together and decided this together but their wonks are probably all saying the same thing. The market is shrinking and whether it's by design or incompetence, this creates a new opportunity to acquire it wholesale for pennies on the dollar and build a wall around it and charge for entry. It's a natural result of games requiring NVidia developers for driver tuning, bitcoin/ai and buying out capacity to prevent competitors. The wildcard I can't fit into this puzzle is Valve. They have a huge opportunity here but they also might be convinced that they have already saturated the market and will read the writing on the wall.
  • layoric 1y ago
    Valve is a private company so doesn’t have the same growth at all costs incentives. To Microsoft, the share price is everything.
  • keyringlight 1y ago
    As much as they've got large resources, I'm not sure what projects they could reasonably throw a mountain of money at and expect to change things, and presumably benefit from in the future instead of doing it to be a a force of chaos in the industry. Valve's efforts all seem to orbit around the store, that's their main business and everything else seems like a loss-leader to get you buying through it even if it comes across as a pet project of a group of employees. The striking one for me is their linux efforts, at least as far as I'm aware they don't do a lot that isn't tied to the steam deck (or similar devices) or running games available on steam through linux. Even the deck APU is derived from the semi-custom work AMD did for the consoles, they're benefiting from a second later harvest that MS/Sony have invested (hundreds of millions?) in many years earlier. I suppose a lot of it comes down to what Valve needs to support their customers (developers/publishers), they don't see the point in pioneering and establishing some new branch of tech with developers.
  • bob1029 1y ago
• jekwoooooe 1y ago
  This guy makes some good points but he clearly has a bone to pick. Calling dlss snake oil was where I stopped reading
  • kg 1y ago
    The article doesn't make the best argument to support the claim but it's true that NVIDIA is now making claims like '4090 level performance' on the basis that if you turn on DLSS multi-frame generation you suddenly have Huge Framerates when most of the pixels are synthesized instead of real. Personally I'm happy with DLSS on balanced or quality, but the artifacts from framegen are really distracting. So I feel like it's fair to call their modern marketing snake oil since it's so reliant on frame gen to create the illusion of real progress.
  • Retr0id 1y ago
    Yeah, computer graphics has always been "software trickery" all the way down. There are valid points to be made about DLSS being marketed in misleading ways, but I don't think it being "software trickery" is a problem at all.
    • ThatPlayer 1y ago
      Exactly. Running games at a lower resolution isn't new. I remember changing the size of the viewport in the original DOOM 1993 to get it to run faster. Making a lower resolution look better without having to run at a higher resolution is the exact same problem anti-aliasing has been tackling forever. DLSS is just another form of AA that is now so advanced, you can go from an even lower resolution and still look good. So even when I'm running a game at native resolution, I still want anti-aliasing, and DLSS is a great choice then.
      • imiric 1y ago
        It's one thing to rely on a technique like AA to improve visual quality with negligible drawbacks. DLSS is entirely different though, since upscaling introduces all kinds of graphical issues, and frame generation[1] even more so, while adding considerable input latency. NVIDIA will claim that this is offset by its Reflex feature, but that has its own set of issues. So, sure, we can say that all of this is ultimately software trickery, but when the trickery is dialed up to 11 and the marketing revolves entirely on it, while the raw performance is only slightly improved over previous generations, it's a clear sign that consumers are being duped. [1]: I'm also opposed to frame generation from a philosophical standpoint. I want my experience to be as close as possible to what the game creator intended. That is, I want every frame to be generated by the game engine; every object to look as it should within the world, and so on. I don't want my graphics card to create an experience that approximates what the creator intended. This is akin to reading a book on an e-reader that replaces every other word with one chosen by an algorithm. I want none of that.
• __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  > With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us. I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets. I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooom and then cry and outrage when they are exploited instead of just walking away and doing something else. Same with magic the gathering, the game went to shit and so many people got outraged and in a big huff but they still spend thousands on the hobby. I just stopped playing mtg.
  • nobodyandproud 1y ago
    I couldn’t be more pleased with my 7900xt 20gb. Running most inference models (quantized of course) via Vulkan. Playing games using Wine and/or Steam+Proton on Linux. Sweet spot in price.
  • frollogaston 1y ago
    Also playing PC video games doesn't even require a Nvidia GPU. It does sorta require Windows. I don't want to use that, so guess I lost the ability to waste tons of time playing boring games, oh no.
    • rightbyte 1y ago
      Steam's Wine thing works quite well. And yes you need to fiddle and do work arounds including giving up getting some games to work.
      • cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        Yeah Proton covers a lot of titles. It’s mainly games that use the most draconian forms of anticheat that don’t work.
      • frollogaston 1y ago
        Yeah, but it's not worth. Apparently the "gold" list on ProtonDB is games that allegedly work with tweaks. So like, drop in this random DLL and it might fix the game. I'm not gonna spend time on that. Last one I ever tried was https://www.protondb.com/app/813780 https://www.protondb.com/app/813780 with comments like "works perfectly, except multiplayer is completely broken" and the workaround has changed 3 times so far, also it lags no matter what. Gave up after stealing 4 different DLLs from Windows. It doesn't even have anticheat, it's just cause of some obscure math library.
• snitty 1y ago
  NVIDIA is, and will be for at least the next year or two, supply constrained. They only have so much capacity at TSMC for all the chips, and the lion's share of that is going to be going enterprise chips, which sell for an order of magnitude more than the consumer chips. It's hard to get too offended by them shirking the consumer marker right now when they're printing money with their enterprise business.
  • wmf 1y ago
    They could be more honest about it though.
  • davidee 1y ago
    Not personally offended, but when a company makes a big stink around several gross exaggerations (performance, price, availability) it's not hard to understand why folks are kicking up their own stink. Nvidia could have said "we're prioritizing enterprise" but instead they put on a big horse and pony show about their consumer GPUs. I really like the Gamer's Nexus paper launch shirt. ;)
    • nicce 1y ago
      They could rapidly build new own factories but they don’t.
      • axoltl 1y ago
        Are you saying Nvidia could spin up their own chip fabs in short order?
        • benreesman 1y ago
          If they believed they were going to continue selling AI chips at those margins they would: - outbid Apple on new nodes - sign commitments with TSMC to get the capacity in the pipeline - absolutely own the process nodes they made cards on that are still selling way above retail NVIDIA has been posting net earnings in the 60-90 range over the last few years. If you think that's going to continue? You book the fab capacity hell or high water. Apple doesn't make those margins (which is what on paper would determine who is in front for the next node).
• frollogaston 1y ago
  Because they won't sell you an in-demand high-end GPU for cheap? Well TS
  • tiahura 1y ago
    Not to mention that they are currently in stock at my local microcenter.
• another_kel 1y ago
  I’m sorry but this framing is insane > So 7 years into ray traced real-time computer graphics and we’re still nowhere near 4K gaming at 60 FPS, even at $1,999. The guy is complaining that a product can’t live up to his standard, while dismissing barely noticeable proposed trade off that can make it possible because it’s «fake».
• jdprgm 1y ago
  The 4090 was released coming up on 3 years and is currently going for about 25% over launch msrp USED. Buying gpu's is literally an appreciating asset. It is complete insanity and an infuriating situation for an average consumer. I honestly don't know why nvidia didn't just suspend their consumer line entirely. It's clearly no longer a significant revenue source and they have thoroughly destroyed consumer goodwill over the past 5 years.
  • trynumber9 1y ago
    >I honestly don't know why nvidia didn't just suspend their consumer line entirely. It's ~$12 billion a year with a high gross margin by the standards of every other hardware company. They want to make sure neither AMD nor Intel get that revenue they can invest into funding their own AI/ML efforts.
• oilkillsbirds 1y ago
  Nobody’s going to read this, but this article and sentiment is utter anti-corporate bullshit, and the vastly congruent responses show that none of you have watched the historical development of GPGPU, or do any serious work on GPUs, or keep up with the open work of nvidia researchers. The spoiled gamer mentality is getting old for those of us that actually work daily in GPGPU across industries, develop with RTX kit, do AI research, etc. Yes they’ve had some marketing and technical flubs as any giant publically traded company will have, but their balance of research-driven development alongside corporate profit necessities is unmatched.
  • oilkillsbirds 1y ago
    And no I don’t work for nvidia. I’ve just been in the industry long enough to watch the immense contribution nvidia has made to every. single. field. The work of their researchers is astounding, it’s clear to anyone that’s honestly worked in this field long enough. It’s insane to hate on them.
    • grg0 1y ago
      Their contribution to various fields and the fact that they treat the average consumer like shit nowadays are not mutually exclusive. Also, nobody ever said they hate their researchers.
      • Rapzid 1y ago
        Maybe the average consumer doesn't agree they are being treated like shit? Steam top 10 GPU list is almost all NVidia. Happy customers or duped suckers? I've seen the later sentiment a lot over the years and discounting consumer's preferences never seems to lead to correct prediction of outcomes..
        • detaro 1y ago
          Or maybe the average consumer bought them while still being unhappy about the overall situation?
• FeepingCreature 1y ago
  Oh man, you haven't gotten into their AI benchmark bullshittery. There's factors of 4x on their numbers that are basically invented whole cloth by switching units.
  • robbies 1y ago
    They “learned” this trick from their consumer days. Devs always had to reverse-engineer the hypothetical scaling from their fantasy numbers
• benreesman 1y ago
  The thing is, company culture is a real thing. And some cultures are invasive/contagious like kudzu both internally to the company and into adjacent companies that they get comped against. The people get to thinking a certain way, they move around between adjacent companies at far higher rates than to more distant parts of their field, the executives start sitting on one another's boards, before you know it a whole segment is enshittified, and customers feel like captives in an exploitation machine instead of parties to a mutually beneficial transaction in which trade increases the wealth of all. And you can build mythologies around falsehoods to further reinforce it: "I have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value." No buddy, you have some very specific restrictions on your ability to sell the company to your cousin (ha!) for a handful of glass beads. You have a legal obligation to bin your wafers the way it says on your own box, but that doesn't seem to bother you. These days I get a machine like the excellent ASUS Proart P16 (grab one of those before they're all gone if you can) with a little 4060 or 4070 in it that can boot up Pytorch and make sure the model will run forwards and backwards at a contrived size, and then go rent a GB200 or whatever from Latitude or someone (seriously check out Latitude, they're great), or maybe one of those wildly competitive L40 series fly machines (fly whips the llama's ass like nothing since Winamp, check them out too). The GMTek EVO-X1 is a pretty capable little ROCm inference machine for under 1000, its big brother is nipping at the heels of a DGX Spark under 2k. There is good stuff out there but its all from non-incumbent angles. I don't game anymore but if I did I would be paying a lot of attention to ARC, I've heard great things. Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs for more than Latitude charges for 5Ghz EPYC. Fuck NVIDIA gaming retail rat race, its an electrical as well as moral hazard in 2025. It's a shame we all have to be tricky to get what used to be a halfway fair deal 5-10 years ago (and 20 years ago they passed a HUGE part of the scaling bonanza down to the consumer), but its possible to compute well in 2025.
  • glitchc 1y ago
    Nice advertorial. I hope you got paid for all of those plugs.
    • benreesman 1y ago
      I wish! People don't care what I think enough to monetize it. But I do spend a lot of effort finding good deals on modern ass compute. This is the shit I use to get a lot of performance on a budget. Will people pay you to post on HN? How do I sign up?
• sonicvrooom 1y ago
  it would be "just" capitalist to call these fuckers out for real, on the smallest level. you are safe.
• shmerl 1y ago
  > ... NVENC are pretty much indispensable What's so special about NVENC that Vulkan video or VAAPI can't provide? > AMD also has accelerated video transcoding tech but for some reason nobody seems to be willing to implement it into their products OBS works with VAAPI fine. Looking forward to them adding Vulkan video as an option. Either way, as a Linux gamer I haven't touched Nvidia in years. AMD is a way better experience.
• DarkmSparks 1y ago
  I sometimes wonder if people getting this salty over "fake" frames actually realise every frame is fake even in native mode. Neither is more "real" than the other, it's just different.
• strictnein 1y ago
  This really makes no sense: > This in turn sparked rumors about NVIDIA purposefully keeping stock low to make it look like the cards are in high demand to drive prices. And sure enough, on secondary markets, the cards go way above MSRP Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP, but they get almost all the hate for it. Why would they set themselves up for that? Scalpers are a retail wide problem. Acting like Nvidia has the insight or ability to prevent them is just silly. People may not believe this, but retailers hate it as well and spend millions of dollars trying to combat it. They would have sold the product either way, but scalping results in the retailer's customers being mad and becoming some other company's customers, which are both major negatives.
  • kbolino 1y ago
    Scalping and MSRP-baiting have been around for far too many years for nVidia to claim innocence. The death of EVGA's GPU line also revealed that nVidia holds most of the cards in the relationship with its "partners". Sure, Micro Center and Amazon can only do so much, and nVidia isn't a retailer, but they know what's going on and their behavior shows that they actually like this situation.
    • amatecha 1y ago
      Yeah wait, what happened with EVGA? (guess I can search it up, of course) I was browsing gaming PC hardware recently and noticed none of the GPUs were from EVGA .. I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\
      • theshackleford 1y ago
        In 2022 claiming a lack of respect from Nvidia, low margins, and Nvidia's control over partners as just a few of the reasons, EVGA ended its partnership with Nvidia and ceased manufacturing Nvidia GPUs. > I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\ It's so wild to hear this as in my country, they were not considered anything special over any other third party retailer as we have strong consumer protection laws which means its all much of a muchness.
• Ancapistani 1y ago
  I disagree with some of the article’s points - primarily, that nVidia’s drivers were ever “good” - but the gist I agree with. I have a 4070 Ti right now. I use it for inference and VR gaming on a Pimax Crystal (2880x2880x2). In War Thunder I get ~60 FPS. I’d love to be able to upgrade to a card with at least 16GB of VRAM and better graphics performance… but as far as I can tell, such a card does not exist at any price.
• KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
  [flagged]
• scrubs 1y ago
  Another perspective: Nvidia customer support on their mellanox purchase ...is total crap. It's the worst of corporate America ... paper pushing beurceatric guys who slow roll stuff ... getting to a smart person behind the customer reps requires one to be an ape in a bad mood 5x ... I think they're so used to that now that unless you go crazy mode their take is ... well I guess he wasn't serious about his ask and he dropped it. Here's another nvdia/mellanox bs problem: many mlx nic cards are finalized or post assembled say by hp. So if you have a hp "mellanox" nic nvidia washes their hands of anything detailed. It's not ours; hp could have done anything to it what do we know? So one phones hp ... and they have no clue either because it's really not their IP or their drivers. It's a total cluster bleep and more and more why corporate america sucks
  • grg0 1y ago
    Corporate America actually resembles the state of government a lot too. Deceptive marketing, inflated prices that leave the average Joe behind, and low quality products on top of all that.
    • scrubs 1y ago
      In the 1980s maybe a course correction was needed to help capitalism. But it's over corrected by 30%. I'm not knocking corporate america or capitalism in absolute terms. I am saying customers have lost power... whether it's phone trees, right to fix, a lack of accountability (2008 housing crisis), the ability to play endless accounting games to pay lower taxes plus all the more mundane things ... it's gotten out of whack.
  • ksec 1y ago
    I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X support are great.
    • scrubs 1y ago
      >I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X support are great. I'll have to take your word on that. And if I take your word: ergo not Connect-X support sucks So that's sucks yet again on the table ... for what the 3rd time? Nvidia sucks.
• deepGem 1y ago
  [flagged]
• spoaceman7777 1y ago
  The real issue here is actually harebrained youtubers stirring up drama for views. That's 80% of the problem. And their viewers (and readers, for that which makes it into print) eat it up. Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly, posting to social media, and youtubers jumping on the trend for likes. These are 99% user error issues drummed up by non-professionals (and, in some cases, people paid by 3rd party vendors to protect those vendors' reputation). And the complaints about transient performances issues with drivers, drummed up into apocalyptics scenarios, again, by youtubers, who are putting this stuff under a microscope for views, are universal across every single hardware and software product. Everything. Claiming "DLSS is snakeoil", and similar things are just an expression of the complete lack of understanding of the people involved in these pot-stirring contests. Like... the technique obviously couldn't magically multiply the ability of hardware to generate frames using the primary method. It is exactly as advertised. It uses machine learning to approximate it. And it's some fantastic technology, that is now ubiquitous across the industry. Support and quality will increase over time, just like every _quality_ hardware product does during its early lifespan. It's all so stupid and rooted in greed by those seeking ad-money, and those lacking in basic sense or experience in what they're talking about and doing. Embarrassing for the author to so publicly admit to eating up social media whinging.
  • grg0 1y ago
    If you've ever watched a GN or LTT video, they never claimed that DLSS is snakeoil. They specifically call out the pros of the technology, but also point out that Nvidia lies, very literally, about its performance claims in marketing material. Both statements are true and not mutually exclusive. I think people like in this post get worked up about the false marketing and develop (understandably) a negative view of the technology as a whole. > Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly This is not true. Even GN reproduced the melting of the first-party cable. Also, why shouldn't you be able to use third-party cables? Fuck DRM too.
    • spoaceman7777 1y ago
      I'm referring to the section header in this article. Youtubers are not a truly hegemonic group, but there's a set of ideas and narratives that pervade the group as a whole that different subsets buy into, and push, and that's one that exists in the overall sphere of people who discuss the use of hardware for gaming.
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  All symptoms of being number one. Customers don’t matter, the company matters. Competition sorts out such attitude quick smart but AMD never misses a chance to copy Nvidias strategy in any way and intel is well behind. So for now, you’ll eat what Jensen feeds you.
• voxleone 1y ago
  It’s reasonable to argue that NVIDIA has a de facto monopoly in the field of GPU-accelerated compute, especially due to CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). While not a legal monopoly in the strict antitrust sense (yet), in practice, NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC, and increasingly in professional content creation — is extraordinarily dominant.
  • arcanus 1y ago
    > NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC The two largest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD. I don't think it's accurate to say Nvidia has monopoly on HPC Source: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/ https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/
    • infocollector 1y ago
      It’s misleading to cite two government-funded supercomputers as evidence that NVIDIA lacks monopoly power in HPC and AI: - Government-funded outliers don’t disprove monopoly behavior. The two AMD-powered systems on the TOP500 list—both U.S. government funded—are exceptions driven by procurement constraints, not market dynamics. NVIDIA’s pricing is often prohibitive, and its dominance gives it the power to walk away from bids that don’t meet its margins. That’s not competition—it’s monopoly leverage. - Market power isn't disproven by isolated wins. Monopoly status isn’t defined by having every win, but by the lack of viable alternatives in most of the market. In commercial AI, research, and enterprise HPC workloads, NVIDIA owns an overwhelming share—often >90%. That kind of dominance is monopoly-level control. - AMD’s affordability is a symptom, not a sign of strength. AMD's lower pricing reflects its underdog status in a market it struggles to compete in—largely because NVIDIA has cornered not just the hardware but the entire CUDA software stack, developer ecosystem, and AI model compatibility. You don't need 100% market share to be a monopoly—you need control. NVIDIA has it. In short: pointing to a couple of symbolic exceptions doesn’t change the fact that NVIDIA’s grip on the GPU compute stack—from software to hardware to developer mindshare—is monopolistic in practice.
  • yxhuvud 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• rkagerer 1y ago
  I am a volunteer firefighter and hold a degree in electrical engineering. The shenanigans with their shunt resistors, and ensuing melting cables, is in my view criminal. Any engineer worth their salt would recognize pushing 600W through a bunch of small cables with no contingency if some of them have failed is just asking for trouble. These assholes are going to set someone's house on fire. I hope they get hit with a class action lawsuit and are forced to recall and properly fix these products before anyone dies as a result of their shoddy engineering.
  • rkagerer 1y ago
    Apparently somebody did sue a couple years back. Anyone know what happened with the [plaintiff] vs. nVidia lawsuit? EDIT: Plantiff dismissed it. Guessing they settled. Here are the court documents (alternately, shakna's links below include unredacted copies): https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corporation.pdf https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora... https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corporation-notice-voluntary-dismissal.pdf https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora... A GamersNexus article investigating the matter: https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/12vhpwr-dumpster-fire-investigation-contradicting-specs-corner-cutting https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/12vhpwr-dumpster-fire-investiga... And a video referenced in the original post, describing how the design changed from one that proactively managed current balancing, to simply bundling all the connections together and hoping for the best: https://youtu.be/kb5YzMoVQyw https://youtu.be/kb5YzMoVQyw
    • shakna 1y ago
      > NOTICE of Voluntary Dismissal With Prejudice by [name redacted] (Filed on 3/10/2023) (Entered: 03/10/2023) Sounds like it was settled out of court. [0] https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/5--22-cv-07090/Genova_v._NVIDIA_Corporation/ https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
    • middle-aged-man 1y ago
      Do those mention failing to follow Underwriters Laboratory requirements? I’m curious whether the 5090 package was not following UL requirements. Would that make them even more liable? Part of me believes that the blame here is probably on the manufacturers and that this isn’t a problem with Nvidia corporate.
• Dylan16807 1y ago
  > The competing open standard is FreeSync, spearheaded by AMD. Since 2019, NVIDIA also supports FreeSync, but under their “G-Sync Compatible” branding. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with G-Sync when a competing, open standard exists and differences are negligible[4]. Open is good, but the open standard itself is not enough. You need some kind of testing/certification, which is built in to the G-Sync process. AMD does have a FreeSync certification program now which is good. If you rely on just the standard, some manufacturers get really lazy. One of my screens technically supports FreeSync but I turned it off day one because it has a narrow range and flickers very badly.
• johnklos 1y ago
  I'm so happy to see someone calling NVIDIA out for their bullshit. The current state of GPU programming sucks, and that's just an example of the problems with the GPU market today. The lack of open source anything for GPU programming makes me want to throw my hands up and just do Apple. It feels much more open than pretending that there's anything open about CUDA on Linux.
• jes5199 1y ago
  with Intel also shitting the bed, it seems like AMD is poised to pick up “traditional computing” while everybody else runs off to chase the new gold rush. Presumably there’s still some money in desktops and gaming rigs?
• fracus 1y ago
  This was an efficient, well written, TKO.
  • anonymars 1y ago
    Agreed. An excellent summary of a lot of missteps that have been building for a while. I had watched that article on the power connector/ shunt resistors and was dumbfounded at the seemingly rank-amateurish design. And although I don't have a 5000 series GPU I have been astonished at how awful the drivers have been for the better part of a year. As someone who filed the AMD/ATi ecosystems due to their quirky unreliability, Nvidia and Intel have really shit the bed these days (I also had the misfortune of "upgrading" to a 13th gen Intel processor just before we learned that they cook themselves) I do think DLSS supersampling is incredible but Lord almighty is it annoying that the frame generation is under the same umbrella because that is nowhere near the same, and the water is awful muddy since "DLSS" is often used without distinction
• ksec 1y ago
  >How is it that one can supply customers with enough stock on launch consistently for decades, and the other can’t? I guess the author is too young and didn't go through iPhone 2G to iPhone 6 era. Also worth remembering it wasn't too long ago Nvidia was sitting on nearly ONE full year of GPU stock unsold. That has completely changed the course of how Nvidia does supply chain management and forecast. Which unfortunately have a negative impact all the way to Series 50. I believe they have since changed and next Gen should be better prepared. But you can only do so much when AI demand is seemingly unlimited. >The PC, as gaming platform, has long been held in high regards for its backwards compatibility. With the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA broke that going forward. PhysX..... Glide? What about all the Audio Drivers API before. As much as I wish everything is backward compatible. That is just not how the world works. Just like any old games you need some fiddling to get it work. And they even make the code available so people could actually do something rather then emulation or reverse engineering. >That, to me, was a warning sign that maybe, just maybe, ray tracing was introduced prematurely and half-baked. Unfortunately that is not how it works. Do we want to go back to Pre-3DFx to today to see how many what we thought was great idea for 3D accelerator only to be replaced by better ideas or implementation? These idea were good on paper but didn't work well. We than learn from it and reiterate. >Now they’re doing an even more computationally expensive version of ray tracing: path tracing. So all the generational improvements we could’ve had are nullified again...... How about Path Tracing is simply a better technology? Game developers also dont have to use any of these tech. The article act as if Nvidia forces all game to use it. Gamers want better graphics quality, Artist and Graphics asset is already by far the most expensive item in gaming and it is still increasing. What hardware improvement is allowing those to be achieved at lower cost. ( To Game Developers ) >Never mind that frame generation introduces input lag that NVIDIA needs to counter-balance with their “Reflex” technology, No. That is not why "Reflex" tech was invented. Nvidia spend R&D on 1000 fps monitor as well and potentially sub 1ms frame monitor. They have always been latency sensitive. ------------------------------ I have no idea how modern Gamers become what they are today. And this isn't the first time I have read it even on HN. You dont have to buy Nvidia. You have AMD and now Intel ( again ). Basically I can summarise one thing about it, Gamers want Nvidia 's best GPU for the lowest price possible. Or a price they think is acceptable without understanding the market dynamics and anything supply chain or manufacturing. They also want higher "generational" performance. Like 2x every 2 year. And if they dont get it, it is Nvidia's fault. Not TSMC, not Cadence, not Tokyo Electron, not Issac Newton or Law of Physic. But Nvidia. Nvidia's PR tactic isn't exactly new in the industry. Every single brand do something similar. Do I like it? No. But unfortunately that is how the game is played. And Apple is by far the worst offender. I do sympathise with the Cable issue though. And not the first time Nvidia has with thermal issues. But then again they are also the one who are constantly pushing the boundary forward. And AFAIK the issues isn't as bad as the series 40 but some YouTube seems to be making a bigger issue than most. Supply issues will be better but TSMC 3nm is fully booked . The only possible solution would be to have consumer GPU less capable of AI workload. Or to have AI GPU working with leading edge node and consumer always be a node lower to split the capacity problem. I would imagine that is part of the reason why TSMC is accelerating 3nm capacity increase on US soil. Nvidia is now also large enough and has enough cash to take on more risk.
• DeepYogurt 1y ago
  > And I hate that they’re getting away with it, time and time again, for over seven years. Nvidia's been at this way longer than 7 years. They were cheating at benchmarks to control a narrative back in 2003. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/05/23/1516220/futuremark-confirms-nvidias-benchmark-cheating https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/05/23/1516220/futuremark-...
• 827a 1y ago
  Here's something I don't understand: Why is it that when I go look at DigitalOcean's GPU Droplet options, they don't offer any Blackwell chips? [1] I thought Blackwell was supposed to be the game changing hyperchip that carried AI into the next generation, but the best many providers still offer are Hopper H100s? Where are all the Blackwell chips? Its been oodles of months. Apparently AWS has them available in the P6 instance type, but the only configuration they offer has 2TB of memory and costs... $113/hr [2]? Like, what is going on at Nvidia? Where the heck is Project Digits? Like, I'm developing this shadow opinion that Nvidia actually hasn't built anything new in three years, but they fill the void by talking about hypothetical newtech that no one can actually buy + things their customers have built with the actually good stuff they built three years ago. Like, consumers can never buy Blackwell because "oh Enterprises have bought them all up" then when Microsoft tries to buy any they say "Amazon bought them all up" and vice-versa. Something really fishy is going on over there. Time to short. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/products/gpu-droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/products/gpu-droplets [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
  • hank808 1y ago
    Digits: July 22 it seems is the release date for the version with the Asus badge. https://videocardz.com/newz/asus-ascent-gx10-with-gb10-blackwell-superchip-launches-july-22-marks-nvidias-entry-into-desktop-cpu-market https://videocardz.com/newz/asus-ascent-gx10-with-gb10-black...
• ratmeadow 1y ago
  Anyone else getting a bit disillusioned with the whole tech hardware improvements thing? Seems like every year we get less improvement for higher cost and the use cases become less useful. Like the whole industry is becoming a rent seeking exercise with diminishing returns. I used to follow hardware improvements and now largely don't because I realised I (and probably most of us) don't need it. It's staggering that we are throwing so many resources at marginal improvements for things like gaming, and I say that as someone whose main hobby used to be gaming. Ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS, etc at a price point of $3000 just for the GPU - who cares when a 2010 cell shaded game running on an upmarket toaster gave me the utmost joy? And the AI use cases don't impress me either - seems like all we do each generation is burn more power to shove more data through and pray for an improvement (collecting sweet $$$ in the meantime). Another commenter here said it well, there's just so much more you can do with your life than follow along with this drama.
  • bamboozled 1y ago
    I remember when it was a serious difference, like PS1-PS3 was absolutely miraculous and exciting to watch. It's also fun that no matter how fast the hardware seems to get, we seem to fill it up with shitty bloated software.
    • ratmeadow 1y ago
      IMO at some point in the history of software we lost track of hardware capabilities versus software end outcomes. Hardware improved many orders of magnitude but overall software quality/usefulness/efficiency did not (yes this is a hill I will die on). We've ended up with mostly garbage and an occasional legitimately brilliant use of transistors.
  • philistine 1y ago
    Your disillusionment is warranted, but I'll say that on the Mac side the grass has never been greener. The M chips are screamers year after year, the GPUs are getting ok, the ML cores are incredible and actually useful.
• WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
  Call it delusions or conspiracy theories, what ever, I don't care, but it seems to me that NVIDIA wants to vendor lock the whole industry If all game developers begin to rely on NVIDIA technology, the industry as a whole puts customers in a position where they are forced to give in The public's perception of RTX's softwarization (DLSS) and them coining the technical terms says it all They have a long term plan, and that plan is: - make all the money possible - destroy all competition - vendor lock the whole world When I see that, I can't help myself but to think something is fishy: https://i.imgur.com/WBwg6qQ.png https://i.imgur.com/WBwg6qQ.png
• yalok 1y ago
  a friend of mine is a SW developer in Nvidia, working on their drivers. He was complaining lately that he is required to fix a few bugs in the drivers code for the new card (RTX?), while not provided with the actual hardware. His pleas to send him this HW were ignored, but the demand to fix by a deadline kept being pushed. He actually ended up buying older but somewhat similar used hardware with his personal money, to be able to do his work. Not even sure if he was eventually able to expense it, but wouldn't be surprised if not, knowing how big companies bureaucracy works...
• PoshBreeze 1y ago
  > The RTX 4090 was massive, a real heccin chonker. It was so huge in fact, that it kicked off the trend of needing support brackets to keep the GPU from sagging and straining the PCIe slot. This isn't true. People were buying brackets with 10 series cards.
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  Consumer GPU feels like an "paper launch" for the past years that's like they purposely not selling because they allocated 80% of their production to enterprise only I just hope that new fabs operate early as possible because these price is insane
• amatecha 1y ago
  Uhh, these 12VHPWR connectors seem like a serious fire risk. How are they not being recalled? I just got a 5060ti , now I'm wishing I went AMD instead.. what the hell :( Whoa, the stuff covered in the rest of the post is just as egregious. Wow! Maybe time to figure out which AMD models compares performance-wise and sell this thing, jeez.
• musebox35 1y ago
  With the rise of LLM training, Nvidia’s main revenue stream switched to datacenter gpus (>10x gaming revenue). I wonder whether this have affected the quality of these consumer cards, including both their design and product processes: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nvda/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nvda/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
• reichstein 1y ago
  Aks. "Every beef anyone has ever had with Nvidia in one outrage friendly article." If you want to hate on Nvidia, there'll be something for you in there. An entire section on 12vhpwr connectors, with no mention of 12V-2x6. A lot of "OMG Monopoly" and "why won't people buy AMD" without considering that maybe ... AMD cards are not considered by the general public to be as good _where it counts_. (Like benefit per Watt, aka heat.) Maybe it's all perception, but then AMD should work on that perception. If you want the cooler CPU/GPU, perception is that that's Intel/Nvidia. That's reason enough for me, and many others. Availability isn't great, I'll admit that, if you don't want to settle for a 5060.
• Sweepi 1y ago
  Nvidia is full of shit, but this article is full of shit, too. A lot of human slop, some examples: - 12VHPWR is not at fault / the issue. As the article itself points out, the missing power balancing circuit is to blame. The 3090 Ti had bot 12VHPWR and the balancing power circuit and ran flawless. - Nvidia G-Sync: Total non-issue. G-Sync native is dead. Since 2023, ~1000 Freesync Monitors have been released, and 3(!!) G-Sync native Monitors. - The RTX 4000 series is not still expensive, it is again expensive. It was much cheaper a year before RTX 5000 release - Anti-Sag Brackets were a thing way before RTX 4000
• Kon5ole 1y ago
  TSMC can only make about as many Nvidia chips as OpenAI and the other AI guys wants to buy. Nvidia releases gpus made from basically the shaving leftovers from the OpenAI products, which makes them limited in supply and expensive. So gamers have to pay much more and wait much longer than before, which they resent. Some youtubers make content that profit from the resentment so they play fast and loose with the fundamental reasons in order to make gamers even more resentful. Nvidia has "crazy prices" they say. But they're clearly not crazy. 2000 dollar gpus appear in quantities of 50+ from time to time at stores here but they sell out in minutes. Lowering the prices would be crazy.
  • xiphias2 1y ago
    This is one reason, and another is that both Dennard scaling has stopped and GPUs hit a memory wall for DRAM. The only reason AI hardware gets the significant improvements is that they are using big matmuls and a lot of research has been in getting lower precision (now 4bit) training working (numerical precision stability was always a huge problem with backprop).
  • Ologn 1y ago
    Yes. In 2021, Nvidia was actually making more revenue from its home/consumer/gaming chips than from its data center chips. Now 90% of its revenue is from its data center hardware, and less than 10% of its revenue is from home gpus. The home gpus are an afterthought to them. They take up resources that can be devoted to data center. Also, in some sense there can be some fear 5090s could cannibalize the data center hardware in some aspects - my desktop has a 3060 and I have trained locally, run LLMs locally etc. It doesn't make business sense at this time for Nvidia to meet consumer demand.
• jdthedisciple 1y ago
  Read this in good faith but I don't see how it's supposed to be Nvidia's fault? How could Nvidia realistically stop scalper bots?
  • SirMaster 1y ago
    They did stop them for their own sales. They offered the "Verified Priority Access" program to buy their cards from them through their store at MSRP and still do.
• liendolucas 1y ago
  I haven't read the whole article but a few things to remark: * The prices for Nvidia GPUs are insane. For that money you can have an extremely good PC with a good non Nvidia GPU. * The physical GPU sizes are massive, even letting the card rest on a horizontal motherboard looks like scary. * Nvidia has still issues with melting cables? I've heard about those some years ago and thought it was a solved problem. * Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time. Looks as if Nvidia at the moment is only looking at the AI market (which as a personal belief has to burst at some point) and simply does not care the non GPU AI market at all. I remember many many years ago when I was a teenager and 3dfx was the dominant graphics card manufacturer that John Carmack profethically in a gaming computer magazine (the article was about Quake I) predicted that the future wasn't going to be 3dfx and Glide. Some years passed by and effectively 3dfx was gone. Perhaps is just the beginning of the same story that happened with 3dfx. I think AMD and Intel have a huge opportunity to balance the market and bring Nvidia down, both in the AI and gaming space. I have only heard excellent things about Intel's ARC GPUs in other HNs threads and if I need to build a new desktop PC from scratch there's no way to pay for the prices that Nvidia is pushing to the market, I'll definitely look at Intel or AMD.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    > Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time. CUDA outlived several attempts to offer an open alternative by now, starting with OpenCL. It's really ironic for a hardware company that its moat, such as it is, is largely about software. And it's not even that software around CUDA is that great. But for some reason AMD is seemingly incapable of hitting even that low bar, even though they had literally decades to catch up. Intel, on the other hand, is seriously lagging behind on the hardware end.
• Havoc 1y ago
  They’re not full of shit - they’re just doing what a for profit co in a dominant position does. In other news I hope intel pulls their thumb out of their ass cause AMD is crushing it and that’s gonna end the same way
• snarfy 1y ago
  I'm a gamer and love my AMD gpu. I do not give a shit about ray tracing, frame generation, or 4k gaming. I can play all modern fps at 500fps+. I really wish the market wasn't so trendy and people bought what worked for them.
  • alt227 1y ago
    Yeah I was exactly the same as you for years, holding out against what I considered to be unecessary exrtravagence. That was until I got a 4k monitor at work and experienced 4k HDR gaming. I immediately went out and bought an RTX 4070 and a 4k monitor and I will never be going back. The experience is glorious and I was a fool for not jumping sooner. 4K HDR gaming is not the future, is has been the standard for many years now for good reason.
• Arainach 1y ago
  Why was the title of this post changed long after posting to something that doesn't match the article title? This editorializing goes directly against HN Guidelines (but was presumably done by the HN team?)
  • cbarrick 1y ago
    +1. "Nvidia won, we all lost" sets a very different tone than "NVIDIA is full of shit". It's clearly not the tone the author intended to set. Even more concerning is that, by editorializing the title of an article that is (in part) about how Nvidia uses their market dominance to pressure reviewers and control the narrative, we must question whether or not the mod team is complicit in this effort. Is team green afraid that a title like "NVIDIA is full of shit" on the front page of HN is bad for their image or stock price? Was HN pressured to change the name? Sometimes, editorialization is just a dumb and lazy mistake. But editorializing something like this is a lot more concerning. And it's made worse by the fact that the title was changed by the mods.
    • tyre 1y ago
      Okay let’s take off the tin foil hat for a second. HN has a very strong moderation team with years and years of history letting awkward (e.g. criticism of YC, YC companies) things stand.
      • cbarrick 1y ago
        I said what I said above not as a genuinely held belief (I doubt Nvidia had any involvement in this editorialization), but as a rhetorical effect. There are many reasons why the editorialized-title rule exists. One of the most important reasons is so that we can trust HN as an unbiased news aggregator. Given the content of the article, this particular instance of editorialization is pretty egregious and trust breaking. And to be clear, those questions I asked are not outlandish to ask, even if we do trust HN enough to dismiss them. The title should not have been changed.
        • 1y ago
• dagaci 1y ago
  Jenson has managed to kneel into every market boom in a reasonable amount of time with his GPUs and tech (hardware and software). No doubt he will be there when the next boom kicks off too. Microsoft fails consistently ... even when offered a lead on the plate... it fails, but these failures are eventually corrected for by the momentum of its massive business units. Apple is just very very late... but this failure can be eventually corrected for by its unbeatable astroturfing units. Perhaps AMD are too small keep up everywhere it should. But compared to the rest, AMD is a fast follower. Why Intel is where it is is a mystery to me but i'm quite happy about its demise and failures :D Being angry about NVIDIA is not giving enough credit to NVIDIA for being on-time and even leading the charge in the first place. Everyone should remember that NVIDIA also leads into the markets that it dominates.
  • Mistletoe 1y ago
    What is the next boom? I honestly can’t think of one. Feels like we are just at the Age of the Plateau, which will be quite painful for markets and the world.
    • alanbernstein 1y ago
      Humanoid robotics
      • chriskanan 1y ago
        This will be huge in the next decade and powered by AI. There are so many competitors, currently, that it is hard to know who the winners will be. Nvidia is already angling for humanoid robotics with its investments.
      • mtmail 1y ago
        and skynet
        • alanbernstein 1y ago
          Not THAT kind of boom
• mrkramer 1y ago
  Probably the next big thing will be Chinese GPUs that are the same quality as NVIDIA GPUs but at least 10-20% cheaper aaand we will have to wait for that maybe 5-10 years.
• nickdothutton 1y ago
  It has been decades since I did any electronics, and even then only as a hobby doing self-build projects, but the power feed management (obviously a key part of such a high current and expensive component in a system) is shameful.
• zoobab 1y ago
  Not enough VRAM to load big LLMs, in order not to compète with their expensive high end. Market segmentation it's called.
• fithisux 1y ago
  NVidia won? Not for me. I prefer Intel offerings. Open and Linux friendly. I even hope they would release the next gen Risc-V boards with Intel Graphics.
  • camel-cdr 1y ago
    A RISC-V board with NVIDIA graphics is more likely: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/KiV13GqXGMZfZjopY0Xxpg https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/KiV13GqXGMZfZjopY0Xxpg NVIDIA Keynote from the upcoming RISC-V Summit China: "Enabling RISC-V application processors in NVIDIA compute platforms"
    • fithisux 1y ago
      Not happy with that.
• hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  To anyone who remembers econ 101 it's hard to read something like "scalper bots scoop up all of the new units as soon as they're launched" and not conclude that Nvidia itself is simply pricing the units they sell too low.
• Nifty3929 1y ago
  I just don't think NVidia cares all that much about it's gaming cards, except to the extent that they don't want to cede too much ground to AMD and basically preserve their image in that market for now. Basically they don't want to lose their legions of gaming fans that got them started, and who still carry the torch. But they'll produce the minimum number of gaming cards needed to accomplish that. Otherwise the money is in the datacenter (AI/HPC) cards.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• avipars 1y ago
  If only, NVIDIA could use their enterprise solution on consumer hardware.
• parketi 1y ago
  Here’s my take on video cards in general. I love NVIDIA cards for all out performance. You simply can’t beat them. And until someone does, they will not change. I have owned AMD and Intel cards as well and played mainly FPS games like Doim, Quake, Crysis, Medal of Honor, COD, etc. all of them perform better on NVIDIA. But I have noticed a change. Each year those performance margins seem to narrow. I paid $1000+ dollars for my RTX 4080 Super. That’s ridiculous. No video card should cost over $1000. So the next time I “upgrade,” it won’t be NVIDIA. I’ll probably go back to AMD or Intel. I would love to see Intel continue to develop video cards that are high performance and affordable. There is a huge market for those unicorns. AMDs model seems to be slightly less performance for slightly less money. Intel on the other hand is offering performance on par with AMD and sometimes NVIDIA for far less money - a winning formula. NVIDIA got too greedy. They overplayed their hand. Time for Intel to focus on development and fill the gaping void of price for performance metrics.
• TimParker1727 1y ago
  Here’s my take on video cards in general. I love NVIDIA cards for all out performance. You simply can’t beat them. And until someone does, they will not change. I have owned AMD and Intel cards as well and played mainly FPS games like Doim, Quake, Crysis, Medal of Honor, COD, etc. all of them perform better on NVIDIA. But I have noticed a change. Each year those performance margins seem to narrow. I paid $1000+ dollars for my RTX 4080 Super. That’s ridiculous. No video card should cost over $1000. So the next time I “upgrade,” it won’t be NVIDIA. I’ll probably go back to AMD or Intel. I would love to see Intel continue to develop video cards that are high performance and affordable. There is a huge market for those unicorns. AMDs model seems to be slightly less performance for slightly less money. Intel on the other hand is offering performance on par with AMD and sometimes NVIDIA for far less money - a winning formula. NVIDIA got too greedy. They overplayed their hand. Time for Intel to focus on development and fill the gaping void of price for performance metrics.
• tricheco 1y ago
  > The RTX 4090 was massive, a real heccin chonker Every line of the article convinces me I'm reading bad rage bait, every comment in the thread confirms it's working. The article provides a nice list of grievances from the "optimized youtube channel tech expert" sphere ("doink" face and arrow in the thumbnail or GTFO), and none of them really stick. Except for the part where nVidia is clearly leaving money on the table... From 5080 up no one can compete, with or without "fake frames", at no price, I'd love to take the dividends on the sale of the top 3 cards, but that money is going to scalpers. If nvidia is winning, it's because competitors and regulators are letting them.
• xgkickt 1y ago
  AMD’s openness has been a positive in the games industry. I only wish they too made ARM based APUs.
• tom_m 1y ago
  Know what really kicks me in the nuts? Stupid kid me didn't buy Nvidia when I told my father to back in like 2002 for $16 or something. He did. And holds it until this day. Fortunately that means taking care of him is easier haha, but dang I should have gotten some too.
• kldg 1y ago
  the big reason I upgrade GPUs these days is for more VRAM for LLMs and diffusion models. I don't care (or need to care, really) as much about gaming -- along with great Proton support, running things from a midrange Linux-based gaming PC I have shoved in my home server rack works great via Steam's Remote Play (NoMachine also pretty good), but I play strategy/spreadsheet games, not twitchy FPS games. my most recent upgrade was for a 4090, but that gives me only 24GB VRAM, and it's too expensive to justify buying two of them. I also have an antique kepler datacenter GPU, but Nvidia cut driver support a long while ago, making software quite a pain to get sorted. there's a nonzero chance I will wind up importing a Moore Threads GPU for next purchase; Nvidia's just way too expensive, and I don't need blazing fast speeds given most of my workloads run well inside the time I'm sleeping, but I can't be running at the speed of CPU; I need everything to fit into VRAM. I'd alternately be stoked for Intel to cater to me. $1500, 48GB+ VRAM, good pytorch support; make it happen, somebody.