14 ms·

The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

138 points by taubek 10mo ago

Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
I'm also curious what this could mean for Nintendo.
- xattt 10mo ago
  NVIDIA would still have service contract obligations to fulfil, and would provide support for its existing products for a period of time. Don’t worry about Nintendo. Their pockets are deep and they are creative enough to pivot. They would retool their stack to support another ARM chip, or another arch entirely.
- nicolaslem 10mo ago
  What goes into a Nintendo console is not prime silicon. When it's time to design the next console, I am sure Nvidia will still be more than happy to give them a design that they have laying around somewhere in a drawer if it means they ship 100M units.
0dayz 10mo ago
It remains to be seen to be fair. But if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a slow death of the democratization of tech. At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the very raw tech (chips).
eucryphia 10mo ago
More children born?
butterknife 10mo ago
Is it better to go short on them or buy AMD?
- internet101010 10mo ago
  Betting on AMD's continued success in CPUs is far safer than Nvidia's demise.
pjmlp 10mo ago
It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs, instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.
- newsclues 10mo ago
  It means lots of people will give up the hobby. Let's be real, the twitch FPS CoD players aren't going to give that up and play a boring life simulator. This has the potential to harm a lot of businesses from hardware to software companies, and change the lives of millions of people.
  - jonway 10mo ago
    That doesn't sem very plausible, how many people are driven away from CounterStrike or like League of Legends because the graphics weren't as good as Cyberpunk or whatever? Theres a LOT of games that compete with AAA-massive-budget games on aggregate like Dwarf Fortress, CS, League, Fortnite, people are still playing arma 2, dayz, rust, etc Rainbow Six: Siege still has adherents and even cash-payout tournaments. EvE: Online, Ultima Online, Runescape, still goin' These games have like no advertising and are still moneymakers. Eve and UO are like 20 and 30 years old. Heck, Classic WoW!
    - deaux 10mo ago
      I wonder if all the games you named combined surpass what Mihoyo makes off the likes of Genshin Impact.
      - jonway 10mo ago
        Dunno (maybe wow?) but is it the most expensive graphics hardware giving AAA all the money/air or because they have a great reputation as games, solid consistent advertising, a strong network effect and a spot on the top of new release lists? I feel like league of legends has, wrt the genshin $s, I honestly haven’t checked!
      - Apocryphon 10mo ago
jaapz 10mo ago
AMD will be very happy when they do. They are already making great cards, currently running an RX7800XT (or something like that), and it's amazing. Linux support is great too
- snvzz 10mo ago
  RX 7900gre, can confirm as much.
  - mdip 10mo ago
    Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after that. My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite, not Cyberpunk 2077) There are many caveats there, of course. AMD's biggest problem is in the drivers/implementation for that card. Unlike NVidia's similar technology, it requires setting the game at a lower resolution which it then "fixes" and it tends to produce artifacts depending on the game/how high those settings go. It's a lot harder to juggle the settings between the driver and the game than it should be.
    - the_pwner224 10mo ago
      For games that have FSR built-in you can enable it in the game settings, then it'll only scale up the game content while rendering the HUD at native resolution. And can use the better upscaling algorithms that rely on internal game engine data / motion vectors, should reduce artifacts. The other cool things is they also have Frame Gen available in the driver to apply to any game, unlike DLSS FG which only works on a few games. You can toggle it on in the AMD software just below the Super Res option. I quickly tried it in a few games and it worked great if you're already getting 60+ FPS, no noticeable artifacts. Though going from 30=>60 doesn't work, too many artifacts. And the extra FPS are only visible in the AMD software's FPS counter overlay, not in other FPS counter overlays. I recently got a Asus Rog Flow Z13 gaming "tablet" with the AMD Strix Halo APU. It has a great CPU + shared RAM + ridiculously powerful iGPU. Doesn't have the brute power of my previous desktop with a 4090, but this thing can handle the same games at 4k with upscaling on high settings (no raytracing), it's shockingly capable for its compact form factor.
coldtea 10mo ago
[flagged]
- ulrashida 10mo ago
  I was tempted to respond with an offhand comment about the size of the industry or similar, but what axe do you have to grind about PC gaming? You'd prefer folks go to the far more injurious mobile gaming space?
  - coldtea 10mo ago
    >You'd prefer folks go to the far more injurious mobile gaming space? No, I prefer them touching grass and talking to some people, or getting a less addictive and time-wasting hobby.
    - ulrashida 10mo ago
      That's a worthwhile view, but unlikely to occur. You may as well wish away casinos and alcohol while you're at it.
      - recursive 10mo ago
        Ok, done.
- shmeeed 10mo ago
  Luckily, what's valuable and what's not is not on you to judge.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  Really, I have been gaming before even getting my Timex 2068 in the mid 80's, starting with Game & Watch handhelds, and I don't get "build your aquarium" culture of many PC gamers nowadays. It is so bad that is almost impossible to buy a traditional desktop on regular computer stores, there are only fish tanks with rainbows on sale.
- stacktraceyo 10mo ago
snvzz 10mo ago
If NVIDIA exits the market, there is still AMD, Intel and PowerVR (Imagination Technologies is back at making discrete PC GPUs, although currently only in China).
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  Unfortunately none of those are any use for video work.
  - shmeeed 10mo ago
    Is that due to some kind of issue with the architecture, or just a matter of software support? In the latter case, I'd expect patches for AMD or Intel to become a priority pretty quickly. After all, they need their products to run on systems that customers can buy.
    - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
      Well, they don't support CUDA and I don't see CUDA coming to AMD any time soon. Intel is just plain not capable of it because it's not really a GPU, more a framebuffer with a clever blitter.
      - pjmlp 10mo ago
        Great opportunity to adopt Khronos APIs.
      - ivanjermakov 10mo ago
        Isn't OpenCL is a widely supported compute platform alternative to CUDA? Not sure if it's fair comparison.
      - iszomer 10mo ago
        ZLUDA?
      - pdpi 10mo ago
        Presumably you mean Intel’s integrated GPUs? They do have the Arc line of discrete GPUs now, and those are a bit more than a frame buffer with a clever blitter.
grim_io 10mo ago
Shrug and buy the next best thing?
fxtentacle 10mo ago
I don’t think they can. NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU. The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce revenue without reducing costs.
- jsheard 10mo ago
  You can't turn a GB200 into a GB202 (which I assume is what you meant since GP102 is from 2016), they are completely different designs. That kind of salvage happens between variants of the same design, for example the RTX Pro 6000 and RTX 5090 both use GB202 in different configurations, and chips which don't make the cut for the former get used for the latter.
- cwzwarich 10mo ago
  Nvidia doesn't share dies between their high-end datacenter products like B200 and consumer products. The high-end consumer dies have many more SMs than a corresponding datacenter die. Each has functionality that the other does not within an SM/TPC, nevermind the very different fabric and memory subsystem (with much higher bandwidth/SM on the datacenter parts). They run at very different clock frequencies. It just wouldn't make sense to share the dies under these constraints, especially when GPUs already present a fairly obvious yield recovery strategy.
- woah 10mo ago
  Why don't they sell these to datacenters as well, which could run a "low core section" with reduced power and cooling?
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  > So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU. B200 doesn't have any graphics capabilities. The datacenter chips don't have any graphical units, it's just wasted die space. As long as gaming GPUs will compete for same wafer space that AI chips use, the AI chips will be far more profitable to NVIDIA
sombragris 10mo ago
I doubt that this would ever happen. But... If it does, I think it would be a good thing. The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs. Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end and thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even for the lowest settings.
- Bridged7756 10mo ago
  True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.
  - archagon 10mo ago
    I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.
    - jamesgeck0 10mo ago
      Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers building their business on older mobile hardware.
  - batiudrami 10mo ago
    Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.
    - 10mo ago
m4rtink 10mo ago
We can really hope they do it and fast! That way they will not only burn the most good will but will also get themselves entangled even more into the AI bubble - hopefully enough to go down with it.
throwaway613745 10mo ago
I’ve always been an AMD customer because I’ve despised Nvidia’s business practices for 10+ years. It would still suck if they left the market because who does AMD have to compete with with? Intel? LOL Increased prices for everyone. Lovely. I can’t despise AI enough.
- baal80spam 10mo ago
  > I’ve always been an AMD customer because I’ve despised Nvidia’s business practices for 10+ years. I am 100% sure AMD would have done the exact same thing as NVIDIA does right now, given the chance. Are you saying they wouldn't have milked the market to the last drop? Do you really believe it?
  - throwaway613745 10mo ago
    Of course they would have milked us that’s why I want Nvidia to stick around, to keep AMD in check.
  - keyringlight 10mo ago
    If you look at AMD's CPUs there's indications they do that. When Zen1/1+/2 came out they were priced below intel's products as they needed to rebuild mindshare with their promising new chips, from Zen3 onwards where they started building a performance lead in many categories as well as core count they jacked the prices up because they could demand it.
_23sd 10mo ago
This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.
- wmf 10mo ago
  It's not related to the DRAM shortage. Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI and there was controversy years before that about most "gaming" GPUs going to crypto miners. They won't exit the gaming market but from a shareholder perspective it does look like a good idea.
  - htrp 10mo ago
    yet another reason to not listen to your shareholders. if it were up to them, cuda would be a money losing initiative that was killed in 2009
    - willis936 10mo ago
      It's a bad idea and yet everyone does it.
    - internet101010 10mo ago
      Furthermore, I would wager a giant portion of people who have entered the ML space in the last five years started out by using CUDA on their gaming rigs. Throwing away that entrenchment vector seems like a terrible idea.
  - Animats 10mo ago
    > Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI Well, actually it's that the AI business made NVidia 10x bigger. NVidia now has a market cap of $4.4 trillion. That's six times bigger than General Motors, bigger than Apple, and the largest market cap in the world. For a GPU maker.
ZiiS 10mo ago
Then Intel and AMD carry on, tbh having sewn up handhelds and consoles and made gaming on integrated graphics mainstream many won't notice. An AI bubble burst leaving loads of GPU laden datacenters is much more likely to hasten cloud gaming.
j45 10mo ago
It wouldn't be unheard of. Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora. Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well. More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going. Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting. Update: Adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)
- flopsamjetsam 10mo ago
  I had completely forgotten about the existence of Eudora. Thanks friend, that lead me down a mental rabbit hole.
  - j45 10mo ago
    Glad you enjoyed. Steve Wozniaks review of audits was fun to read.
- kps 10mo ago
  Mac Eudora was the best email client ever. If it had got UTF8 support I'd probably still be running it in an emulator.
  - j45 10mo ago
    I just learned today that there has been some efforts underway: https://hermes.cx/ https://hermes.cx/
dhosek 10mo ago
If the AI bubble doesn’t burst is carrying an awful lot of water there…
bitwize 10mo ago
Look. Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones. The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a niche of a niche. Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable market: enterprises and especially AI companies. PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity? Cloud stream them. I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other side.
ryandrake 10mo ago
It would be great if more GPU competition would enter the field instead of less. The current duopoly is pretty boring and stagnant, with prices high and each company sorta-kinda doing the same thing and milking their market. I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI, but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all doing their own thing and there were so many options.
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  We'd need our government to actually enforce antitrust laws that have been on the books for about a century. Good luck.
- fruitworks 10mo ago
  there's intel and they're not bad
  - weaksauce 10mo ago
    pretty sure i heard that they were stepping down from doing discrete graphics in the next year or two
    - pdimitar 10mo ago
      Source? (Your username makes your claim a touch funny btw.)
TehCorwiz 10mo ago
If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  There is definitely a part of me which feels like with the increasing ram prices and similar. Its hard for people to have a home lab. To me what also feels is that there becomes more friction in an already really competitive and high-friction business of creating cloud. With increasing ram prices which I (from my knowledge) would only decrease in 2027-2028 or when this bubble pops, It would be extremely expensive for a new entry of cloud provider in this space. When I mention cloud provider, what I mean aren't the trifecta of AWS,Azure or GCP but rather all the other providers who bought their own hardware and are co-locating it to a datacenter and selling their services targeted at low/mid-range vps/vds servers I had previously thought about creating cloud but in this economy and the current situations, I'd much rather wait. The best bet right now for most people creating cloud /providing such services is probably whitewashing any other brand and providing services on top that make you special. The servers are still rather cheap but the mood that I can see in providers right now is that they are willing to hold the costs for some time to not create a frenzy (so they still have low prices) but they are cautiously waiting and looking for the whole situation and if recent developments continue happening in such a way, I wouldn't be surprised if server providers might raise some prices because the effective underlying hardware's ram/prices increased too.
  - thewebguyd 10mo ago
    Feel the same way here. Can't help but get the vibe that big tech wants to lock consumers out, eliminate the ability to have personal computing/self-hosted computing. Maybe in tandem with governments, not sure, but it's certainly appetizing to them from a profit perspective. The end goal is the elimination of personal ownership over any tech. They want us to have to rent everything.
webdevver 10mo ago
the pc gaming market is a hobbyist niche compared to the ongoing infrastructure projects. i predict that the "pc" is going to be slowly but surely eaten bottom-up by increasingly powerful SoCs.
- Animats 10mo ago
  From the article: "(NVidia) AI data center revenue reached $51.2 billion versus just $4.3 billion from gaming in Q3 2025." Moore Threads in China just announced a new GPU.[1] Announced, not shipped. [1] https://wccftech.com/moore-threads-lushan-gaming-huashan-ai-gpus-15x-gaming-uplift-50x-rt-boost-dx12-ultimate-support/ https://wccftech.com/moore-threads-lushan-gaming-huashan-ai-...
SkyMarshal 10mo ago
I'm not sure it would matter. It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in games anymore. Plenty of popular games use variations on cartoon-style graphics, for example - Fortnight, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. Seems gameplay, creativity, and player community are more determining factors. That said, things like improved environmental physics and NPC/enemy AI might enable new and novel game mechanics and creative game design. But that can come from AMD and others too.
- mikepurvis 10mo ago
  Notably the games you listed are all f2p/esports games, and that does matter in terms of how much budget developers have to polish a realistic look vs ship a cartoon and call it the "art style". I just upgraded to 9700 XT to play ARC Raiders and it's absolutely a feast for the eyes while also pioneering on several fronts especially around the bot movement and intelligence.
- Animats 10mo ago
  > It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in games anymore. Have you seen the GTA VI trailer?
wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago
AMD would do the same thing as Nvidia but $50 cheaper.
AtlasBarfed 10mo ago
Game graphics are still a high margin silicon business. Someone will do it. Frankly, the graphics chops are plenty strong for a decade of excellent games. The big push in the next couple decades will probably be AI generated content to make games bigger and more detailed and more immersive
oersted 10mo ago
I don’t understand why most people in this thread think that this would be such a big deal. It will not change the market in significant negative or positive ways. AMD has been at their heals for a couple of decades and is more competitive than ever, they will simply fill their shoes. Most games consoles have been AMD centric for a long time regardless, they’ve always been fairly dominant in the mid range and they have a longstanding reputation of having the best price/performance value for gamers. Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years, depending on how the AI bubble develops.
- asdff 10mo ago
  Why would AMD shareholders tolerate them engaging in gaming pc market if Nvidia drops out? They might last a couple years but I mean the writing will be on the wall for them to chase enterprise sales and abandon gamers. Especially when game console manufacturers would prefer you spend $25 a month for life instead of buying a $500 console every 8 years. There won't be an xbox or playstation in your house before long.
  - oersted 10mo ago
    Sure the gaming hardware landscape is likely to change, but it won’t be up to Nvidia’s decision. If it remains a viable business, it will thrive whether Nvidia is in it or not. They’ve become a big name now with AI, but they were never the only game in town in their home markets. They had an edge on the high-end so their name had some prestige, but market share wise it was quite even. Even with AI, they have a temporary head start but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get crowded in the coming years, what they do is not magic.
yegle 10mo ago
I've heard good things about Moore Threads. Who knows, maybe the consumer GPU market is not a duopoly after all, Nvidia exiting the market would be a good thing longer term by introducing more competitions. My general impression is that the US technology companies either treat competition from China seriously and actively engage, or Chinese tech companies will slowly and surely eat the cake. There are numerous examples: the recent bankruptcy of iRobot, the 3D printer market dominated by Bambu Labs, the mini PC market where Chinese brands dominates.
t1234s 10mo ago
Looks like an hit piece to trigger some people to dump their $NVDA stock. They worked phrases like "abandon" and "AI Bubble" into the title/subtitle. Authors other articles look like clickbait crap https://www.pcworld.com/author/jon-martindale https://www.pcworld.com/author/jon-martindale
venturecruelty 10mo ago
Some of the pro-monopoly takes in this thread are mindblowing. We get precisely what we deserve.
- veegee 10mo ago
  [dead]
thom 10mo ago
Is there any path for Microsoft and NVIDIA to work together and resurrect some sort of transparent SLI layer for consumer workloads? It’d take the pressure off the high end of the market a little and also help old cards hold value for longer, which would be a boon if, for example, your entire economy happened to be balanced on top of a series of risky loans against that hardware.
partomniscient 10mo ago
They probably won't. They'll just change things so their hardware becomes a subscription-style model rather than proper outright ownership by the purchaser, which is to a limited degree the case when it comes to their hardware drivers anyway. Fuck this future.
whatshisface 10mo ago
If a $100B/year company closes a $1B/year division, they are doing something much worse than losing $1B/year: they are giving $1B in funding to a new competitor which can grow to threaten the major part.
cmxch 10mo ago
Then Intel and AMD take what NVIDIA won’t.
Insanity 10mo ago
I've switched away from Nvidia around 2008 due to poor Linux support. Been on AMD ever since (now running the flagship model from a year ago, the 7900xtx or whatever it's called). Won't personally miss Nvidia, but we need competition in the space to keep prices 'reasonable' (although they haven't been reasonable for some years), and to push for further innovation.
cycomanic 10mo ago
What I don't really understand is why the big data centre operators destroy their old cards instead of selling them off. What are the downsides for them? Apart from the obvious, i.e. it would bring in money, would it not also drive down the cost for brand new cards? I.e. Nvidia can currently overcharge dramatically because there is such a shortage. If the data centre operators would dump large numbers of used cards on the market would that not increase supply and drive down cost?
- jayd16 10mo ago
  Its just easier to write off the full value as e-waste than to try to turn a profit selling a meager amount of used hardware.
  - georgefrowny 10mo ago
    You don't "write off" the full value, you fiddle the amortization so they go to zero accounting value exactly when you want them to. They're playing this exact game with datacentre GPUs right now. You can still have a tax implication when you sell the fully depreciated item but in theory it should only be a benefit unless your company has a 100% marginal tax rate somehow. Of course it can cost more to store the goods and administer the sale then you recoup. And the manufacturer may do or even require a buyback to prevent the second hand market undercutting their sales. Or you may be disinclined to provide cheap hardware to your competitors.
- sgillen 10mo ago
  Who is buying the old cards? They can't be used for gaming, if there was money to be made I think they would be doing it.
- theandrewbailey 10mo ago
  Most data center GPUs don't have display outputs and some use exotic connectors (not PCIe x16 slots), making them worth next to nothing as conventional graphics cards.
  - 10mo ago
asdaqopqkq 10mo ago
Will leave a vaccum for Chinese companies to grab the whole market share.
cake-rusk 10mo ago
I don't think they will. There is a reason why every GPU they make (gaming or not) supports CUDA. Future gamers are future CUDA developers. Taking that away would be a self goal.
darubedarob 10mo ago
If the ai features at least where not degrading visuals.

138 points by taubek 10mo ago

Wowfunhappy 10mo ago

I'm also curious what this could mean for Nintendo.

xattt 10mo ago
NVIDIA would still have service contract obligations to fulfil, and would provide support for its existing products for a period of time. Don’t worry about Nintendo. Their pockets are deep and they are creative enough to pivot. They would retool their stack to support another ARM chip, or another arch entirely.
nicolaslem 10mo ago
What goes into a Nintendo console is not prime silicon. When it's time to design the next console, I am sure Nvidia will still be more than happy to give them a design that they have laying around somewhere in a drawer if it means they ship 100M units.

0dayz 10mo ago

It remains to be seen to be fair. But if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a slow death of the democratization of tech. At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the very raw tech (chips).

eucryphia 10mo ago

More children born?

butterknife 10mo ago

Is it better to go short on them or buy AMD?

internet101010 10mo ago
Betting on AMD's continued success in CPUs is far safer than Nvidia's demise.

pjmlp 10mo ago

It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs, instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.

newsclues 10mo ago
It means lots of people will give up the hobby. Let's be real, the twitch FPS CoD players aren't going to give that up and play a boring life simulator. This has the potential to harm a lot of businesses from hardware to software companies, and change the lives of millions of people.
- jonway 10mo ago
  That doesn't sem very plausible, how many people are driven away from CounterStrike or like League of Legends because the graphics weren't as good as Cyberpunk or whatever? Theres a LOT of games that compete with AAA-massive-budget games on aggregate like Dwarf Fortress, CS, League, Fortnite, people are still playing arma 2, dayz, rust, etc Rainbow Six: Siege still has adherents and even cash-payout tournaments. EvE: Online, Ultima Online, Runescape, still goin' These games have like no advertising and are still moneymakers. Eve and UO are like 20 and 30 years old. Heck, Classic WoW!
  - deaux 10mo ago
    I wonder if all the games you named combined surpass what Mihoyo makes off the likes of Genshin Impact.
    - jonway 10mo ago
      Dunno (maybe wow?) but is it the most expensive graphics hardware giving AAA all the money/air or because they have a great reputation as games, solid consistent advertising, a strong network effect and a spot on the top of new release lists? I feel like league of legends has, wrt the genshin $s, I honestly haven’t checked!
    - Apocryphon 10mo ago

jaapz 10mo ago

AMD will be very happy when they do. They are already making great cards, currently running an RX7800XT (or something like that), and it's amazing. Linux support is great too

snvzz 10mo ago
RX 7900gre, can confirm as much.
- mdip 10mo ago
  Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after that. My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite, not Cyberpunk 2077) There are many caveats there, of course. AMD's biggest problem is in the drivers/implementation for that card. Unlike NVidia's similar technology, it requires setting the game at a lower resolution which it then "fixes" and it tends to produce artifacts depending on the game/how high those settings go. It's a lot harder to juggle the settings between the driver and the game than it should be.
  - the_pwner224 10mo ago
    For games that have FSR built-in you can enable it in the game settings, then it'll only scale up the game content while rendering the HUD at native resolution. And can use the better upscaling algorithms that rely on internal game engine data / motion vectors, should reduce artifacts. The other cool things is they also have Frame Gen available in the driver to apply to any game, unlike DLSS FG which only works on a few games. You can toggle it on in the AMD software just below the Super Res option. I quickly tried it in a few games and it worked great if you're already getting 60+ FPS, no noticeable artifacts. Though going from 30=>60 doesn't work, too many artifacts. And the extra FPS are only visible in the AMD software's FPS counter overlay, not in other FPS counter overlays. I recently got a Asus Rog Flow Z13 gaming "tablet" with the AMD Strix Halo APU. It has a great CPU + shared RAM + ridiculously powerful iGPU. Doesn't have the brute power of my previous desktop with a 4090, but this thing can handle the same games at 4k with upscaling on high settings (no raytracing), it's shockingly capable for its compact form factor.

coldtea 10mo ago

[flagged]

ulrashida 10mo ago
I was tempted to respond with an offhand comment about the size of the industry or similar, but what axe do you have to grind about PC gaming? You'd prefer folks go to the far more injurious mobile gaming space?
- coldtea 10mo ago
  >You'd prefer folks go to the far more injurious mobile gaming space? No, I prefer them touching grass and talking to some people, or getting a less addictive and time-wasting hobby.
  - ulrashida 10mo ago
    That's a worthwhile view, but unlikely to occur. You may as well wish away casinos and alcohol while you're at it.
    - recursive 10mo ago
      Ok, done.
shmeeed 10mo ago
Luckily, what's valuable and what's not is not on you to judge.
pjmlp 10mo ago
Really, I have been gaming before even getting my Timex 2068 in the mid 80's, starting with Game & Watch handhelds, and I don't get "build your aquarium" culture of many PC gamers nowadays. It is so bad that is almost impossible to buy a traditional desktop on regular computer stores, there are only fish tanks with rainbows on sale.
stacktraceyo 10mo ago

snvzz 10mo ago

If NVIDIA exits the market, there is still AMD, Intel and PowerVR (Imagination Technologies is back at making discrete PC GPUs, although currently only in China).

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
Unfortunately none of those are any use for video work.
- shmeeed 10mo ago
  Is that due to some kind of issue with the architecture, or just a matter of software support? In the latter case, I'd expect patches for AMD or Intel to become a priority pretty quickly. After all, they need their products to run on systems that customers can buy.
  - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    Well, they don't support CUDA and I don't see CUDA coming to AMD any time soon. Intel is just plain not capable of it because it's not really a GPU, more a framebuffer with a clever blitter.
    - pjmlp 10mo ago
      Great opportunity to adopt Khronos APIs.
    - ivanjermakov 10mo ago
      Isn't OpenCL is a widely supported compute platform alternative to CUDA? Not sure if it's fair comparison.
    - iszomer 10mo ago
      ZLUDA?
    - pdpi 10mo ago
      Presumably you mean Intel’s integrated GPUs? They do have the Arc line of discrete GPUs now, and those are a bit more than a frame buffer with a clever blitter.

grim_io 10mo ago

Shrug and buy the next best thing?

fxtentacle 10mo ago

I don’t think they can. NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU. The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce revenue without reducing costs.

jsheard 10mo ago
You can't turn a GB200 into a GB202 (which I assume is what you meant since GP102 is from 2016), they are completely different designs. That kind of salvage happens between variants of the same design, for example the RTX Pro 6000 and RTX 5090 both use GB202 in different configurations, and chips which don't make the cut for the former get used for the latter.
cwzwarich 10mo ago
Nvidia doesn't share dies between their high-end datacenter products like B200 and consumer products. The high-end consumer dies have many more SMs than a corresponding datacenter die. Each has functionality that the other does not within an SM/TPC, nevermind the very different fabric and memory subsystem (with much higher bandwidth/SM on the datacenter parts). They run at very different clock frequencies. It just wouldn't make sense to share the dies under these constraints, especially when GPUs already present a fairly obvious yield recovery strategy.
woah 10mo ago
Why don't they sell these to datacenters as well, which could run a "low core section" with reduced power and cooling?
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
> So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU. B200 doesn't have any graphics capabilities. The datacenter chips don't have any graphical units, it's just wasted die space. As long as gaming GPUs will compete for same wafer space that AI chips use, the AI chips will be far more profitable to NVIDIA

sombragris 10mo ago

I doubt that this would ever happen. But... If it does, I think it would be a good thing. The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs. Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end and thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even for the lowest settings.

Bridged7756 10mo ago
True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.
- archagon 10mo ago
  I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.
  - jamesgeck0 10mo ago
    Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers building their business on older mobile hardware.
- batiudrami 10mo ago
  Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.
  - 10mo ago

m4rtink 10mo ago

We can really hope they do it and fast! That way they will not only burn the most good will but will also get themselves entangled even more into the AI bubble - hopefully enough to go down with it.

throwaway613745 10mo ago

I’ve always been an AMD customer because I’ve despised Nvidia’s business practices for 10+ years. It would still suck if they left the market because who does AMD have to compete with with? Intel? LOL Increased prices for everyone. Lovely. I can’t despise AI enough.

baal80spam 10mo ago
> I’ve always been an AMD customer because I’ve despised Nvidia’s business practices for 10+ years. I am 100% sure AMD would have done the exact same thing as NVIDIA does right now, given the chance. Are you saying they wouldn't have milked the market to the last drop? Do you really believe it?
- throwaway613745 10mo ago
  Of course they would have milked us that’s why I want Nvidia to stick around, to keep AMD in check.
- keyringlight 10mo ago
  If you look at AMD's CPUs there's indications they do that. When Zen1/1+/2 came out they were priced below intel's products as they needed to rebuild mindshare with their promising new chips, from Zen3 onwards where they started building a performance lead in many categories as well as core count they jacked the prices up because they could demand it.

_23sd 10mo ago

This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.

wmf 10mo ago
It's not related to the DRAM shortage. Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI and there was controversy years before that about most "gaming" GPUs going to crypto miners. They won't exit the gaming market but from a shareholder perspective it does look like a good idea.
- htrp 10mo ago
  yet another reason to not listen to your shareholders. if it were up to them, cuda would be a money losing initiative that was killed in 2009
  - willis936 10mo ago
    It's a bad idea and yet everyone does it.
  - internet101010 10mo ago
    Furthermore, I would wager a giant portion of people who have entered the ML space in the last five years started out by using CUDA on their gaming rigs. Throwing away that entrenchment vector seems like a terrible idea.
- Animats 10mo ago
  > Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI Well, actually it's that the AI business made NVidia 10x bigger. NVidia now has a market cap of $4.4 trillion. That's six times bigger than General Motors, bigger than Apple, and the largest market cap in the world. For a GPU maker.

ZiiS 10mo ago

Then Intel and AMD carry on, tbh having sewn up handhelds and consoles and made gaming on integrated graphics mainstream many won't notice. An AI bubble burst leaving loads of GPU laden datacenters is much more likely to hasten cloud gaming.

j45 10mo ago

It wouldn't be unheard of. Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora. Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well. More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going. Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting. Update: Adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)

flopsamjetsam 10mo ago
I had completely forgotten about the existence of Eudora. Thanks friend, that lead me down a mental rabbit hole.
- j45 10mo ago
  Glad you enjoyed. Steve Wozniaks review of audits was fun to read.
kps 10mo ago
Mac Eudora was the best email client ever. If it had got UTF8 support I'd probably still be running it in an emulator.
- j45 10mo ago
  I just learned today that there has been some efforts underway: https://hermes.cx/ https://hermes.cx/

dhosek 10mo ago

If the AI bubble doesn’t burst is carrying an awful lot of water there…

bitwize 10mo ago

Look. Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones. The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a niche of a niche. Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable market: enterprises and especially AI companies. PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity? Cloud stream them. I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other side.

ryandrake 10mo ago

It would be great if more GPU competition would enter the field instead of less. The current duopoly is pretty boring and stagnant, with prices high and each company sorta-kinda doing the same thing and milking their market. I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI, but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all doing their own thing and there were so many options.

venturecruelty 10mo ago
We'd need our government to actually enforce antitrust laws that have been on the books for about a century. Good luck.
fruitworks 10mo ago
there's intel and they're not bad
- weaksauce 10mo ago
  pretty sure i heard that they were stepping down from doing discrete graphics in the next year or two
  - pdimitar 10mo ago
    Source? (Your username makes your claim a touch funny btw.)

TehCorwiz 10mo ago

If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.

Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
There is definitely a part of me which feels like with the increasing ram prices and similar. Its hard for people to have a home lab. To me what also feels is that there becomes more friction in an already really competitive and high-friction business of creating cloud. With increasing ram prices which I (from my knowledge) would only decrease in 2027-2028 or when this bubble pops, It would be extremely expensive for a new entry of cloud provider in this space. When I mention cloud provider, what I mean aren't the trifecta of AWS,Azure or GCP but rather all the other providers who bought their own hardware and are co-locating it to a datacenter and selling their services targeted at low/mid-range vps/vds servers I had previously thought about creating cloud but in this economy and the current situations, I'd much rather wait. The best bet right now for most people creating cloud /providing such services is probably whitewashing any other brand and providing services on top that make you special. The servers are still rather cheap but the mood that I can see in providers right now is that they are willing to hold the costs for some time to not create a frenzy (so they still have low prices) but they are cautiously waiting and looking for the whole situation and if recent developments continue happening in such a way, I wouldn't be surprised if server providers might raise some prices because the effective underlying hardware's ram/prices increased too.
- thewebguyd 10mo ago
  Feel the same way here. Can't help but get the vibe that big tech wants to lock consumers out, eliminate the ability to have personal computing/self-hosted computing. Maybe in tandem with governments, not sure, but it's certainly appetizing to them from a profit perspective. The end goal is the elimination of personal ownership over any tech. They want us to have to rent everything.

webdevver 10mo ago

the pc gaming market is a hobbyist niche compared to the ongoing infrastructure projects. i predict that the "pc" is going to be slowly but surely eaten bottom-up by increasingly powerful SoCs.

Animats 10mo ago
From the article: "(NVidia) AI data center revenue reached $51.2 billion versus just $4.3 billion from gaming in Q3 2025." Moore Threads in China just announced a new GPU.[1] Announced, not shipped. [1] https://wccftech.com/moore-threads-lushan-gaming-huashan-ai-gpus-15x-gaming-uplift-50x-rt-boost-dx12-ultimate-support/ https://wccftech.com/moore-threads-lushan-gaming-huashan-ai-...

SkyMarshal 10mo ago

I'm not sure it would matter. It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in games anymore. Plenty of popular games use variations on cartoon-style graphics, for example - Fortnight, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. Seems gameplay, creativity, and player community are more determining factors. That said, things like improved environmental physics and NPC/enemy AI might enable new and novel game mechanics and creative game design. But that can come from AMD and others too.

mikepurvis 10mo ago
Notably the games you listed are all f2p/esports games, and that does matter in terms of how much budget developers have to polish a realistic look vs ship a cartoon and call it the "art style". I just upgraded to 9700 XT to play ARC Raiders and it's absolutely a feast for the eyes while also pioneering on several fronts especially around the bot movement and intelligence.
Animats 10mo ago
> It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in games anymore. Have you seen the GTA VI trailer?

wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago

AMD would do the same thing as Nvidia but $50 cheaper.

AtlasBarfed 10mo ago

Game graphics are still a high margin silicon business. Someone will do it. Frankly, the graphics chops are plenty strong for a decade of excellent games. The big push in the next couple decades will probably be AI generated content to make games bigger and more detailed and more immersive

oersted 10mo ago

I don’t understand why most people in this thread think that this would be such a big deal. It will not change the market in significant negative or positive ways. AMD has been at their heals for a couple of decades and is more competitive than ever, they will simply fill their shoes. Most games consoles have been AMD centric for a long time regardless, they’ve always been fairly dominant in the mid range and they have a longstanding reputation of having the best price/performance value for gamers. Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years, depending on how the AI bubble develops.

asdff 10mo ago
Why would AMD shareholders tolerate them engaging in gaming pc market if Nvidia drops out? They might last a couple years but I mean the writing will be on the wall for them to chase enterprise sales and abandon gamers. Especially when game console manufacturers would prefer you spend $25 a month for life instead of buying a $500 console every 8 years. There won't be an xbox or playstation in your house before long.
- oersted 10mo ago
  Sure the gaming hardware landscape is likely to change, but it won’t be up to Nvidia’s decision. If it remains a viable business, it will thrive whether Nvidia is in it or not. They’ve become a big name now with AI, but they were never the only game in town in their home markets. They had an edge on the high-end so their name had some prestige, but market share wise it was quite even. Even with AI, they have a temporary head start but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get crowded in the coming years, what they do is not magic.

yegle 10mo ago

I've heard good things about Moore Threads. Who knows, maybe the consumer GPU market is not a duopoly after all, Nvidia exiting the market would be a good thing longer term by introducing more competitions. My general impression is that the US technology companies either treat competition from China seriously and actively engage, or Chinese tech companies will slowly and surely eat the cake. There are numerous examples: the recent bankruptcy of iRobot, the 3D printer market dominated by Bambu Labs, the mini PC market where Chinese brands dominates.

t1234s 10mo ago

Looks like an hit piece to trigger some people to dump their $NVDA stock. They worked phrases like "abandon" and "AI Bubble" into the title/subtitle. Authors other articles look like clickbait crap https://www.pcworld.com/author/jon-martindale https://www.pcworld.com/author/jon-martindale

venturecruelty 10mo ago

Some of the pro-monopoly takes in this thread are mindblowing. We get precisely what we deserve.

veegee 10mo ago
[dead]

thom 10mo ago

Is there any path for Microsoft and NVIDIA to work together and resurrect some sort of transparent SLI layer for consumer workloads? It’d take the pressure off the high end of the market a little and also help old cards hold value for longer, which would be a boon if, for example, your entire economy happened to be balanced on top of a series of risky loans against that hardware.

partomniscient 10mo ago

They probably won't. They'll just change things so their hardware becomes a subscription-style model rather than proper outright ownership by the purchaser, which is to a limited degree the case when it comes to their hardware drivers anyway. Fuck this future.

whatshisface 10mo ago

If a $100B/year company closes a $1B/year division, they are doing something much worse than losing $1B/year: they are giving $1B in funding to a new competitor which can grow to threaten the major part.

cmxch 10mo ago

Then Intel and AMD take what NVIDIA won’t.

Insanity 10mo ago

I've switched away from Nvidia around 2008 due to poor Linux support. Been on AMD ever since (now running the flagship model from a year ago, the 7900xtx or whatever it's called). Won't personally miss Nvidia, but we need competition in the space to keep prices 'reasonable' (although they haven't been reasonable for some years), and to push for further innovation.

cycomanic 10mo ago

What I don't really understand is why the big data centre operators destroy their old cards instead of selling them off. What are the downsides for them? Apart from the obvious, i.e. it would bring in money, would it not also drive down the cost for brand new cards? I.e. Nvidia can currently overcharge dramatically because there is such a shortage. If the data centre operators would dump large numbers of used cards on the market would that not increase supply and drive down cost?

jayd16 10mo ago
Its just easier to write off the full value as e-waste than to try to turn a profit selling a meager amount of used hardware.
- georgefrowny 10mo ago
  You don't "write off" the full value, you fiddle the amortization so they go to zero accounting value exactly when you want them to. They're playing this exact game with datacentre GPUs right now. You can still have a tax implication when you sell the fully depreciated item but in theory it should only be a benefit unless your company has a 100% marginal tax rate somehow. Of course it can cost more to store the goods and administer the sale then you recoup. And the manufacturer may do or even require a buyback to prevent the second hand market undercutting their sales. Or you may be disinclined to provide cheap hardware to your competitors.
sgillen 10mo ago
Who is buying the old cards? They can't be used for gaming, if there was money to be made I think they would be doing it.
theandrewbailey 10mo ago
Most data center GPUs don't have display outputs and some use exotic connectors (not PCIe x16 slots), making them worth next to nothing as conventional graphics cards.
- 10mo ago

asdaqopqkq 10mo ago

Will leave a vaccum for Chinese companies to grab the whole market share.

cake-rusk 10mo ago

I don't think they will. There is a reason why every GPU they make (gaming or not) supports CUDA. Future gamers are future CUDA developers. Taking that away would be a self goal.

darubedarob 10mo ago

If the ai features at least where not degrading visuals.