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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Nvidia won, we all lost
kldg wrote 19 hours 21 min 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.
tom_m wrote 20 hours 44 min 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.
xgkickt wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
AMD’s openness has been a positive in the games industry. I only wish
they too made ARM based APUs.
tricheco wrote 1 day 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.
TimParker1727 wrote 1 day 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 …
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.
parketi wrote 1 day 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 …
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.
avipars wrote 1 day ago:
If only, NVIDIA could use their enterprise solution on consumer
hardware.
Nifty3929 wrote 1 day 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.
hiAndrewQuinn wrote 1 day 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.
fithisux wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
A RISC-V board with NVIDIA graphics is more likely: [1] NVIDIA
Keynote from the upcoming RISC-V Summit China: "Enabling RISC-V
application processors in NVIDIA compute platforms"
[1]: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/KiV13GqXGMZfZjopY0Xxpg
zoobab wrote 1 day ago:
Not enough VRAM to load big LLMs, in order not to compète with their
expensive high end.
Market segmentation it's called.
nickdothutton wrote 1 day 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.
mrkramer wrote 1 day 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.
dagaci wrote 1 day 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.
parineum wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
Nvidia won and we all did too. There's a reason they own so much if
the market, they are the best. There's no allegations of anything
anticompetitive behavior alleged and the market is fairly open.
int_19h wrote 1 day ago:
With respect to GPUs and AI I think it might actually be the case of
engineering the boom more so than anticipating it. Not the AI angle
itself, but the GPU compute part of it specifically - Jensen had
NVIDIA invest heavily into that when it was still very niche (Ian
Buck was hired in 2004) and then actively promoted it to people doing
number crunching.
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
Why be happy about the demise of Intel? I'd rather have more chip
designers than fewer.
Mistletoe wrote 1 day 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.
bgnn wrote 1 day ago:
Jensen id betting on two technologies: integrated silicon
photonucs, aka optical compute + communication (realistic bet), and
Quantum computing (moonshot bet).
tmtvl wrote 1 day ago:
I'm gonna predict biotech. Implanted chips that let you interact
with LLMs directly with your brain. Chips that allow you to pay for
stuff by waving your hand at a sensor. Fully hands-free
videoconferencing on the go. As with blockchain and current LLMs,
not something I fancy spending any time with, but people will call
it the next step towards some kind of tech utopia.
thfuran wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
>Chips that allow you to pay for stuff by waving your hand at a
sensor
You've been able to do that relatively cheaply for at least a
decade. Nobody really does because the market for even minor
surgeries that can essentially be replaced by having a pocket is
pretty small.
Implanted neural interfaces have a lot of technical challenges
that I think make them extremely unlikely as purely elective
procedures in anything like the immediate future. AR glasses are
way more plausible.
thebruce87m wrote 1 day ago:
VLM / VLA.
xeromal wrote 1 day ago:
It's just because we can't know what the next boom is until it hits
us in the face except for a tiny population of humans that effect
those changes
debesyla wrote 1 day ago:
As all the previous booms - hard to predict before it happens. And
if we do predict, high chances are that we will miss.
My personal guess is something in the medical field, because surely
all the AI search tools could help to detect common items in all
the medical data. Maybe more of ozempyc, maybe for some other
health issue. (Of course, who knows. Maybe it turns out that the
next boom is going to be in figuring out ways to make things go
boom. I hope not.)
alanbernstein wrote 1 day ago:
Humanoid robotics
mdaniel wrote 1 day ago:
relevant: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source
Humanoid Robots - [1] - July, 2025 (97 comments)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456904
mtmail wrote 1 day ago:
and skynet
alanbernstein wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
Not THAT kind of boom
chriskanan wrote 1 day 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.
Arainach wrote 1 day 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?)
shutupnerd0000 wrote 1 day ago:
Barbara Streisand requested it.
rectang wrote 1 day ago:
When titles are changed, the intent as I understand it is to nudge
discussion towards thoughtful exchange. Discussion is forever
threatening to spin out of control towards flame wars and the
moderators work hard to prevent that.
I think that if you want to understand why it might be helpful to
change the title, consider how well "NVIDIA is full of shit" follows
the HN comment guidelines.
I don't imagine you will agree with the title change no matter what,
but I believe that's essentially the rationale. Note that the topic
wasn't flagged, which if suppression of the author's ideas or
protection of Nvidia were goals would have been more effective.
(FWIW I have plenty of issues with HN but how titles are handled
isn't one of them.)
iwontberude wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see how changing the title has encouraged thoughtful
exchange when the top comments are talking about the change to the
title. Seems better to let moderators do their job when there is an
actual problem with thoughtful exchange instead of creating one.
mindslight wrote 1 day ago:
I agree with your explanation, but I think it's a hollow rationale.
"Full of shit" is a bit aggressive and divisive, but the thesis is
in the open and there is plenty of room to expand on it in the
actual post. Whereas "Nvidia won" is actually just as divisive and
in a way has more implied aggression (of a fait accompli), it's
just cloaked in using less vulgar language.
rectang wrote 1 day ago:
The new title, “Nvidia won, we all lost”, is taken from a
subheading in the actual article, which is something I’ve often
seen dang recommend people do when faced with baity or otherwise
problematic titles.
[1]: https://blog.sebin-nyshkim.net/posts/nvidia-is-full-of-s...
dandanua wrote 1 day ago:
Haven't you figured out the new global agenda yet? Guidelines (and
rules) exist only to serve the masters.
Zambyte wrote 1 day ago:
New as of which millennium?
throwaway290 wrote 1 day ago:
I think it's pretty obvious. People were investing like crazy into
Nvidia on the "AI" gamble. Now everybody needs to keep hyping up
Nvidia and AI no matter reality. (Until it starts to become obvious
and then the selloff starts)
j_timberlake wrote 1 day ago:
Literally every single anti-AI comment I see on this site uses a
form of the word "hype". You cannot make an actual objective
argument against the AI-wave predictions, so you use the word hype
and pretend that's a real argument and not just ranting.
elzbardico wrote 1 day ago:
I work with AI, I consider generative AI an incredible tool in
our arsenal of computing things.
But, in my opinion, the public expectations in my opinion are
clearly exaggerated and sometimes even dangerous as we ran the
risk of throwing the baby with the bathwater when some
ideas/marketing/vc people ideas become not realizable in the
concrete world.
Why, having this outlook, I should be banned of using the very
useful word/concept of "hype"?
j_timberlake wrote 1 day ago:
Your post doesn't contain a single prediction of a problem that
will occur, dangerous or otherwise, just some vague reference
to "the baby might get thrown out with the bathwater". This is
exactly what I'm talking about, you just talk around the issue
without naming anything specific, because you don't have
anything. If you did, you'd state it.
Meanwhile the AI companies continue to produce new SotA models
yearly, sometimes quarterly, meaning the evidence that you're
just completely wrong never stops increasing.
Zambyte wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
> [...] when some ideas/marketing/vc people ideas become not
realizable in the concrete world.
This is a single prediction of a problem that will occur. The
tools not living up to the hype leads to disappointment, and
people are likely to entirely abandon it because they got
burned (throw the baby out with the bath water), even though
the tools are still useful if you ignore the hype.
cbarrick wrote 1 day 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.
rubatuga wrote 1 day ago:
Probably malicious astroturfing is going on from Nvidia and the
mods. @dang who was the moderator who edited the title?
tyre wrote 1 day 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.
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
theres alot of shadow banning, up ranking and down ranking
hshdhdhj4444 wrote 1 day ago:
I thought HN was a dingle moderator, dang, and now I think there
may be 2 people?
card_zero wrote 1 day ago:
That's correct, dang has offloaded some of the work to tomhow,
another dingle.
kevindamm wrote 1 day ago:
and together they are trouble?
cipher_accompt wrote 1 day ago:
I'm curious whether you're playing devil's advocate or if you
genuinely believe that characterizing OP’s comment as “tin
foil hat” thinking is fair.
The concentration of wealth and influence gives entities like
Nvidia the structural power to pressure smaller players in the
economic system. That’s not speculative -- it’s common sense,
and it's supported by antitrust cases. Firms like Nvidia are
incentivized to abuse their market power to protect their
reputation and, ultimately, their dominance. Moreover, such
entities can minimize legal and economic consequences in the rare
instances that there are any.
So what exactly is the risk created by the moderation team
allowing criticism of YC or YC companies? There aren’t many
alternatives -- please fill me in if I'm missing something. In
contrast, allowing sustained or high-profile criticism of giants
like Nvidia could, even if unlikely, carry unpredictable risks.
So were you playing devil’s advocate, or do you genuinely think
OP’s concern is more conspiratorial than it is a plausible
worry about the chilling effect created by concentration of
immense wealth?
sillyfluke wrote 1 day ago:
>the concentration of wealth
On this topic, I'm curious what others think of the renaming of
this post: [1] The original title I gave was:
"Paul Graham: without billionaires, there will be no
startups."
As it was a tweet, I was trying to summarize his conclusive
point in the first part of the sentence:
Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think
that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't
think there should be startups,"
Now, this part of the sentence to me was the far more
interesting part because it was a much bolder claim than the
second part of the sentence:
because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires.
This second part seems like a pretty obvious observation and is
a completely uninteresting observation by itself.
The claim that successful startups have produced billonaires
therefore successful startups require billionaires is a far
more contentious and interesting claim.
The mods removed "paul graham" from the title and switched the
title to the uninteresting second part of the sentence, turning
it into a completely banal and pointless title: Successful
startups produce billionaires. Thereby removing any hint of the
bold claim being made by the founder of one of the most
succesful VCs of the 21st century. And incidentally, also the
creator of this website.
I can only conclude someone is loathe to moderate a thread
about whether billionaires are neccessary for sucessful
startups to exist.
ps. There is no explicit guideline for tweets as far as I can
tell. You are forced to use an incomplete quote or are forced
to summarize the tweet im some fashion.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435732
blibble wrote 1 day ago:
> HN has a very strong moderation team with years and years of
history letting awkward (e.g. criticism of YC, YC companies)
things stand.
the attempt to steer direction is well hidden, but it is very
much there
with [1] you can see the correction applied, in real time
the hidden bits applied to dissenting accounts? far less visible
[1]: https://hnrankings.info/
throwawayqqq11 wrote 1 day ago:
Oh wow, i always had that gut feeling, but now i know. Stop
killing games went from consistent rank 2 to 102 in an instant.
And it all happend outside my timezone so i didnt even know it
existed here.
p_j_w wrote 1 day ago:
HN’s moderation system (posts with lots of flagged comments
get derated) seems to really easy to game. Don’t like a
story? Have bots post a bunch of inflammatory comments likely
to get flagged and it will go away. There’s no way the
people who run the site don’t know this, so I don’t know
how to possibly make the case that they are actually okay
with it.
const_cast wrote 1 day ago:
I believe usually when this happens the admins like dang
and tomhow manually unflag the post if they think it's
relevant. Which... is not a perfect system, but it works.
I've seen plenty of posts be flagged, dead, then get
unflagged and revived. They'll go in and manually flag
comments, too, to get the conversation back on track. So, I
think site admins are aware that this is happening.
Also, it's somewhat easy to tell who is a bot. Really new
accounts are colored green. I'm sure there's also
long-running bots, and I'm not sure how you would find
those.
Ygg2 wrote 1 day ago:
Jesus Christ. That is a massive correction. I fear most of
those EU petition numbers are probably bots, designed to
sabotage it.
cbarrick wrote 1 day 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.
snarfy wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
Havoc wrote 1 day 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
liendolucas wrote 1 day 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 wrote 21 hours 6 min 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.
jdthedisciple wrote 1 day 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?
Kon5ole wrote 1 day 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.
Ologn wrote 1 day 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.
xiphias2 wrote 1 day 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).
Sweepi wrote 1 day 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
reichstein wrote 1 day 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.
musebox35 wrote 1 day 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:
[1]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nvda/metrics/revenue-by-segme...
amatecha wrote 1 day 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.
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day 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
PoshBreeze wrote 1 day 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.
yalok wrote 1 day 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...
WhereIsTheTruth wrote 1 day 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:
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/WBwg6qQ.png
mcdeltat wrote 1 day 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.
keyringlight wrote 1 day ago:
What stands out to me is that it's not just the hardware side,
software production to make use of it to realize the benefits offered
doesn't seem to be running smoothly either, at least for gaming. I'm
not sure nvidia really cares too much though as there's no market
pressure on them where it's a weakness for them, if consumer GPUs
disappeared tomorrow they'd be fine.
A few months ago Jensen Huang said he sees quantum computing as the
next big thing he wants nvidia to be a part of over the next 10-15
years (which seems like a similar timeline as GPU compute), so I
don't think consumer GPUs are a priority for anyone. Gaming used to
be the main objective with byproducts for professional usage, for the
past few years that's reversed where gaming piggybacks on common
aspects to compute.
seydor wrote 1 day ago:
Our stock investments are going up so ...... What can we do other
than shrug
philistine wrote 1 day 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.
hot_gril wrote 14 hours 25 min ago:
Yeah, going from Intel to M1 was a huge improvement, but not in
every way. So now they're closing all the other gaps, and it's
getting even better.
mcdeltat wrote 1 day ago:
Good point, we should commend genuinely novel efforts towards
making baseline computation more efficient, like Apple has done as
you say. Particularly in light of recent x86 development which
seems to be "shove as many cores as possible on a die and heat your
apartment while your power supply combusts" (meanwhile the software
gets less efficient by the day, but that's another thing
altogether...). ANY DAY of the week I will take a compute platform
that's no-bs no-bells-and-whistles simply more efficient without
the manufacturer trying to blow smoke up our asses.
bamboozled wrote 1 day 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.
mcdeltat wrote 1 day 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.
827a wrote 1 day 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]
[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/gpu-droplets
[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
hank808 wrote 1 day ago:
Digits: July 22 it seems is the release date for the version with the
Asus badge.
[1]: https://videocardz.com/newz/asus-ascent-gx10-with-gb10-black...
DeepYogurt wrote 1 day 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.
[1]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/05/23/1516220/futuremark-co...
ksec wrote 1 day 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.
fracus wrote 1 day ago:
This was an efficient, well written, TKO.
anonymars wrote 1 day 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
jes5199 wrote 1 day 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?
Dylan16807 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
rkagerer wrote 1 day 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.
dreamcompiler wrote 1 day ago:
To emphasize this point, go outside at noon in the summer and mark
off a square meter on the sidewalk. That square of concrete is
receiving about 1000w from the sun.
Now imagine a magnifying glass that big (or more practically a
fresnel lens) concentrating all that light into one square inch.
That's a lot of power. When copper connections don't work perfectly
they have nonzero resistance, and the current running through them
turns into heat by I^2R.
lukeschlather wrote 1 day ago:
Also, like, I kind of want to play with these things, but also I'm
not sure I want a computer that uses 500W+ in my house, let alone
just a GPU.
I might actually be happy to buy one of these things, at the inflated
price, and run it at half voltage or something... but I can't tell if
that is going to fix these concerns or they're just bad cards.
izacus wrote 1 day ago:
With 5080 using 300W, talking about 500W is a bit of an
exaggeration, isn't it?
lukeschlather wrote 1 day ago:
I'm talking about the 5090 which is 575W.
izacus wrote 1 day ago:
But why are you talking about it? It's a hugely niche hardware
which is a tiny % of nVidia cards out there. It's deliberately
outsized and you wouldn't put it in 99% of gaming PCs.
And yet you speak of it like it's a representative model. Do
you also use a Hummer EV to measure all EVs?
lukeschlather wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
I am interested in buying hardware that can run the full
DeepSeek R1 locally. I don't think it's a particularly good
idea, but I've contemplated an array of 5090s.
If I were interested in using an EV to haul particularly
heavy loads, I might be interested in the Hummer EV and have
similar questions that might sound ridiculous.
wasabinator wrote 1 day ago:
It's not the voltage, it's the current you'd want to halve. The
wire gauge required to carry power is dependent on the current
load. It's why when i first saw these new connectors and the loads
they were being tasked with it was a wtf moment for me. Better to
just avoid them in the first place though.
dietr1ch wrote 1 day ago:
It's crazy, you don't even need to know about electricity after
you see a thermal camera on them operating at full load. I'm
surprised they can be sold to the general public, the reports of
cables melting plus the high temps should be enough to force a
recall.
ryao wrote 1 day ago:
Has anyone made 12VHPWR cables that replace the 12 little wires with
2 large gauge wires yet? That would prevent the wires from becoming
unbalanced, which should preempt the melting connector problem.
As a bonus, if the gauge is large enough, the cable would actually
cool the connectors, although that should not be necessary since the
failure appears to be caused by overloaded wires dumping heat into
the connector as they overheat.
AzN1337c0d3r wrote 1 day ago:
They don't just specify 12 smaller cables for nothing if 2 larger
ones will do. There are concerns here with mechanical compatibility
(12 wires have smaller allowable bend radius than 2 larger ones
with the same ampacity).
kuschku wrote 1 day ago:
One option is to use two very wide, thin insulated copper sheets
as cable. Still has a good bend radius in one dimension, but is
able to sink a lot of power.
alright2565 wrote 1 day ago:
Might help a little bit, by heatsinking the contacts better, but
the problem is the contact resistance, not the wire resistance. The
connector itself dangerously heats up.
Or at least I think so? Was that a different 12VHPWR scandal?
chris11 wrote 1 day ago:
I think it's both contact and wire resistance.
It is technically possible to solder a new connector on. LTT did
that in a video.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzwrLLg1RR4
ryao wrote 1 day ago:
Uneven abnormal contact resistance is what causes the wires to
become unbalanced, and then the remaining ones whose contacts
have low resistance have huge currents pushed through them,
causing them to overheat due to wire resistance. I am not sure
if it is possible to have perfect contact resistance in all
systems.
ryao wrote 1 day ago:
I thought that the contact resistance caused the unbalanced
wires, which then overheat alongside the connector, giving the
connector’s heat nowhere to go.
bobmcnamara wrote 1 day ago:
Contact resistance is a problem.
Another problem is when the connector is angled, several of the
pins may not make contact, shoving all the power through as few
as one wire. A common bus would help this but the contact
resistance in this case is still bad.
ryao wrote 1 day ago:
A common bus that is not also overheating would cool the
overheating contact(s).
alright2565 wrote 1 day ago:
It would help, but my intuition is that the thin steel of the
contact would not move the heat fast enough to make a
significant difference. Only way to really know is to test
it.
bobmcnamara wrote 1 day ago:
Or 12 strands in a single sheath so it's not overly rigid.
rkagerer wrote 1 day ago:
Apparently somebody did sue a couple years back. Anyone know what
happened with the Lucas Genova vs. nVidia lawsuit?
EDIT: Plantiff dismissed it. Guessing they settled. Here are the
court documents (alternately, shakna's links below include unredacted
copies): [1]
A GamersNexus article investigating the matter: [3] 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:
[1]: https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora...
[2]: https://www.classaction.org/media/plaintiff-v-nvidia-corpora...
[3]: https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/12vhpwr-dumpster-fire-investiga...
[4]: https://youtu.be/kb5YzMoVQyw
autobodie wrote 1 day ago:
GamersNexus ftw as always
middle-aged-man wrote 1 day 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.
shakna wrote 1 day ago:
> NOTICE of Voluntary Dismissal With Prejudice by Lucas Genova
(Deckant, Neal) (Filed on 3/10/2023) (Entered: 03/10/2023)
Sounds like it was settled out of court.
[0]
[1]: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Dist...
voxleone wrote 1 day 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.
hank808 wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks ChatGPT!
yxhuvud wrote 1 day ago:
Strict antitrust sense don't look at actual monopoly to trigger, but
just if you use your standing in the market to gain unjust
advantages. Which does not require a monopoly situation but just a
strong standing used wrong (like abusing vertical integration). So
Standard Oil, to take a famous example, never had more than a 30%
market share.
Breaking a monopoly can be a solution to that, however. But having a
large part of a market by itself doesn't trigger anti trust
legislation.
arcanus wrote 1 day 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:
[1]: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/
infocollector wrote 1 day 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.
andrewstuart wrote 1 day 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.
spoaceman7777 wrote 1 day 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.
Rapzid wrote 1 day ago:
GN were the OG "fake framers" going back to their constant casting
shade on DLSS, ignoring it on their reviews, and also crapping on RT.
AI upscaling, AI denoising, and RT were clearly the future even 6
years ago. CDPR and the rest of the industry knew it, but outlets
like GN pushed a narrative(borderline conspiracy) the developers were
somehow out of touch and didn't know what they were talking about?
There is a contingent of gamers who play competitive FPS. Most of
which are, like in all casual competitive hobbies, not very good. But
they ate up the 240hz rasterization be-all meat GN was feeding them.
Then they think they are the majority and speak for all gamers(as
every loud minority on the internet does).
Fast forward 6 years and NVidia is crushing the Steam top 10 GPU
list, AI rendering techniques are becoming ubiquitous, and RT is
slowly edging out rasterization.
Now that the data is clear the narrative is most consumers are
"suckers" for purchasing NVidia, Nintendo, and etc. And the content
creator economy will be there to tell them they are right.
Edit: I believe too some of these outlets had chips on their shoulder
regarding NVidia going way back. So AMDs poor RT performance and lack
of any competitive answer the the DLSS suite for YEARS had them lying
to themselves about where the industry was headed. Essentially they
were running interference for AMD. Now that FSR4 is finally here it's
like AI upscaling is finally ok.
grg0 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
grg0 wrote 1 day ago:
Well, I can't speak for all youtubers, but I do watch most GN and
LTT videos and the complaints are legitimate, nor are they random
jabronis yolo'ing hardware installations.
spoaceman7777 wrote 1 day ago:
As far as I know, neither of them have had a card
unintentionally light on fire.
The whole thing started with Derbauer going to bat for a cable
from some 3rd party vendor that he'd admitted he'd already
plugged in and out of various cards something like 50 times.
The actual instances that youtubers report on are all reddit
posters and other random social media users who would clearly
be better off getting a professional installation. The huge
popularity for enthusiast consumer hardware, due to the social
media hype cycle, has brought a huge number of naive
enthusiasts into the arena. And they're getting burned by doing
hardware projects on their own. It's entirely unsurprising,
given what happens in all other realms of amateur hardware
projects.
Most of those who are whinging about their issues are false
positive user errors. The actual failure rates (and there are
device failures) are far lower, and that's what warrantys are
for.
grg0 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm sure the failure rates are blown out of proportion, I
agree with that.
But the fact of the matter is that Nvidia has shifted from a
consumer business to b2b, and they don't even give a shit
about pretending they care anymore. People take beef with
that, understandably, and when you couple that with the false
marketing, the lack of inventory, the occasional hardware
failure, missing ROPs, insane prices that nobody can afford
and all the other shit that's wrong with these GPUs, then
this is the end result.
scrubs wrote 1 day 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
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X support are
great.
scrubs wrote 1 day 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.
grg0 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
Ancapistani wrote 1 day 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.
strictnein wrote 1 day 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.
solatic wrote 1 day ago:
Scalpers are only a retail-wide problem if (a) factories could
produce more, but they calculated demand wrong, or (b) factories
can't produce more, they calculated demand wrong, and under-priced
MSRP relative to what the market is actually willing to pay, thus
letting scalpers capture more of the profits.
Either way, scalping is not a problem that persists for multiple
years unless it's intentional corporate strategy. Either factories
ramp up production capacity to ensure there is enough supply for
launch, or MSRP rises much faster than inflation. Getting demand
planning wrong year after year after year smells like incompetence
leaving money on the table.
The argument that scalping is better for NVDA is coming from the fact
that consumer GPUs no longer make a meaningful difference to the
bottom line. Factory capacity is better reserved for even more
profitable data center GPUs. The consumer GPU market exists not to
increase NVDA profits directly, but as a marketing / "halo" effect
that promotes decision makers sticking with NVDA data center chips.
That results in a completely different strategy where out-of-stock is
a feature, not a bug, and where product reputation is more important
than actual product performance, hence the coercion on review media.
whamlastxmas wrote 1 day ago:
Nvidia shareholders make money when share price rises. Perceived
extreme demand raises share prices
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
If you believe their public statements, because they didn't want to
build out additional capacity and then have a huge excess supply of
cards when demand suddenly dried up.
In other words, the charge of "purposefully keeping stock low" is
something NVidia admitted to; there was just no theory of how they'd
benefit from it in the present.
rf15 wrote 1 day ago:
which card's demand suddenly dried up? Can we buy their excess
stock already? please?
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
I didn't say that happened. I said that was why NVidia said they
didn't want to ramp up production. They didn't want to end up
overextended.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
I don't even think Nvidia could overextend if they wanted to.
They're buying low-margin, high demand TSMC wafers to chop into
enormous GPU tiles or even larger datacenter products. These
aren't smartphone chipsets, they're enormous, high-power
desktop GPUs.
adithyassekhar wrote 1 day ago:
Think of it this way, the only reason 40 series and above are priced
like they are is because they saw how willing people were to pay
dueing 30 series scalper days.
This over representation by the rich is training other customers that
nvidia gpus are worth that much so when they increase it again people
won't feel offended.
KeplerBoy wrote 1 day ago:
Did you just casually forget about the AI craze we are in the midst
of? Nvidia still selling GPUs for gamers at all is a surprise to be
honest.
Mars008 wrote 1 day ago:
Is AMD doing the same? From another post in this thread:
> Nowadays, $650 might get you a mid-range RX 9070 XT if you
miraculously find one near MSRP.
If yes then it's industry wide phenomena.
lmm wrote 1 day ago:
> Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP
How would we know if they were?
sidewndr46 wrote 1 day ago:
Theoretically they'd need to make a public filing about their
revenue and disclose this income stream. More to your point, I
think it's pretty easy to obscure this under something else. My
understanding is Microsoft has somehow always avoided disclosing
the actual revenue from the Xbox for example.
rubyn00bie wrote 1 day ago:
> Scalpers are a retail wide problem. Acting like Nvidia has the
insight or ability to prevent them is just silly.
Oh trust me, they can combat it. The easiest way, which is what
Nintendo often does for the launch of its consoles, is produce an
enormous amount of units before launch. The steady supply to
retailers, absolutely destroys folks ability to scalp. Yes a few
units will be scalped, but most scalpers will be underwater if there
is a constant resupply. I know this because I used to scalp consoles
during my teens and early twenties, and Nintendo's consoles were the
least profitable and most problematic because they really try to
supply the market. The same with iPhones, yeah you might have to wait
a month after launch to find one if you don't pre-order but you can
get one.
It's widely reported that most retailers had maybe tens of cards per
store, or a few hundred nationally, for the 5090s launch. This
immediately creates a giant spike in demand, and drove prices up
along with the incentive for scalpers. The manufacturing partners
immediately saw what (some) people were willing to pay (to the
scalpers) and jacked up prices so they could get their cut. It is
still so bad in the case of the 5090 that MSRP prices from AIBs
skyrocketed 30%-50%. PNY had cards at the original $1999.99 MSRP and
now those same cards can't be found for less than $2,999.99.
By contrast look at how AMD launched it's 9000 series of GPUS-- each
MicroCenter reportedly had hundreds on hand (and it sure looked like
by pictures floating around). Folks were just walking in until noon
and still able to get a GPU on launch day. Multiple restocks happened
across many retailers immediately after launch. Are there still some
inflated prices in the 9000 series GPUs? Yes, but we're not talking a
50% increase. Having some high priced AIBs has always occurred but
what Nvidia has done by intentionally under supplying the market is
awful.
I personally have been trying to buy a 5090 FE since launch. I have
been awake attempting to add to cart for every drop on BB but haven't
been successful. I refuse to pay the inflated MSRP for cards that
haven't been been that well reviewed. My 3090 is fine... At this
point, I'm so frustrated by NVidia I'll likely just piss off for this
generation and hope AMD comes out with something that has 32GB+ of
VRAM at a somewhat reasonable price.
cherioo wrote 1 day ago:
Switch 2 inventory was amazing, but how did RX 9070 inventory
remotely sufficient? News at the time were all about how limited
its availability [1] Not to mention it's nowhere to be found on
Steam Hardware Survey
[1]: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/103716/amd-rx-9070-xt-stock...
[2]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
Rapzid wrote 1 day ago:
The 9070 XT stock situation went about like this; I bought a 5070
Ti instead.
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
>Oh trust me, they can combat it.
As has been explained by others. They cant. Look at the tech which
is used by Switch 2 and then look at the tech by Nvidia 50 series.
And Nintendo didn't destroy scalpers, they are still in many market
not meeting demand despite "is produce an enormous amount of units
before launch".
rubyn00bie wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
If you put even a modicum of effort into trying to acquire a
Switch 2 you can. I’ve had multiple instances to do so, and I
don’t even have interest in it yet. Nintendo even sent me an
email giving me a 3 day window to buy one. Yes, it will require a
bit of effort and patience but it’s absolutely possible. If you
decide you want one “immediately” yeah you probably are going
to be S.O.L. but it has literally been out a month as of today.
I’d bet by mid August it’s pretty darn easy.
Nintendo has already shipped over 5 million of them. That’s an
insane amount of supply for its first month.
Also, Nvidia could have released the 50-series after building up
inventory. Instead, they did the opposite trickling supply into
the market to create scarcity and drive up prices. They have no
real competition right now especially in the high end. There was
no reason to have a “paper launch” except to drive up prices
for consumers and margins for their board partners. Process node
had zero to do with what has transpired.
pshirshov wrote 1 day ago:
W7900 has 48 Gb and is reasonably priced.
kouteiheika wrote 1 day ago:
It' $4.2k on Newegg; I wouldn't necessarily call it reasonably
priced, even compared to NVidia.
If we're looking at the ultra high end, you can pay double that
and get an RTX 6000 Pro with double the VRAM (96GB vs 48GB),
double the memory bandwidth (1792 GB/s vs 864 GB/s) and much much
better software support. Or you could get an RTX 5000 Pro with
the same VRAM, better memory bandwidth (1344 GB/s vs 864 GB/s) at
similar ~$4.5k USD from what I can see (only a little more
expensive than AMD).
Why the hell would I ever buy AMD in this situation? They don't
really give you anything extra over NVidia, while having similar
prices (usually only marginally cheaper) and much, much worse
software support. Their strategy was always "slightly worse
experience than NVidia, but $50 cheaper and with much worse
software support"; it's no wonder they only have less than 10%
GPU market share.
kbolino wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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)...
:\
izacus wrote 1 day ago:
EVGA was angry because nVidia wouldn't pay them for attempts at
scalping which failed.
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give the
benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing scalping with
MSRP-baiting.
It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or even
make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and develop the IP
cores, and they contract with TSMC and others to make the
chips, and they do make limited runs of "Founders Edition"
cards, but most cards that are available to consumers undergo
final assembly and retail boxing according to the specs of the
partner -- ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc.
MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP without
consulting any of its partners and then those partners go and
assemble the graphics cards and have to charge more than that
to make a reasonable profit. This has been going on for many
GPU generations now, but it's not scalping. We can question why
this "partnership" model even exists in the first place, since
these middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their
competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand here
and thus the lion's share of the blame.
Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the
industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices, causing a
supply shortage, so that they can resell the cards at higher
prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct control over this
(though I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out that there
was some insider involvement), they also never do very much to
address it either. Getting all the hate for this without
directly reaping the monetary benefit sounds irrational at
first, but artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are
real business tactics.
izacus wrote 1 day ago:
Then you didn't follow the situation, since majority of EVGA
anger was because nVidia wouldn't buy back their chips after
EVGA failed to sell cards at hugely inflated price point.
Then they tried to weaponize PR to beat nVidia into buying
back their unsold cores they thought they'll massively profit
off with inflated crypto hype prices.
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
Ok, this seems to be based entirely on speculation. It
could very well be accurate but there's no statements I can
find from either nVidia or EVGA corroborating it. Since
it's done by the manufacturer themselves, it's more like
gouging rather than scalping.
But more to the point, there's still a trail of blame going
back to nVidia here. If EVGA could buy the cores at an
inflated price, then nVidia should have raised its
advertised MSRP to match. The reason I call it MSRP-baiting
is not because I care about EVGA or any of these other
rent-seekers, it's because it's a calculated lie weaponized
against the consumer.
As I kind of implied already, it's probably for the best if
this "partner" arrangement ends. There's no good reason
nVidia can't sell all of its desktop GPUs directly to the
consumer. EVGA may have bet big and lost from their own
folly, but everybody else was in on it too (except video
gamers, who got shafted).
Tijdreiziger wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
NVIDIA doesn’t make a lot of finished cards for the
same reason Intel doesn’t make a lot of motherboards,
presumably.
kbolino wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
Maybe, but that's not a great analogy. The
standardized, user-accessible sockets mean many
different CPUs can be paired with many different
motherboards. There's also a wide variety of sizes and
features in motherboards, plus they have buses for
connecting various kinds of peripherals. GPUs have none
of this flexibility or extensibility.
theshackleford wrote 1 day 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.
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
The big bombshell IMO is that, according to EVGA at least,
nVidia just comes up with the MSRP for each card all on its
own, and doesn't even tell its partners what that number will
be before announcing it to the public. I elaborate on this a
bit more in a response to a sibling comment.
DarkmSparks wrote 1 day 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.
shmerl wrote 1 day 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.
sonicvrooom wrote 1 day ago:
it would be "just" capitalist to call these fuckers out for real, on
the smallest level.
you are safe.
benreesman wrote 1 day 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.
827a wrote 1 day ago:
> Fuck the cloud and their ancient Xeon SKUs
Dude, no one talks about this and it drives me up the wall. The only
way to guarantee modern CPUs from any cloud provider is to explicitly
provision really new instance types. If you use any higher-level
abstracted services (Fargate, Cloud Run, Lambda, whatever) you get
salvation army second-hand CPUs from 15 years ago, you're billed by
the second so the slower, older CPUs screw you over there, and you
pay a 30%+ premium over the lower-level instances because its a
"managed service". Its insane and extremely sad that so many
customers put up with it.
benreesman wrote 1 day ago:
Bare metal is priced like it always was but is mad convenient now.
latitude.sh is my favorite, but there are a bunch of providers that
are maybe a little less polished.
It's also way faster to deploy and easier to operate now. And mad
global, I've needed to do it all over the world (a lot of places
the shit works flawlessly and you can get Ryzen SKUs for nothing).
Protip: burn a partition of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS which is the default
on everything and use that as "premium IPMI", even if you run
Ubuntu. you can always boot into a known perfect thing with all the
tools to tweak whatever. If I have to even restart on I just image
it, faster than launching a VM on EC2.
glitchc wrote 1 day ago:
Nice advertorial. I hope you got paid for all of those plugs.
benreesman wrote 1 day 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?
FeepingCreature wrote 1 day 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 wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
They “learned” this trick from their consumer days. Devs always
had to reverse-engineer the hypothetical scaling from their fantasy
numbers
oilkillsbirds wrote 1 day 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.
gdbsjjdn wrote 1 day ago:
It pains me to be on the side of "gamers" but I would rather support
spoiled gamers than modern LLM bros.
oilkillsbirds wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
Or maybe the average consumer bought them while still being
unhappy about the overall situation?
jdprgm wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
another_kel wrote 1 day 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».
frollogaston wrote 1 day ago:
Because they won't sell you an in-demand high-end GPU for cheap? Well
TS
tiahura wrote 1 day ago:
Not to mention that they are currently in stock at my local
microcenter.
snitty wrote 1 day 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.
msgodel wrote 1 day ago:
I was under the impression that a ton of their sales growth last
quarter was actually from consumers. DC sales growth was way lower
than I expected.
scrubs wrote 1 day ago:
"It's hard to get too offended by them shirking the consumer"
BS! Nvidia isn't entitled. I'm not obligated. Customer always has
final say.
The problem is a lot of customers can't or don't stand their ground.
And the other side knows that.
Maybe you're a well trained "customer" by Nvidia just like Basil
Fawlty was well trained by his wife ...
Stop excusing bs.
davidee wrote 1 day 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. ;)
xp84 wrote 21 hours 3 min ago:
My (uninformed) perception is that their “gaming” marketing
department does their best to hype their gaming stuff that they
have, while their senior leadership is in charge of whether they
ship reasonable quantities of it, and, as an NVDA investor,
they’re clearly making the right choices there. It sucks for
gamers that the same silicon is useful for both gaming and AI, but
that’s the situation.
nicce wrote 1 day ago:
They could rapidly build new own factories but they don’t.
selectodude wrote 1 day ago:
Somebody should let Intel know.
axoltl wrote 1 day ago:
Are you saying Nvidia could spin up their own chip fabs in short
order?
nicce wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, if they wanted. They have had years to make that decision.
They have enough knowledge. Their profits are measured in
billions. But in order to maximize profits, that is not good
because it is better to throttle supply.
benreesman wrote 1 day 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).
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
And what if Nvidia booked but the order didn't come. What if
Nvidia's customer isn't going to commit? How expensive and
how much prepayment is needed for TSMC to break a new Fab?
These are the same question Apple Fans asking Apple to buy
TSMC. The fact is isn't so simple. And even if Nvidia were
willing to pay for it TSMC wouldn't do it just for Nvidia
alone.
benreesman wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I agree my "if" is doing a lot of lifting there. As
in, "if Jensen were being candid and honest when he goes on
stage and said things".
Big if, I I get that.
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
They could be more honest about it though.
__turbobrew__ wrote 1 day 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 wrote 20 hours 42 min 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.
witnessme wrote 1 day ago:
Couldn't agree more
notnullorvoid wrote 1 day ago:
If I hadn't bought a 3090 when they were 1k new, I likely would've
switched back onto the AMD train by now.
So far there hasn't been enough of a performance increase for me to
upgrade either for gaming or ML. Maybe AMDs rumored 9090 will be
enough to get me to open my wallet.
scarface_74 wrote 1 day ago:
And even if you ignore AMD, most PCs being sold are cheap computers
using whatever integrated hardware Intel is selling for graphics.
artursapek wrote 1 day ago:
I just learned MTG this year because my 11 year old son got into it.
I like it. How did it “go to shit”?
__turbobrew__ wrote 1 day ago:
Don’t let my opinion affect you, MTG is still a fun game and you
should do that if you find it enjoyable — especially if your son
likes it. But here is why I had a falling out:
1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there are too
many cards being printed to keep up
2. Cards from new sets are pushed to be very strong (FIRE design)
which means that the new cards are frequently the best cards.
Combine this with the high number of new sets means the pool of
best cards is always churning and you have to constantly be buying
new cards to keep up.
3. Artificial scarcity in print runs means that the best cards in
the new sets are very expensive. We are talking about cardboard
here, it isn’t hard to simply print more sheets of a set.
4. The erosion of the brand identity and universe. MTG used to have
a really nicely curated fantasy universe and things meshed together
well. Now we have spongebob, deadpool, and a bunch of others in the
game. It like if you put spongebob in the star wars universe, it
just ruins the texture of the game.
5. Print quality of cards went way down. Older cards actually have
better card stock than the new stuff.
6. Canadians MTG players get shafted. When a new set is printed
stores get allocations of boxes (due to the artificial scarcity)
and due to the lower player count in Canada, usually Canadian
stores get much lower allocations than their USA counterparts.
Additionally, MTG cards get double tariffs as they get printed
outside of the USA, imported into the USA and tariffed, and then
imported into Canada and tariffed again. I think the cost of MTG
cards when up like 30-40% since global trade war.
Overall it boils down to hasbro turning the screws on players to
squeeze more money, and I am just not having it. I already spent
obscene amounts of money on the game before this all happened.
latentcall wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
Can’t you just print cards on a laser printer and use those
hadlock wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
> 1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there are
too many cards being printed to keep up
My local shop has an entire wall of the last ~70 sets, everything
from cyberpunk ninjas to gentlemen academic fighting professors
to steampunk and everything in between. I think they are
releasing ~10 sets per year on average? 4 main ones and then a
bunch of effectively novelty ones. I hadn't been in a store in
years (most of my stuff is 4th edition from the late 1990s) I did
pull the trigger on the Final Fantasy novelty set recently
though, for nostalgia's sake.
But yeah it's overwhelming, as a kid I was used to a new major
set every year and a half or so with a handful of new cards. 10
sets a year makes it feel futile to participate.
artursapek wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
“There’s an infinite amount of cash at the Federal
Reserve”
zaneyard wrote 1 day ago:
If you don't care about competitive balance or the "identity" of
magic it probably didn't.
Long answer: the introduction of non-magic sets like SpongeBob
SquarePants, Deadpool, or Assassin's Creed are seen as tasteless
money grabs that dilute the quality and theme of magic even
further, but fans of those things will scoop them up.
The competitive scene has been pretty rough, but I haven't played
constructed formats in a while so I'm not as keyed into this. I
just know that there have been lots of cards released recently that
have had to be banned for how powerful they were.
Personally, I love the game, but I hate the business model. It's
ripe for abuse and people treat cards like stocks to invest in.
artursapek wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
yeah I hate that Lego has been doing this too. most new sets are
co-branded garbage.
dgellow wrote 1 day ago:
> when they are exploited instead of just walking away and doing
something else.
You don’t even have to walk away. You pretty much never need the
latest GPUs to have a great gaming experience
reissbaker wrote 1 day ago:
I want to love AMD, but they're just... mediocre. Worse for gaming,
and much worse for ML. They're better-integrated into Linux, but
given that the entire AI industry runs on:
1. Nvidia cards
2. Hooked up to Linux boxes
It turns out that Nvidia tends to work pretty well on Linux too,
despite the binary blob drivers.
Other than gaming and ML, I'm not sure what the value of spending
much on a GPU is... AMD is just in a tough spot.
const_cast wrote 1 day ago:
Price-per-price AMD typically has better rasterization performance
in comparison to nvidia. The only price point where this doesn't
hold true is the very tippy top, which, I think, most people aren't
at. Nvidia does have DLSS which I hear is quite good these days.
But I know for me personally, I just try to buy the GPU with the
best rasterization performance at my price point, which is always
AMD.
xg15 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
I'm with you - in principle. Capital-G "Gamers" who turned gaming
into an identity and see themselves as the real discriminated group
have fully earned the ridicule.
But I think where the criticism is valid is how NVIDIA's behavior is
part of the wider enshittification trend in tech. Lock-in and
overpricing in entertainment software might be annoying but
acceptable, but it gets problematic when we have the exact same
trends in actually critical tech like phones and cars.
hot_gril wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
There's nothing annoying about Nvidia cards though, unless of
course you're using Linux.
flohofwoe wrote 1 day ago:
> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world
besides video games
...and even if you're all in on video games, there's a massive amount
of really brilliant indie games on Steam that run just fine on a 1070
or 2070 (I still have my 2070 and haven't found a compelling reason
to upgrade yet).
duckmysick wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
I'd really love to try AMD as a daily driver. For me CUDA is the
showstopper. There's really nothing comparable in the AMD camp.
delusional wrote 1 day ago:
ROCM is, to some degree and in some areas, a pretty decent
alternative. Developing with it is often times a horrible
experience, but once something works, it works fine.
pixelesque wrote 1 day ago:
> but once something works, it works fine.
Is there "forwards compatibility" to the same code working on the
next cards yet like PTX provided Nvidia?
Last time (4 years ago?) I looked into ROCM, you seemed to have
to compile for each revision of each architecture.
delusional wrote 1 day ago:
I'm decently sure you have to compile separately for each
architecture, and if you elect to compile for multiple
architectures up front, you'll have excruciating compile times.
You'd think that would be annoying, but it ends up not really
mattering since AMD completely switches out the toolchain about
every graphics generation anyway. That's not a good reason to
not have forwards compatibility, but it is a reason.
The reason I'm not completely sure is because I'm just doing
this as a hobby, and I only have a single card, and that single
card has never seen a revision. I think that's generally the
best way to be happy with ROCM. Accept that it's at the
abstraction level of embedded programming, any change in the
hardware will have to result in a change in the software.
klipklop wrote 1 day ago:
You are certainly right that this group has little spending
self-control. There is no limit just about to how abusive companies
like Hasbro, Nvidia and Nintendo can be and still rake in record
sales.
They will complain endlessly about the price of a RTX 5090 and still
rush out to buy it. I know people that own these high end cards as a
flex, but their lives are too busy to actually play games.
fireflash38 wrote 1 day ago:
It's because it's part and parcel of their identity. Being able to
play the latest games, often with their friends, is critical to
their social networks.
kevincox wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not saying that these companies aren't charging "fair" prices
(whatever that means) but for many hardcore gamers their spending
per hour is tiny compared to other forms of entertainment. They may
buyba $100 game and play to for over 100 hours. Maybe add another
$1/hour for the console. Compared to someone who frequents the
cinema goes to the pub or does many other common hobbies and it can
be hard to say that games are getting screwed.
Now it is hard to draw a straight comparison. Gamers may spend a
lot more time playing so $/h isn't a perfect metric. And some will
frequently buy new games or worse things like microtransactions
which quickly skyrocket the cost. But overall it doesn't seem like
the most expensive hobby, especially if you are trying to spend
less.
dgellow wrote 1 day ago:
Off-topic: micro transactions are just digital transactions.
There is nothing micro about them. I really wish that term would
just die
Bratmon wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
If you're mad that the etymology of "microtransaction" doesn't
match its current usage, you're going to be apoplectic when you
learn about 90% of English words.
hot_gril wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
Probably called that because it's smaller than the transaction
of buying the game
dgellow wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
You would think so, but that’s not how the term has been
used for over a decade. It has always been a marketing tool.
Any in game transaction is called micro transactions. For
what it’s worth most games with so called micro
transactions are free. Look at [1] , 100 coins is $10. there
is nothing „micro“ about those prices
[1]: https://www.pathofexile.com/shop/category/armour-eff...
stodor89 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
I think more and more people will realize games are a waste of time
for them and go on to find other hobbies. As a game developer, it
kinda worries me. As a gamer, I can't wait for gaming to be a niche
thing again, haha.
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
Fortunately for your business model, there's a constant stream of
new people to replace the ones who are aging out. But you have to
make sure your product is appealing to them, not just to the same
people who bought it last decade.
whatevertrevor wrote 1 day ago:
The games industry is now bigger than the movies industry. I think
you're very wrong about this, as games are engaging in a way other
consumption based media simply cannot replicate.
stodor89 wrote 13 hours 55 min ago:
"Game industry" is an umbrella term for 100 different things. I
can't for the life of me figure out in what sense I and the FIFA
devs are part of the same industry. There's no knowledge, or
skills, or audience, or marketing strategies, that would transfer
from one to the other.
whatevertrevor wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. I'm trying
to say games aren't becoming niche any time soon. Of course I'm
going to use the umbrella term to say that? Yeah there are many
sub-segments, arguably many more than say movies, but that only
strengthens my argument. It can cater to so many different sort
of audiences.
> more and more people will realize games are a waste of time
for them and go on to find other hobbies
This is what I'm arguing against, more and more people will
realize exactly what sort of games they like and home in on
that is a much more likely scenario.
And just in case your point is that games used to be more
engaging and fresh, well, Indie games exist. So many games are
doing many new things, or fusing existing genres into something
fresh. There's a lot more variety to be had in games than most
other media.
a2tech wrote 19 hours 37 min ago:
What’s the gaming industry look like when you remove mobile
gaming from the equation?
whatevertrevor wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
Depends on who you believe, some sources claim mobile gaming is
20% of the market by revenue, others say 50%.
padjo wrote 1 day ago:
I played video games since I was a teenager. Loved them, was
obsessed with them. Then sometime around 40 I just gave up. Not
because of life pressure or lack of time but because I just
started to find them really boring and unfulfilling. Now I’d
much rather watch movies or read. I don’t know if the games
changed or I changed.
FredPret wrote 1 day ago:
I’m an ex-gamer, but I remember games in the 90’s and
earlier 00’s being much more respecting of one’s time.
You could still sink a ton of time into it if you wanted do,
but you could also crank out a decent amount of fun in 5-15
minutes.
Recently games seem to have been optimized to maximize play
time rather than for fun density.
padjo wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
I don’t think it’s the time aspect. I think that on
average movies and books offer far more insightful
commentary on life and tell more interesting stories. That
and the video game world is just less engaging than reality.
Like in a video game I have to run everywhere and need to be
hitting things with a sword constantly to not get bored,
while in reality a walk in nature on a trail I’ve walked
100 times before is an enjoyable experience that will leave
me physically and mentally in a much better place than
sitting on the couch for hours.
int_19h wrote 1 day ago:
I would strongly disagree. If anything, it's the other way
around - a typical 90s game had a fairly steep learning
curve. Often no tutorials whatsoever, difficulty could be
pretty high from the get go, players were expected to
essentially learn through trial and error and failing a lot.
Getting familiar enough with the game mechanics to stop
losing all the time would often take a while, and could be
frustrating while it lasted.
These days, AAA games are optimized for "reduced friction",
which in practice usually means dumbing down the mechanics
and the overall gameplay to remove everything that might
annoy or frustrate the player. I was playing Avowed recently
and the sheer amount of convenience features (e.g. the entire
rest / fast travel system) was boggling.
whatevertrevor wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
Yeah it's mostly nostalgia and selection bias speaking.
Easy to remember all the flaws of games you have played
recently and compare them to the handful of classics you
can remember from the 90s.
There was so so so much trial and error in games in the
90s, with some you basically had to press different inputs
to even figure out what does what. No QoL features, really
poor save systems that forced you to play the same section
over and over, terrible voice acting, crappy B-movie
plotlines (this hasn't changed that much tbf but there are
some amazingly written games too at least to somewhat
counterbalance that) etc.
whatevertrevor wrote 1 day ago:
I get that, I go through periods of falling in and out of them
too after having grown up with them. But there is a huge
fraction of my age group (and a little older) that have
consistently had games as their main "consumption" hobby
throughout.
And then there's the age group younger than me, for whom games
are not only a hobby but also a "social place to be", I doubt
they'll be dropping gaming entirely easily.
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
"it's just a fad"
Nah. Games will always be around.
stodor89 wrote 1 day ago:
Of course they will. People play since before they were people.
darkoob12 wrote 1 day ago:
I am not a gamer and don't why AMD GPUs aren't good enough. It's
weird since both Xbox and PlayStation are using AMD GPUs.
I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia
graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and ignore
large console market.
Bratmon wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
AMD GPUs are 5 years behind Nvidia. But that logically means that
if you thought Nvidia graphics looked fine in 2020, you'll think
AMD graphics look fine now.
AngryData wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
I am a gamer, and I don't understand why everyone flocks to Nvidia
either unless they are buying the newest flagship card. Maybe just
because "the best card" is from Nvidia so many assume Nvidia must
be the best for everyone? For multiple generations ive gotten
better card for my dollar at any "mid-tier" gaming level with AMD,
and have had zero complaints.
wredcoll wrote 1 day ago:
A significant part of the vocal "gamers" is about being "the best"
which translates into gpu benchmarking.
You don't get headlines and hype by being an affordable way to play
games at a decent frame rate, you achieve it by setting New Fps
Records.
Cthulhu_ wrote 1 day ago:
AMD GPU's are fine, but nvidia's marketing (overt and covert /
word-of-mouth) is better. "RTX On" is a meme where people get
convinced the graphics are over 9000x "better"; it's a meaningless
marketing expression but a naive generation of fairly new PC gamers
are eating it up.
And... they don't need to. Most of the most played video games on
PC are all years old [0]. They're online multiplayer games that are
optimized for average spec computers (and mobile) to capture as big
a chunk of the potential market as possible.
It's flexing for clout, nothing else to it. And yet, I can't say
it's anything new, people have been bragging, boasting and
comparing their graphics cards for decades.
[0]
[1]: https://activeplayer.io/top-15-most-popular-pc-games-of-20...
keyringlight wrote 1 day ago:
One thing I wonder about is whether PC gaming is splitting into
two distinct tiers, high end for those with thousands to spend on
their rig and studios who are pathfinders (id, Remedy, 4A, etc)
in graphics, then the wider market for cheaper/older systems and
studios going for broad appeal. I know the market isn't going to
be neatly divided and more of a blurry ugly continuum.
The past few years (2018 with the introduction of RT and
upscaling reconstruction seems as good a milestone as any) feel
like a transition period we're not out of yet, similar to the
tail end of the DX9/Playstation3/Xbox360 era when some studios
were moving to 64bit and DX11 as optional modes, almost like PC
was their prototyping platform for when they made completed the
jump with PS4/Xbox one and more mature PC implementations. It
wouldn't surprise me if it takes more years and titles built
targeting the next generation consoles before it's all settled.
phatfish wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
Once the "path tracing" that the current top end Nvidia cards
can pull off reaches mainstream it will settle down. The PS6
isn't going to be doing path tracing because the hardware for
that is being decided now. I'd guess PS7 time frame. It will
take console level hardware pricing to bring the gaming GPU
prices down.
I understand the reason for moving to real time ray-tracing. It
is much easier for development, and apparently the data for
baked/pre-rendered lighting in these big open worlds was
getting out of hand. Especially with multiple time-of-day
passes.
But, it is only the "path tracing" that top end Nvidia GPUs can
do that matches baked lighting detail.
The standard ray-tracing in the latest Doom for instance has a
very limited number of entities that actually emit light in a
scene. I guess there is the main global illumination source,
but many of the extra lighting details in the scene don't emit
light. This is a step backward compared to baked lighting.
Even shots from the plasma weapon don't cast any light into the
scene with the standard ray-tracing, which Quake 3 was doing.
npteljes wrote 1 day ago:
What I experienced is that AI is a nightmare on AMD in Linux. There
is a myriad of custom things that one needs to do, and even that
just breaks after a while. Happened so much on my current setup
(6600 XT) that I don't bother with local AI anymore, because the
time investment is just not worth it.
It's not that I can't live like this, I still have the same card,
but if I were looking to do anything AI locally with a new card,
for sure it wouldn't be an AMD one.
FredPret wrote 1 day ago:
I set up a deep learning station probably 5-10 years ago and ran
into the exact same issue. After a week of pulling out my hair, I
just bought an Nvidia card.
phronimos wrote 1 day ago:
Are you referring to AI training, prediction/inference, or both?
Could you give some examples for what had to be done and why?
Thanks in advance.
npteljes wrote 1 day ago:
Sure! I'm referring to setting up a1111's stable diffusion
webui, and setting up Open WebUI.
Wrt/ a1, it worked at one point (a year ago) after 2-3 hours of
tinkering, then regressed to not working at all, not even from
fresh installs on new, different Linuxes. I tried the main
branch and the AMD specific fork as well.
Wrt/ Open WebUI, it works, but the thing uses my CPU.
eden-u4 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have much experience with ROCm for large trainings, but
NVIDIA is still shit with driver+cuda version+other things. The
only simplification is due to ubuntu and other distros that
already do the heavy lift by installing all required components,
without much configuration.
int_19h wrote 1 day ago:
On Ubuntu, in my experience, installing the .deb version of the
CUDA toolkit pretty much "just works".
npteljes wrote 1 day ago:
Oh I'm sure. The thing is that with AMD I have the same luxury,
and the wretched thing still doesn't work, or has regressions.
datagram wrote 1 day ago:
AMD cards are fine from a raw performance perspective, but Nvidia
has built themselves a moat of software/hardware features like
ray-tracing, video encoding, CUDA, DLSS, etc where AMD's
equivalents have simply not been as good.
With their current generation of cards AMD has caught up on all of
those things except CUDA, and Intel is in a similar spot now that
they've had time to improve their drivers, so it's pretty easy now
to buy a non-Nvidia card without feeling like you're giving
anything up.
jezze wrote 1 day ago:
I have no experience of using it so I might be wrong but AMD has
ROCm which has something called HIP that should be comparable to
CUDA. I think it also has a way to automatically translate CUDA
calls into HIP as well so it should work without the need to
modify your code.
whatevaa wrote 1 day ago:
Consumer card ROCm support is straight up garbage. CUDA support
project was also killed.
AMD doesn't care about consumers anymore either. All the money
in AI.
MangoToupe wrote 1 day ago:
> AMD doesn't care about consumers anymore either. All the
money in AI.
I mean, this also describes the quality of NVIDIA cards. And
their drivers have been broken for the last two decades if
you're not using windows.
Almondsetat wrote 1 day ago:
AMD "has" ROCm just like Intel "has" AVX-512
tankenmate wrote 1 day ago:
`I think it also has a way to automatically translate CUDA
calls`
I suspect the thing you're referring to is ZLUDA[0], it allows
you to run CUDA code on a range of non NVidia hardware (for
some value of "run").
[0]
[1]: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
smallmancontrov wrote 1 day ago:
For an extremely flexible value of "run" that you would be
extremely unwise to allow anywhere near a project whose
success you have a stake in.
tankenmate wrote 1 day ago:
To quote "The Dude"; "Well ... ummm ... that's ... ahh ...
just your opinion man". There are people who are
successfully running it in production, but of course
depending on your code, YMMV.
StochasticLi wrote 1 day ago:
it's mostly about AI training at this point. the software for
this only supports CUDA well.
SSLy wrote 1 day ago:
AMD RT is still slower than Nvidia's.
senko wrote 1 day ago:
> AMD GPUs aren't good enough.
Software. AMD has traditionally been really bad at their drivers.
(They also missed the AI train and are trying to catch up).
I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a lesser
extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long time ago. Even
if they are better now, (I feel) Intel integrated (if no special
GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less risky choices.
jorams wrote 1 day ago:
> I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs
The situation completely changed with the introduction of the
AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was like 10 years
ago.
Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was atrocious. The
open source drivers performed so bad you'd get better performance
out of Intel integrated graphics than an expensive AMD GPU, and
their closed source drivers were so poorly updated you'd have to
downgrade the entire world for the rest of your software to be
compatible. At that time Nvidia was clearly ahead, even though
the driver needs to be updated separately and they invented their
own versions of some stuff.
With the introduction of AMDGPU and the years after that
everything changed. AMD GPUs now worked great without any effort,
while Nvidia's tendency to invent their own things really started
grating. Much of the world started moving to Wayland, but Nvidia
refused to support some important common standards. Those that
really wanted their stuff to work on Nvidia had to introduce
entirely separate code paths for it, while other parts of the
landscape refused to do so. This started improving again a few
years ago, but I'm not aware of the current state because I now
only use Intel and AMD hardware.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
The open source driver for the Netboooks APU was never as good
as either the Windows version, or the closed source that
predated it.
Lesser OpenGL version, and I never managed to have hardware
accelerated video until it died last year.
MegaDeKay wrote 1 day ago:
I use the amdgpu driver and my luck has not been as good as
yours. Can't sleep my PC without having it wake up to fill my
logs with spam [0] and eventually crash.
Then there is the (in)famous AMD reset bug that makes AMD a
real headache to use with GPU passthrough. The card can't be
properly reset when the VM shuts down so you have to reboot the
PC to start the VM a second time. There are workarounds but
they only work on some cards & scenarios [1] [2]. This problem
goes back to around the 390 series cards so they've had forever
to properly implement reset according to the pci spec but
haven't. nvidia handles this flawlessly
[0] [1] [2]
[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3911
[2]: https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset
[3]: https://github.com/inga-lovinde/RadeonResetBugFix
eptcyka wrote 1 day ago:
I was under the impression that nvidia just didn't let
consumer cards do GPU passthrough.
ho_schi wrote 1 day ago:
This is wrong. For 14 years the recommendation on Linux is:
* Purchase always AMD.
* Purchase never Nvidia.
* Intel is also okay.
Because the AMD drivers are good and open-source. And AMD cares
about bug reports. The one from Nvidia can and will create issues
because they’re closed-source and avoided for years to support
Wayland. Now Nvidia published source-code and refuses to merge it
into Linux and Mesa facepalm
While Nvidia comes up with proprietary stuff AMD brought us
Vulkan, FreeSync, supported Wayland well already with
Implicit-Sync (like Intel) and used the regular
Video-Acceleration APIs for long time.
Meanwhile Nvidia: [1] It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Their bad drivers still don’t handle simple actions like a
VT-Switch or Suspend/Resume. If a developer doesn’t know about
that extension the users suffer for years.
Okay. But that is probably only a short term solution?
It is Nvidias short term solution since 2016!
[1]: https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_rob...
[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR
homebrewer wrote 1 day ago:
I have zero sympathy for Nvidia and haven't used their hardware
for about two decades, but amdgpu is the sole reason I stick to
linux-lts kernels. They introduce massive regressions into
every mainline release, even if I delay kernel updates by
several minor versions (to something like x.y.5), it's still
often buggy and crashy.
They do care about but reports, and their drivers — when
given time to stabilize — provide the best experience across
all operating systems (easy updates, etc), but IME mainline
kernels should be treated as alpha-to-beta material.
quicksilver03 wrote 1 day ago:
The AMD drivers are open source, but they definitely are not
good. Have a look at the Fedora discussion forums (for example
[1] ) to see what happens about each month.
I have no NVIDIA hardware, but I understand that the drivers
are even worse than AMD's.
Intel seems to be, at the moment, the least worse compromise
between performance and stability,
[1]: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-does-not...
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
Although you get to set your own standards "A bug was
discovered after upgrading software" isn't very illuminating
vis a vis quality. That does happen from time to time in most
software.
In my experience an AMD card on linux is a great experience
unless you want to do something AI related, in which case
there will be random kernel panics (which, in all fairness,
may one day go away - then I'll be back on AMD cards because
their software support on Linux was otherwise much better
than Nvidia's). There might be some kernel upgrades that
should be skipped, but using an older kernel is no problem.
josephg wrote 1 day ago:
I've been using a 4090 on my linux workstation for a few years
now. Its mostly fine - with the occasional bad driver version
randomly messing things up. I'm using linux mint. Mint uses
X11, which, while silly, means suspend / resume works fine.
NVIDIA's drivers also recently completely changed how they
worked. Hopefully that'll result in a lot of these long term
issues getting fixed. As I understand it, the change is this:
The nvidia drivers contain a huge amount of proprietary, closed
source code. This code used to be shipped as a closed source
binary blob which needed to run on your CPU. And that caused
all sorts of problems - because its linux and you can't
recompile their binary blob. Earlier this year, they moved all
the secret, proprietary parts into a firmware image instead
which runs on a coprocessor within the GPU itself. This then
allowed them to - at last - opensource (most? all?) of their
remaining linux driver code. And that means we can patch and
change and recompile that part of the driver. And that should
mean the wayland & kernel teams can start fixing these issues.
In theory, users shouldn't notice any changes at all. But I
suspect all the nvidia driver problems people have been running
into lately have been fallout from this change.
homebrewer wrote 1 day ago:
They opened a tiny kernel level sliver of their driver,
everything else (including OpenGL stack et al) is and will
still be closed.
Sadly, a couple of years ago someone seriously misunderstood
the news about "open sourcing" their drivers and spread that
misunderstanding widely; many people now think their whole
driver stack is open, when in reality it's like 1% of the
code — the barest minimum they could get away with (I'm
excluding GSP code here).
The real FOSS driver is Nova, and it's driven by the
community with zero help from Nvidia, as always.
xorcist wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
Just recently Alex Courbot with an @nvidia address have
become co-maintainer of Nova. Apparently he has pushed open
source inside nVidia before, so there's hope for the
future.
nirv wrote 1 day ago:
No browser on Linux supports any other backend for video
acceleration except VAAPI, as far as I know. AMD and Intel
use VAAPI, while Nvidia uses VDPAU, which is not supported
anywhere. This single fact means that with Nvidia graphics
cards on Linux, there isn't even such a simple and important
feature for users as video decoding acceleration in the
browser. Every silly YouTube video will use CPU (not iGPU,
but CPU) to decode video, consuming resources and power.
Yes, there are translation layers[1] which you have to know
about and understand how to install correctly, which
partially solve the problem by translating from VAAPI to
NVDEC, but this is certainly not for the average user.
Hopefully, in the future browsers will add support for the
new Vulkan Video standard, but for now, unfortunately, one
has to hardcode the browser launch parameters in order to use
the integrated graphics chip's driver (custom XDG-application
file for AMD APU in my case:
~/.local/share/applications/Firefox-amdgpu.desktop):
`Exec=env LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi DRI_PRIME=0
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=0
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=radeons
i /usr/bin/firefox-beta %u`.
[1]: https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
I never managed to get it working on my Netbook APU.
whatevaa wrote 1 day ago:
VAAPI support in browsers is also bad and oftenly requires
some forcing.
On my Steam deck, I have to use vulkan. AV1 decoder is
straight up buggy, have to disable it with config or
extensions.
rewgs wrote 1 day ago:
> I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a
lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long time
ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel integrated (if
no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less risky choices.
Err, what? While you're right about Intel integrated GPUs being a
safe choice, AMD has long since been the GPU of choice for Linux
-- it just works. Whereas Nvidia on Linux has been flaky for as
long as I can remember.
simion314 wrote 1 day ago:
>Err, what? While you're right about Intel integrated GPUs
being a safe choice, AMD has long since been the GPU of choice
for Linux -- it just works. Whereas Nvidia on Linux has been
flaky for as long as I can remember.
Not OP, I had same experience in the past with AMD,I bought a
new laptop and in 6 months the AMD decided that my card is
obsolete and no longer provided drivers forcing me to be stuck
with older kernel/X11 , so I switched to NVIDIA and after 2 PC
changes I still use NVIDIA since the official drivers work
great, I really hope AMD this time is putting the effort to
keep older generations of cards working on latest kernels/X11
maybe next card will be AMD.
But this is an explanations why us some older Linux users have
bad memories with AMD and we had good reason to switch over to
NVIDIA and no good reason to switch back to AMD
senko wrote 1 day ago:
Had major problems with xinerama, suspend/resume, vsync,
probably a bunch of other stuff.
That said, I've been avoiding AMD in general for so long the
ecosystem might have really improved in the meantime, as there
was no incentive for me to try and switch.
Recently I've been dabbling in AI where AMD GPUs (well, sw
ecosystem, really) are lagging behind. Just wasn't worth the
hassle.
NVidia hw, once I set it up (which may be a bit involved), has
been pretty stable for me.
homebrewer wrote 1 day ago:
> I've been avoiding AMD in general
I have no opinion on GPUs (I don't play anything released
later than about 2008), but Intel CPUs have had more problems
over the last five years than AMD, including disabling the
already limited support for AVX-512 after release and simply
burning themselves to the ground to get an easy win in
initial benchmarks.
I fear your perception of their products is seriously out of
date.
michaelmrose wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
I believe this is correct. Linux drivers and support
duration were garbage at least 2003-2015. AMD fanboys
feveretly expressed opinions notwithstanding. Especially so
when AMD started the process of open sourcing their drivers
even though many chips already existing didn't qualify for
the new upcoming open source drivers. 2015-2018 drivers
were acceptable but performance was poorer than Nvidia and
wayland support wasn't a notable for most parties.
Now wayland support is an important factor and AMD is a
perfectly acceptable and indeed economical choice.
Basically 15 years inertia is hard to counter.
senko wrote 1 day ago:
> I fear your perception of their products is seriously out
of date.
How's the chipset+linux story these days? That was the main
reason for not choosing AMD CPU for me the last few times I
was in the market.
tankenmate wrote 1 day ago:
I run llama.cpp using Vulkan and AMD CPUs, no need to install
any drivers (or management software for that matter, nor any
need to taint the kernel meaning if I have an issue it's easy
to get support). For example the other day when a Mesa update
had an issue I had a fix in less than 36 hours (without any
support contract or fees) and `apt-mark hold` did a perfect
job until there was a fix. Performance for me is within a
couple of % points, and with under-volting I get better
joules per token.
michaelmrose wrote 1 day ago:
They have never been flaky on the x11 desktop
ErrorNoBrain wrote 1 day ago:
ive used an amd card for a couple years
its been great. flawless in fact.
sfn42 wrote 1 day ago:
Same. Bought a 6950xt for like $800ish or something like that a
few years ago and it's been perfect. Runs any game I want to play
on ultra 1440p with good fps. No issues.
Maybe there's a difference for the people who buy the absolute
top end cards but I don't. I look for best value and when I
looked into it amd looked better to me. Also got an amd CPU which
has aso been great.
PoshBreeze wrote 1 day ago:
Nvidia is the high end, AMD is the mid segment and Intel is the low
end. In reality I am playing 4K on HellDivers with 50-60FPS on a
6800XT.
Traditionally the NVIDIA drivers have been more stable on Windows
than the AMD drivers. I choose an AMD card because I wanted a
hassle free experience on Linux (well as much as you can).
mathiaspoint wrote 1 day ago:
AMD isn't even bad at video games, it's just pytorch that doesn't
work so well.
Yeul wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
Nvidia is objectively better for anyone who is willing to pay 3k or
more for a gaming PC
AMD even admits that they don't want to compete in the high range.
I have no loyalty to any company but there is just nothing out
there that beats a 5080.
kyrra wrote 1 day ago:
Frame per watt they aren't as good. But they are still decent.
trynumber9 wrote 1 day ago:
They seem to be close?
The RX 9070 is the 2nd most efficient graphics card this
generation according to TechPowerUp and they also do well when
limited to 60Hz, implying their joules per frame isn't bad
either.
Efficiency: [1] Vsync power draw: [1] The variance within
Nvidia's line-up is much larger than the variance between brands,
anyway.
[1]: https://tpucdn.com/review/gigabyte-geforce-rtx-5050-gami...
[2]: https://tpucdn.com/review/gigabyte-geforce-rtx-5050-gami...
tankenmate wrote 1 day ago:
I run 9070s (non XT) and in combination with under-volting it
is very efficient in both joules per frame and joules per
token. And in terms of purchase price it was a steal compared
to similar class of NVidia cards.
docmars wrote 1 day ago:
The RX 9070XT goes toe-to-toe with the RTX 4080 in many
benchmarks, and costs around 2/3 MSRP. I'd say that's a pretty
big win!
msgodel wrote 1 day ago:
TCO per FPS is almost certainly cheaper.
surgical_fire wrote 1 day ago:
> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world
besides video games
My main hobby is videogames, but since I can consistently play most
games on Linux (that has good AMD support), it doesn't really matter.
kassner wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
Steam+Proton has been so incredibly good in the last year that
I’m yet to install Windows on my gaming PC. I really do recommend
anyone to try out that option first.
surgical_fire wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
Also, I've been using Lutris to install things from GoG or even
standalone games. Pretty straight forward to manage what proton
version to use for each there.
After 3 years, I haven't missed Windows a single day.
bob1029 wrote 1 day ago:
> I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world
besides video games
My favorite part about being a reformed gaming addict is the fact
that my MacBook now covers ~100% of my computer use cases. The
desktop is nice for Visual Studio but that's about it.
I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely zero
desire to upgrade.
int_19h wrote 1 day ago:
Parallels is great for running Windows software on Mac. Ironically,
what with the Microsoft push for Windows on ARM, increasingly more
Windows software gets native ARM64 builds which are great for
Parallels on Apple Silicon. And Visual Studio specifically is one
of those.
nozzlegear wrote 1 day ago:
The only video game I've played with any consistency is World of
Warcraft, which runs natively on my Mac. Combined with Rider for my
.NET work, I couldn't be happier with this machine.
ThatPlayer wrote 1 day ago:
Put Linux on it, and you can even run software raytracing on it for
games like Indiana Jones! It'll do something like ~70 fps medium
1080p IIRC.
No mesh shader supports though. I bet more games will start using
that soon
sunnybeetroot wrote 1 day ago:
I don’t think a reformed gaming addict wants to be tempted with
another game :P
Mars008 wrote 1 day ago:
Still have 2080 RTX on primary desktop, it's more than enough for
GUI.
Just got PRO 6000 96GB for models tuning/training/etc. The cheapest
'good enough' for my needs option.
jabwd wrote 1 day ago:
Is this like a computational + memory need? Otherwise one would
think something like the framework desktop or a mac mini would be
a better choice right?
Mars008 wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
I need both compute and memory. Video/image processing models
take a lot in training. And the bigger the better at these
sizes. So it will run trainings for weeks nonstop.
__turbobrew__ wrote 1 day ago:
Im a reformed gaming addict as well and mostly play games over 10
years old, and am happy to keep doing that.
pshirshov wrote 1 day ago:
PCI reset bug makes it necessary to upgrade to 6xxx series at
least.
nicce wrote 1 day ago:
> I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely zero
desire to upgrade.
Same boat. I have 5700XT as well and since 2023, used mostly my Mac
for gaming.
leoapagano wrote 1 day ago:
Same here - actually, my PC broke in early 2024 and I still haven't
fixed it. I quickly found out that without gaming, I no longer have
any use for my PC, so now I just do everything on my MacBook.
Finnucane wrote 1 day ago:
Same here. I got mine five years ago when I needed to upgrade my
workstation to do work-from-home, and it's been entirely adequate
since then. I switched the CPU from an AMD 3900 to a 5900, but
that's the only upgrade. The differences from one generation to the
next are pretty marginal.
frollogaston wrote 1 day 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.
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
Proton/Steam/ Linux works damn nearly flawlessly for /most/ games.
I've gone through a Nvidia 2060, a 4060, and now an AMD 6700 XT. No
issues even for release titles at launch.
jabwd wrote 1 day ago:
What version of Linux do you run for that? I've had issues
getting Fedora or Ubuntu or Mint to work with my Xbox controller
+ Bluetooth card combo, somehow Bazzite doesn't have these issues
even though its based on Fedora and I don't know what I did wrong
with the other distros.
surgical_fire wrote 1 day ago:
> It does sorta require Windows.
The vast majority of my gaming library runs fine on Linux. Older
games might run better than on Windows, in fact.
JeremyNT wrote 1 day ago:
True for single player, but if you're into multiplayer games
anti-cheat is an issue.
akimbostrawman wrote 1 day ago:
multiplayer games with anti cheat are the minority and of those
about 40% do work
areweanticheatyet.com
surgical_fire wrote 1 day ago:
If a game requires invasive anticheat, it is probably something
I won't enjoy playing. Most likely the game will be full of
cheaters anyway.
And yes, I rarely play anything online multiplayer.
snackbroken wrote 1 day ago:
Out of the 11 games I've bought through Steam this year, I've had
to refund one (1) because it wouldn't run under Proton, two (2) had
minor graphical glitches that didn't meaningfully affect my
enjoyment of them, and two (2) had native Linux builds. Proton has
gotten good enough that I've switched from spending time
researching if I can play a game to just assuming that I can.
Presumably ymmv depending on your taste in games of course, but I'm
not interested in competitive multiplayer games with invasive
anticheat which appears to be the biggest remaining pain point.
My experience with running non-game windows-only programs has been
similar over the past ~5 years. It really is finally the Year of
the Linux Desktop, only few people seem to have noticed.
PoshBreeze wrote 1 day ago:
It depends on the games you play and what you are doing. It is a
mixed bag IME. If you are installing a game that is several years
old it will work wonderfully. Most guides assume you have Arch
Linux or are using one of the "gaming" distros like Bazzite. I
use Debian (I am running Testing/Trixie RC on my main PC).
I play a lot of HellDivers 2. Despite what a lot of Linux
YouTubers say. It doesn't work very well on Linux.
The recommendations I got from people was to change distro. I do
other stuff on Linux. Game slows down when you need it to be
running smoothly doesn't matter what resolution/settings you set.
Anything with anti-cheat probably won't work very well if at all.
I also wanted to play the old Command and Conquer games. Getting
the fan made patchers (not the games itself) to run properly that
fix a bunch of bugs that EA/Westwood never fixed and mod support
is more difficult than I cared to bother with.
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
Fedora 42, Helldivers 2
Make sure to change your Steam launch options to:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=84 gamemoderun %command%
This will use gamemode to run it, give it priority, put the
system in performance power mode, and will fix any pulse audio
static you may be having. You can do this for any game you
launch with steam, any shortcut, etc.
It's missing probably 15fps on this card between windows and
Linux, and since it's above 100fps I really don't even notice.
It does seem to run a bit better under gnome with Variable
Refresh Rate than KDE.
PoshBreeze wrote 1 day ago:
I will be honest, I just gave up. I couldn't get consistent
performance on HellDivers 2. Many of the things you have
mentioned I've tried and found they don't make much of a
difference or made things worse.
I did get it running nice for about a day and then an update
was pushed and it ran like rubbish again. The game runs
smoothly when initially running the map and then massive dip
in frames for several seconds. This is usually when one of
the bugs is jumping at you.
This game may work better on Fedora/Bazzite or but I find
Debian to be super reliable and don't want to switch distro.
I also don't like Fedora generally as I've found it
unreliable in the past. I had a look at Bazzite and I
honestly just wasn't interested. This is due to it having a
bunch of technologies that I have no interest in using.
There are other issues that are tangential but related
issues.
e.g.
I normally play on Super HellDive with other players in a
Discord VC. Discord / Pipewire seems to reset my sound for no
particular reason and my Plantronics Headset Mic (good
headset, not some gamer nonsense) will be not found. This
requires a restart of pipewire/wireplumber and Discord (in
that order). This happens often enough I have a shell script
alias called "fix_discord".
I have weird audio problems on HDMI (AMD card) thanks to a
regression in the kernel (Kernel 6.1 with Debian worked
fine).
I could mess about with this for ages and maybe get it
working or just reboot into Windows which takes me all of a
minute.
It is just easier to use Windows for Gaming. Then use Linux
for work stuff.
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
I used Debian for about 15 years.
Honestly? Fedora is really the premier Linux distro these
days. It's where the most the development is happening, by
far.
All of my hardware, some old, some brand new (AMD card),
worked flawlessly out of the box.
There was a point when you couldn't get me to use an
rpm-based distro if my life depended on it. That time is
long gone.
PoshBreeze wrote 1 day ago:
I don't want to use Fedora. Other than I've found it
unreliable I switched to Debian because I was fed up of
all the Window-isms/Corporate stuff in the distro that
was enabled by default that I was trying to get away
from.
It the same reason I don't want to use Bazzite. It misses
the point of using a Linux/Unix system altogether.
I also learned a long time ago Distro Hopping doesn't
actually fix your issues. You just end up either with the
same issues or different ones. If I switched from Debian
to Fedora, I suspect I would have many of the same
issues.
e.g. If a issue is in the Linux kernel itself such as
HDMI Audio on AMD cards having random noise, I fail to
see how changing from one distro to another would help.
Fedora might have a custom patch to fix this, however I
could also take this patch and make my own kernel image
(which I've done in the past btw).
The reality is that most people doing development for
various project / packages that make the Linux desktop
don't have the setup I have and some of the peculiarities
I am running into. If I had a more standard setup, I
wouldn't have an issue.
Moreover, I would be using FreeBSD/OpenBSD or some other
more traditional Unix system and ditch Linux if I didn't
require some Linux specific applications. I am
considering moving to something like Artix / Devuan in
the future if I did decide to switch.
proc0 wrote 1 day ago:
My hesitation is around high end settings, can Proton run 240hz
on 1440p and high settings? I'm switching anyway soon and might
just have a separate machine for gaming but I'd rather it be
Linux. SteamOS looks promising if they release for PC.
onli wrote 1 day ago:
Proton has often better performance than gaming under Windows -
partly because Linux is faster - so sure it can run those
settings.
proc0 wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting, thanks.
onli wrote 1 day ago:
:) To give a source, [1] is one. There was a more recent
article the search is not showing me now.
[1]: https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/betriebssystem...
mystified5016 wrote 1 day ago:
The only games in my library at all that don't work on linux are
indie games from the early 2000s, and I'm comfortable blaming the
games themselves in this case.
I also don't play any games that require a rootkit, so..
globalnode wrote 1 day ago:
good move, thats why i treat my windows install as a dumb game
box, they can steal whatever data they want from that i dont
care. i do my real work on linux, as far away from windows as i
can possibly get.
theshackleford wrote 1 day ago:
Same way I treat my windows machine, but also the reason I
wont be swapping it to linux any time soon. I use different
operating systems for different purposes for a reason. It's
great for fompartmentalization.
When I am in front of windows, I know I can permit myself to
relax, breath easy and let off some steam. When I am not, I
know I am there to learn/earn a living/produce something etc.
Most probably do not need this, but my brain does, or I would
never switch off.
duckmysick wrote 1 day ago:
What works for me is having different Activities/Workspaces
in KDE - they have different wallpapers, pinned programs in
the taskbar, the programs themselves launch only in a
specific Activity. I hear others also use completely
different user accounts.
rightbyte wrote 1 day 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.
y-curious wrote 1 day ago:
It's Linux, what software doesn't need fiddling to work?
msgodel wrote 1 day ago:
Other than maybe iOS what OSes in general don't need fiddling
these days to be usable?
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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 [1] 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.
[1]: https://www.protondb.com/app/813780
imtringued wrote 1 day ago:
You're not supposed to "steal DLLs".
You're supposed to find a proton fork like "glorious eggroll"
that has patches specifically for your game.
webstrand wrote 1 day ago:
I've been running opensuse+steam and I never had to tweak a dll
to get a game running. Albeit that I don't exactly chase the
latest AAA, the new releases that I have tried have worked
well.
Age of empires 2 used to work well, without needing any
babying, so I'm not sure why it didn't for you. I will see
about spinning it up.
surgical_fire wrote 1 day 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.
I literally never had to do that. Most tweaking I needed to do
was switching proton versions here and there (which is trivial
to do).
jekwoooooe wrote 1 day ago:
This guy makes some good points but he clearly has a bone to pick.
Calling dlss snake oil was where I stopped reading
Retr0id wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
sixothree wrote 1 day ago:
But we're not talking about resolution here. We're talking about
interpolation of entire frames, multiple frames.
ThatPlayer wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think we are? Article talks about DLSS on RTX 20 series
cards, which do not support DLSS frame-gen:
> What always rubbed me the wrong way about how DLSS was
marketed is that it wasn’t only for the less powerful GPUs in
NVIDIA’s line-up. No, it was marketed for the top of the line
$1,000+ RTX 20 series flagship models to achieve the graphical
fidelity with all the bells and whistles.
imiric wrote 1 day 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.
ThatPlayer wrote 1 day ago:
I don't disagree about frame-gen, but upscaling and its
artifacts are not new nor unique to DLSS. Even later PS3 games
upscaled from 720p to 1080p.
kevingadd wrote 1 day 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.
neuroelectron wrote 1 day 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.
pointlessone wrote 1 day ago:
If it’s manufactured it implies intent. Someone at Microsoft is
doing it on purpose and, presumably, thinks it’ll benefit them.
I’m not sure how this can be seen as a win for them. They invested
a massive amount of money into buying all those game studios. They
also admitted Xbox hardware is basically dead. So the only way they
can any return on that investment is third party hardware: either
PlayStation or PC. If I were to choose it would be pc for MS. They
already have game pass and windows is the gaming OS. By giving
business to Sony they would undermine those.
I don’t think nVidia wants gaming collapse either. They might not
prioritize it now but they definitely know that it will persist in
some form. They bet on AI (and crypto before it) because those are
lucrative opportunities but there’s no guarantee they will last. So
they squeeze as much as they can out of those while they can. They
definitely want gaming as a backup. It might be not as profitable and
more finicky as it’s a consumer market but it’s much more stable
in the long run.
proc0 wrote 1 day ago:
I've always played a few games for many hours as opposed to many
games for one playthrough. Subscription just does not make sense for
me, and I suspect that's a big part of the market. Add to this the
fact that you have no control over it and then top it off with
potential ads and I will quit gaming before switching to subs only.
Luckily there is still GoG and Steam doesn't seem like it will change
but who knows.
beefnugs wrote 1 day ago:
This post is crazy nonsense: Bad games companies have always existed,
and the solution is easy: dont buy their trash. I buy mostly smaller
indie games these days just fine.
nvidia isn't purposely killing anything, they are just following the
pivot into the AI nonsense. They have no choice, if they are in a
unique position to make 10x by a pivot they will, even if it might be
a dumpsterfire of a house of cards. Its immoral to just abandon the
industry that created you, but companies have always been immoral.
Valve has an opportunity to what? Take over video card hardware
market? No. AMD and Intel are already competitors in the market and
cant get any foothold (until hopefully now consumers will have no
choice but to shift to them)
MangoToupe wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
It also won’t work, and Microsoft has developed no way to compete
on actual value. As much as I hate the acquisitions they’ve made,
even if Microsoft as a whole were to croak tomorrow I think the game
industry would be fine.
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
New stars would arise, others suggesting the games industry would
collapse and go away is like saying the music industry collapsing
would stop people from making music.
Yes games can be expensive to make, but they don't have to be, and
millions will still want new games to play. It is actually a pretty
low bar for entry to bring an indie game to market (relative to
other ventures). A triple A studio collapse would probably be an
amazing thing for gamers, lots of new and unique indie titles. Just
not great for profit for big companies, a problem I am not
concerned with.
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
The video game industry has been through cycles like this before. One
of them (the 1983 crash) was so bad it killed most American companies
and caused the momentum to shift to Japan for a generation. Another
one I can recall is the "death" of the RTS (real-time strategy) genre
around 2010. They have all followed a fairly similar pattern and in
none of them that I know of have things played out as the companies
involved thought or hoped they would.
the__alchemist wrote 1 day ago:
Thankfully, RTS is healthy again! (To your point about cycles)
needcaffeine wrote 1 day ago:
What RTS games are you playing now, please?
izacus wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
I found Iron Harvest, Last Train Home, Tempest Rising and
Company of Heroes 3 to be pretty good.
rollcat wrote 1 day ago:
It's non-competitive (I'm burnt out with SC2 ladder a bit), but
I've been enjoying Cataclismo, Settlers 3 (THAT is a
throwback), and I'm eyeing They are Billions.
Some SC2 youtubers are now covering Mechabellum, Tempest
Rising, BAR, AoE4, and some in-dev titles: Battle Aces,
Immortal: Gates of Pyre, Zerospace, and of course Stormgate.
These are all on my list but I'm busy enough playing Warframe
^^'
somat wrote 1 day ago:
BAR [1] But... While bar is good, very good. It is also very
hard to compete with, so I see it sort of killing any funding
for good commercial RTS's for the next few years.
[1]: https://www.beyondallreason.info/
evelant wrote 1 day ago:
Sins of a solar empire 2. AI War 2. There haven’t been any
really “big” ones like StarCraft but some very good smaller
ones like those two.
sgarland wrote 1 day ago:
AoE2, baby. Still going strong, decades after launch.
KeplerBoy wrote 1 day ago:
And AoE4, one of the few high profile RTS games of the past
years, is dead.
sgarland wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
I own all AoE games, and despite having 3 and 4 installed,
I don’t think I’ve so much as launched them. Every time
I think “I should try this,” I remember I want to try a
new strategy in 2 instead.
the__alchemist wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
You and many people.
Give 4 a try! Its multiplayer is excellent. Kind of a
hybrid between Starcraft and AoE2 in terms of pacing and
civ divergence. (Fewer, more diverse civs)
The archer kiting/dodging mechanic that dominates AoE2 is
gone.
I play AoE2, not 4 because that's what my friends play,
but 4 is the more interesting one from a strategy
perspective. More opportunities to surprise the opponent,
use novel strats, go off meta etc.
the__alchemist wrote 1 day ago:
That was disappointing to see. I thought it was a great
game, with some mechanics improved over 2, and missing
some of the glitchy behavior that became cannon (e.g. foot
archer kiting) The community (nor my friends) didn't seem
to go for it, primarily for the reason that it's not AoE2.
Exquisite sound design too.
georgeecollins wrote 1 day ago:
I worked in the video game industry from the 90s through to today.
I think you are over generalizing or missing the original point.
It's true that there have been boom and busts. But there are also
structural changes. Do you remember CD-ROMs? Steam and the iPhone
were structural changes.
What Microsoft is trying to do with Gamepass is a structural
change. It may not work out the way that they plan but the truth
is that sometimes these things do change the nature of the games
you play.
IgorPartola wrote 1 day ago:
Not in the game industry but as a consumer this is very true. One
example: ubiquitous access to transactions and payment systems
gave a huge rise to loot boxes.
Also mobile games that got priced at $0.99 meant that only the
unicorn level games could actually make decent money so In-App
Purchases were born.
But also I suspect it is just a problem where as consumers we
spend a certain amount of money on certain kinds of entertainment
and if as a content producer you can catch enough people’s
attention you can get a slice of that pie. We saw this with
streaming services where an average household spent about
$100/month on cable so Netflix, Hulu, et al all decided to price
themselves such that they could be a portion of that pie (and
would have loved to be the whole pie but ironically studios not
willing to license everything to everyone is what prevented
that).
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
But the thing is that Steam didn't cause the death of physical
media. I absolutely do remember PC gaming before Steam, and
between the era when it was awesome (StarCraft, Age of Empires,
Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc.) and the modern Steam-powered
renaissance, there was an absolutely dismal era of disappointment
and decline. Store shelves were getting filled with trash like
"40 games on one CD!" and each new console generation gave
retailers an excuse to shrink shelf space for PC games. Yet
during this time, all of Valve's games were still available on
discs!
I think Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same result
as Embracer Group. They've bought up lots of studios and they
control a whole platform (by which I mean Xbox, not PC) but this
doesn't give them that much power. Gaming does evolve and it
often evolves to work around attempts like this, rather than in
favor of them.
georgeecollins wrote 1 day ago:
I am not saying that about Steam. In fact Steam pretty much
saved triple A PC gaming. Your timeline is quite accurate!
>> Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same result as
Embracer Group.
I hope you are right.
If I were trying to make a larger point, I guess it would be
that big tech companies (Apple, MSFT, Amazon) don't want
content creators to be too important in the ecosystem and tend
to support initiatives that emphasize the platform.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
> big tech companies (Apple, MSFT, Amazon) don't want content
creators to be too important in the ecosystem
100%. The platforms' ability to monetize in their factor is
directly proportional to their relative power vs the most
powerful creatives.
Thus, in order to keep more money, they make strategic moves
that disempower creatives.
bob1029 wrote 1 day ago:
I think the reason you see things like Blizzard killing off Overwatch
1 is because the Lindy effect applies in gaming as well. Some things
are so sticky and preferred that you have to commit atrocities to
remove them from use.
From a supply/demand perspective, if all of your customers are still
getting high on the 5 (or 20) year old supply, launching a new title
in the same space isn't going to work. There are not an infinite # of
gamers and the global dopamine budget is limited.
Launching a game like TF2 or Starcraft 2 in 2025 would be viewed as a
business catastrophe by the metrics most AAA studios are currently
operating under. Monthly ARPU for gamers years after purchasing the
Orange Box was approximately $0.00. Giving gamers access to that
strong of a drug would ruin the demand for other products.
rollcat wrote 1 day ago:
> Launching a game like [...] Starcraft 2
They can't even keep the lights on for SC2.
We [the community] have been designing our own balance patches for
the past five years; and our own ladder maps since +/- day 1 - all
Blizzard was to do since 2020 was to press the "deploy" button, and
they f-ed it up several times anyway.
The news of the year so far is that someone has been exploiting a
remote hole to upload some seriously disturbing stuff to the arcade
(custom maps/mods) section. So of course rather than fixing the
hole, Blizzard has cut off uploads.
So we can't test the balance changes.
Three weeks left until EWC, a __$700.000__ tournament, by the way.
Theoretically SC2 could become like Brood War, with balance changes
happening purely through map design. Except we can't upload maps
either.
sidewndr46 wrote 1 day ago:
From a business perspective, launching a game like Starcraft 2 at
any time is a business catastrophe. There are obscure
microtransactions in other Blizzard titles that have generated more
revenue than Starcraft 2.
rollcat wrote 1 day ago:
There's plenty of business opportunity in any genre; you can make
a shit-ton of money by simply making the game good and building
community goodwill.
The strategy is simple: 1. there's always plenty of people who
are ready to spend way more money in a game than you and I would
consider sane - just let them spend it but 2. make it easy to
gift in-game items to other players. You don't even need to keep
adding that much content - the "whales" are always happy to keep
giving away to new players all the time.
Assuming you've built up that goodwill, this is all you need to
keep the cash flowing. But that's non-exploitative, so you'll be
missing that extra 1%. /shrug
bob1029 wrote 1 day ago:
If SC2 was such a failure at any time, why bother with 3
expansions?
I think the biggest factors involve willingness to operate with
substantially smaller margins and org charts.
It genuinely seemed like "Is this fun?" was actually a bigger
priority than profit prior to the Activision merger.
sidewndr46 wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
Activision Blizzard was not a well run company. After running
the company into the ground Kotick sold it off to Microsoft.
fireflash38 wrote 1 day ago:
I like games companies that create games for fun and story,
rather than just pure profit.
aledalgrande wrote 1 day ago:
Petition related to companies like Blizzard killing games:
[1]: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
a_wild_dandan wrote 1 day ago:
I purchased "approximately $0.00" in TF2 loot boxes. How much
exactly? Left as an exercise to the reader.
KeplerBoy wrote 1 day ago:
When were microtransactions added to TF2? Probably years after
the initial launch, and they worked so well the game became f2p.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
People forget that TF2 was originally 20 dollars before hitting
the F2P market.
ThrowawayTestr wrote 1 day ago:
I paid full price for the orange box
refulgentis wrote 1 day ago:
This is too clever for me, I think - 0?
simonh wrote 1 day ago:
Approximately. +/- 0
keyringlight wrote 1 day 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.
layoric wrote 1 day ago:
Valve is a private company so doesn’t have the same growth at all
costs incentives. To Microsoft, the share price is everything.
porphyra wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
I get ray tracing at 4K 60Hz with my 4090 just fine
marcellus23 wrote 1 day ago:
What game? And with no upscaling or anything?
trynumber9 wrote 1 day ago:
Really? I can't even play Minecraft (DXR: ON) at 4K 60Hz on a RTX
5090...
Maybe another regression in Blackwell.
delduca wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing new, it is just Enshittification
dofubej wrote 1 day 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?
johnklos wrote 1 day ago:
Many of you chose Windows, so, well, yes.
ohdeargodno wrote 1 day 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.
atq2119 wrote 1 day 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.
honeybadger1 wrote 1 day ago:
A bit hyperbolic
ls-a wrote 1 day ago:
Finally someone
system2 wrote 1 day 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.
goalieca wrote 1 day ago:
Were you on the internet in the 90s? Lots of banners like that on
every site.
reddalo wrote 1 day 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.
alganet wrote 1 day 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.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of those Xeon e-waste machines were downright awful, especially
for the "cheap gaming PC" niche they were popular in. Low single-core
clock speeds, low memory bandwidth for desktop-style configurations
and super expensive motherboards that ran at a higher wattage than
the consumer alternatives.
> THIS will be the excitement everyone is looking for.
Or TSMC could become geopolitically jeopardized somehow, drastically
increasing the secondhand value of modern GPUs even beyond what
they're priced at now. It's all a system of scarcity, things could go
either way.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
They were awful compared to newer models, but for the price of
nothing, pretty good deal.
If no good use is found for high-end GPUs, secondhand models will
be like AOL CDs.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, eventually. Then in 2032, you can enjoy the raster
performance that slightly-affluent people in 2025 had for years.
By your logic people should be snatching up the 900 and
1000-series cards by the truckload if the demand was so huge. But
a GTX 980 is like $60 these days, and honestly not very
competitive in many departments. Neither it nor the 1000-series
have driver support nowadays, so most users will reach for a more
recent card.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
There's no zero-cost e-waste like that anymore, it was a
once-time thing.
Also, it's not "a logic", it's not a cosumer recomendation. It
was a fluke in the industry that to me, represents a symptom.
gizajob wrote 1 day ago:
Do you have a timeframe for the pop? I need some excitement.
grg0 wrote 1 day ago:
Hell, yeah. I'm in for some shared excitement too if y'all want to
get some popcorn.
alganet wrote 1 day 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).
int_19h wrote 21 hours 3 min ago:
> 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.
This is not the case if you want things like ray tracing or 4K.
selfhoster11 wrote 1 day ago:
Local LLMs are becoming more popular and easier to run, and
Chinese corporations are releasing extremely good models of all
sizes under MIT or similar terms in many cases. There amount of
VRAM is the main limiter, and it would help with gaming too.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
Gaming needs no additional VRAM.
From a market perspective, LLMs sell GPUs. Doesn't even matter
if they work or not.
From the geopolitical tensions perspective, they're the perfect
excuse to create infrastructure for a global analogue of the
Great Firewall (something that the Chinese are pioneers of, and
catching up to the plan).
From the software engineering perspective, LLMs are a
nuissance, a distraction. They harm everyone.
selfhoster11 wrote 1 day ago:
> Gaming needs no additional VRAM.
Really? What about textures? Any ML that the new wave of
games might use? For instance, while current LLMs powering
NPC interactions would be pretty horrible, what about in 2
years time? You could have arbitrary dialogue trees AND
dynamically voiced NPCs or PCs. This is categorically
impossible without more VRAM.
> the perfect excuse to create infrastructure for a global
analogue of the Great Firewall
Yes, let's have more censorship and kill the dream of the
Internet even deader than it already is.
> From the software engineering perspective, LLMs are a
nuissance, a distraction. They harm everyone.
You should be aware that reasonable minds can differ in this
issue. I won't defend companies forcing the use of LLMs (it
would be like forcing use of vim or any other tech you
dislike), but I disagree about being a nuisance, distraction,
or a universal harm. It's all down to choices and fit for use
case.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
How is any of that related to actual silicon sales
strategies?
Do not mistake adjacent topics for the main thing I'm
discussing. It only proves my point that right now, all
silicon talk is bullshit.
rightbyte wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
rightbyte wrote 1 day ago:
> Why not?
Bombs that fly between continents or are launched from
submarines for any "big scale" war.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see how this is connected to what you said before.
rightbyte wrote 1 day ago:
My point is that GPU factories are big static targets
with sensitive supply chains and thus have no strategic
importance in being so easy to distrupt.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
So are airplane and car factories. I already explained
all of this, what keeps the supply chain together, and
what their strategic value is.
rightbyte wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
I have no clue if we agree with eachother or not?
newsclues wrote 1 day ago:
CPU and GPU compute will be needed for military use
processing the vast data from all sorts of sensors. Think
about data centres crunching satellite imagery for trenches,
fortifications and vehicles.
alganet wrote 1 day ago:
> satellite imagery for trenches, fortifications and
vehicles
Dude, you're describing the 80s. We're in 2025.
GPUs will be used for automated surveillance, espionage,
brainwashing and market manipulation. At least that's what
the current batch of technologies implies.
The only thing stopping this from becoming a full dystopia
is that delicate balance with food and fuel I mentioned
earlier.
It has become pretty obvious that entire wealthy nations
can starve if they make the wrong move. Turns out GPUs
cannot produce calories, and there's a limit to how much of
a market you can manipulate to produce calories for you.
newsclues wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
2025 Ukraine war.
There are satellites and ISR platforms taking images and
data and data centres are processing that information
into actionable targets.
monster_truck wrote 1 day 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
hot_gril wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Mostly, I trust the card that supports my software with the least
issues.
827a wrote 1 day 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.
Nextgrid wrote 1 day 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.
ls612 wrote 1 day ago:
They use the 12VHPWR on some datacenter cards too.
transcriptase wrote 1 day 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.
KerrAvon wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
mjevans wrote 1 day 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.
yunyu wrote 1 day ago:
If you are a gamer, you are no longer NVIDIA's most important customer.
Rapzid wrote 1 day 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.
theshackleford wrote 1 day 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?
dcchambers wrote 1 day ago:
Haven't been for a while. Not since crypto bros started buying up
GPUs for coin mining.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
A revelation on-par with Mac users waking up to learn their computer
was made by a phone company.
hot_gril wrote 14 hours 24 min 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.
ravetcofx wrote 1 day ago:
Barely even a phone company, more like a app store and
microtransactions services company
ionwake wrote 1 day 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.
ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure why my comment got so upvoted, all my comments are my
personal opinion based solely on the publicly streamed video, and as
I said, I’ll happily correct or retract my impression.
hn_throwaway_99 wrote 1 day 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 don't know what you're referring to, but I'd just say that I don't
believe what you are describing could have possibly happened.
Nvidia is a huge corporation, with more than a few lawyers on staff
and on retainer, and what you are describing is criminal fraud that
any plaintiff's lawyer would have a field day with. So, given that,
and since I don't think people who work at Nvidia are complete
idiots, I think whatever you are describing didn't happen the way you
are describing it. Now, it's certainly possible there was some small
print disclaimer, or there was some "weasel wording" that described
something with ambiguity, but when you accuse someone of criminal
fraud you want to have more than "hey this is just my opinion" to
back it up.
moogly wrote 1 day ago:
> what you are describing is criminal fraud that any plaintiff's
lawyer would have a field day with
"Corporate puffery"
kalleboo wrote 1 day ago:
Tefal literally sells a rice cooker that boasts "AI Smart Cooking
Technology" while not even containing a microcontroller and just
being controlled by the time-honored technology of "a magnet that
gets hot". They also have lawyers.
AI doesn't mean anything. You can claim anything uses "AI" and just
define what that means yourself. They could have some basic
anti-collision technology and claim it's "AI".
numpad0 wrote 1 day ago:
They're soaked eyebrows deep in Tiktok style hype juice, believing
that latest breakthrough in robotics is that AGIs just casually
started walking and talking on their own and therefore anything
code controlled by now is considered proof of ineptitude and fake.
It's complete cult crazy talk. Not even cargocult, it's proper
cultism.
frollogaston wrote 1 day ago:
There's also a very thick coat of hype in [1] and related material,
even though the underlying product (an ML training cluster) is real.
[1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/glossary/ai-factory/
CoastalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
Not just you.
I hate being lied to, especially if it's so the liar can reap some
economic advantage from having the lie believed.
AnimalMuppet wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah. I have a general rule that I don't do business with people
who lie to me.
MichaelZuo wrote 1 day ago:
I can’t even imagine what kind of person would not follow that
rule.
Do business with people that are known liars? And just get
repeatedly deceived?
…Though upon reflection that would explain why the depression
rate is so high.
elil17 wrote 1 day ago:
As I understand it the Disney bots do actually use AI in a novel way:
[1] So there’s at least a bit more “there” there than the Tes…
bots.
[1]: https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/design-and-control...
ionwake wrote 1 day 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
numpad0 wrote 1 day ago:
"RL is not AI" "Disney bots were remote controlled" are major AI
hypebro delulu moment lol
Your understanding of AI and robotics are more cucumber than pear
shaped. You're making very little technical sense here.
Challenges and progress in robotics aren't where you think they
are. It's all propagandish contents you're basing your
understandings on.
If you're getting information from TikTok or YouTube Shorts style
content, especially around Tesla bros - get the hell out of it at
Ludicrous Speed. Or consume way more of it so thoroughly that you
cannot be deceived anymore despite blatant lies everywhere. Then
come back. They're all plain wrong and it's not good for you.
elil17 wrote 1 day ago:
Only as opposed to what? VLAM/something else more trendy?
dwattttt wrote 1 day ago:
Having worked on control systems a long time ago, that's a
'nothing' statement: the whole job of the control system is to
keep the robot stable/ambulating, regardless of whatever
disturbances occur. It's meant to reject the forces induced due
to waving exactly as much as bumping into something unexpected.
It's easier to stabilise from an operator initiated wave, really;
it knows it's happening before it does the wave, and would have a
model of the forces it'll induce.
ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
I tried to understand the point of your reply but Im not sure
what your point was - I only seemed to glean "its easier to
balance if the operator is moving it".
Please elaborate unless Im being thick.
EDIT > I upvoted your comment in any case as Im sure its
helping
dwattttt wrote 1 day ago:
It's that there's nothing special about blending "operator
initiated animation commands" with the RL balancing system.
The balance system has to balance anyway; if there was no
connection between an operator's wave command and balance, it
would have exactly the same job to do.
At best the advantage of connecting those systems is that the
operator command can inform the balance system, but there's
nothing novel about that.
rcxdude wrote 1 day ago:
'control system' in this case is not implying remote control,
it's referring to the feedback system that adjust the
actuators in response to the sensed information. If the
motion is controlled automatically, then the control loop can
in principle anticipate the motion in a way that it could not
if it was remote controlled: i.e. the opposite, it's easier
to control the motions (in terms of maintaining balance and
avoiding overstressing the actuators) if the operator is not
live puppeteering it.
ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for the explanation
dwattttt wrote 1 day ago:
Apologies, yes, "control system" is somewhat niche jargon.
"Balance system" is probably more appropriate.
tekla wrote 1 day ago:
> "control system" is somewhat niche jargon
Oh my god. What the hell is happening to STEM education?
Control systems engineering is standard parlance. This is
what Com Sci people are like?
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
Well "control system" is a proper term understood by
anyone with a decent STEM education since 150 years ago.
dwattttt wrote 14 hours 45 min ago:
To be fair, lots of fields have a notion of a "control"
system. Control Theory doesn't have a monopoly on the
term, for all that the field revolves around 'control
systems'.
cherioo wrote 1 day 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.
luisgvv wrote 1 day ago:
Absolutely right, only AAA games get to showcase the true power of
GPUs.
For cheaper guys like me, I'll just give my son indie and low graphic
games which he enjoys
datagram wrote 1 day ago:
The fact that we're calling $500 GPUs "midrange" is proof that
Nvidia's strategy is working.
blueboo wrote 1 day ago:
I think my TNT2 Ultra was $200. But Nvidia had dozens of
competitors back then. 89 when it was founded! Now: AMD…
WithinReason wrote 1 day ago:
What strategy? They charge more because manufacturing costs are
higher, cost per transistor haven't changed much since 28nm [0] but
chips have more and more transistors. What do you think that does
to the price?
[0]:
[1]: https://www.semiconductor-digest.com/moores-law-indeed-sto...
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
strategy of marketting expensive product as normal one?
obviously?
if your product can't be cheap - your product is luxury, not a
day-to-day one
WithinReason wrote 1 day ago:
It's mid range. The range shifted.
piperswe wrote 1 day ago:
10 years ago, $650 would buy you a top-of-the-line gaming GPU
(GeForce GTX 980 Ti). Nowadays, $650 might get you a mid-range RX
9070 XT if you miraculously find one near MSRP.
AngryData wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
I don't know how you can consider a 9070 XT a midrange card, it is
AMD's second best card in benchmarks and only came out 5 months
ago.
wasabi991011 wrote 1 day ago:
$650 of 2015 USD is around $875 of 2025 USD fwiw
conception wrote 1 day ago:
Keeping with inflation (650 to 880) it’d get you a 5070TI.
orphea wrote 1 day ago:
5070TI
Which, performance-wise, is a 60TI class card.
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
That is $880 dollars in today's term. And 2015 Apple was already
shipping a 16nm SoC. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti was still on 28nm. Two
generation Node behind.
Tadpole9181 wrote 1 day ago:
Just going to focus on this one:
> DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling.
I've used all of these (at 4K, 120hz, set to "balanced") since they
came out, and I just don't understand how people say this.
FSR is a vaseline-like mess to me, it has its own distinct
blurriness. Not as bad as naive upscaling, and I'll use it if no DLSS
is available and the game doesn't run well, but it's distracting.
Lossless is borderline unusable. I don't remember the algorithm's
name, but it has a blur similar to FSR. It cannot handle text or UI
elements without artifacting (because it's not integrated in the
engine, those don't get rendered at native resolution). The frame
generation causes almost everything to have a ghost or afterimage -
UI elements and the reticle included. It can also reduce your
framerate because it's not as optimized. On top of that, the way the
program works interferes with HDR pipelines. It is a last resort.
DLSS (3) is, by a large margin, the best offering. It just works and
I can't notice any cons. Older versions did have ghosting, but it's
been fixed. And I can retroactively fix older games by just swapping
the DLL (there's a tool for this on GitHub, actually). I have not
tried DLSS 4.
cherioo wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe I over exaggerated, but I was dumbfounded myself reading
people’s reaction to Lossless Scaling [1] Most people either
can’t tell the difference, don’t care about the difference, or
both. Similar discourse can be found about FSR, frame drop, and
frame stutter. I have conceded that most people do not care.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/s/wlaoHl6GAS
paulbgd wrote 1 day ago:
I’ve used fsr 4 and dlss 4, I’d say fsr 4 is a bit ahead of
dlss 3 but behind dlss 4. No more vaseline smear
gxs wrote 1 day ago:
I think this is the even broader trend here
In their never ending quest to find ways to suck more money out of
people, one natural extension is to just turn the thing into a luxury
good and that alone seems to justify the markup
This is why new home construction is expensive - the layout of a home
doesn’t change much but it’s trivial to throw on some fancy
fixtures and slap the deluxe label on the listing.
Or take a Toyota, slap some leather seats on it, call it a Lexus and
mark up the price 40% (I get that these days there are more
meaningful differences but the point stands)
This and turning everything into subscriptions alone are responsible
for 90% of the issues I have as a consumer
Graphics cards seem to be headed in this direction as well - breaking
through that last ceiling for maximum fps is going to be like buying
a bentley (if it isn’t already) where as before it was just opting
for the v8
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
Nvidia's been doing this for a while now, since at least the Titan
cards and technically the SLI/Crossfire craze too. If you sell it,
egregiously-compensated tech nerds will show up with a smile and a
wallet large enough to put a down-payment on two of them.
I suppose you could also blame the software side, for adopting
compute-intensive ray tracing features or getting lazy with
upscaling. But PC gaming has always been a luxury market, at least
since "can it run Crysis/DOOM" was a refrain. The homogeneity of a
console lineup hasn't ever really existed on PC.
dukeyukey wrote 1 day ago:
I bought a new machine with an RTX 3060 Ti back in 2020 and it's
still going strong, no reason to replace it.
rf15 wrote 1 day ago:
same, 2080 Super here, I even do AI with it
ohdeargodno wrote 1 day 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.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
Some models of 9070 use the well-proven old style PCI-E power
connectors too, which is nice. As far as I'm aware none of the
current AIB midrange or high end Nvidia cards do this.
Henchman21 wrote 1 day ago:
As I understand it, for the 50-series nvidia requires the 12VHPWR
connector
enraged_camel wrote 1 day ago:
I have a 2080 that I'm considering upgrading but not sure which 50
series would be the right choice.
Rapzid wrote 1 day ago:
I went from a 3070 to 5070 Ti and it's fantastic. Just finished
Cyberpunk Max'd out at 4k with DLSS balanced, 2x frame gen, and
reflex 2. Amazing experience.
magicalhippo wrote 1 day ago:
I went from a 2080 Ti to a 5070 Ti. Yes it's faster, but for the
games I play, not dramatically so. Certainly not what I'm used to
doing such a generational leap. The 5070 Ti is noticeably faster
at local LLMs, and has a bit more memory which is nice.
I went with the 5070 Ti since the 5080 didn't seem like a real
step up, and the 5090 was just too expensive and wasn't in stock
for ages.
If I had a bit more patience, I would have waited till the next
node refresh, or for the 5090. I don't think any of the other
current 50-series cards are worth besides the 5090 it if you're
coming from a 2080. And by worth it I mean will give you a big
boost in performance.
thway15269037 wrote 1 day ago:
Grab a used/refurb 3090 then. Probably as legendary card as a
1080Ti.
k12sosse wrote 1 day ago:
Just pray that it's a 3090 under that lid when you buy it
second hand
bigyabai wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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).
user____name wrote 1 day ago:
The sad truth is that with rasterization every renderer needs to be
designed around a specific set of antialiasing solutions.
Antialiasing is like a big wall in your rendering pipeline, there's
the stuff you can do before resolving and the stuff you can do
afterwards. The problem with MSAA is that it is pretty much tightly
coupled with all your architectural rendering decisions. To that
end, TAA is simply the easiest to implement and it kills a lot of
proverbial birds with one stone. And it can all be implemented as
essentially a post processing effect, it has much less of the
tight coupling.
MSAA only helps with geometric edges, shader aliasing can be
combatted with prefiltering but even then it's difficult to get rid
of it completely. MSAA also needs beefy multisample intermediate
buffers, this makes it pretty much a non-starter on heavily
deferred rendering pipelines, which throw away coverage information
to fit their framebuffer budget. On top of that the industry moved
to stochastic effects for rendering all kinds of things that were
too expensive before, the latest being actual realtime path
tracing. I know people moan about TAA and DLSS but to do realtime
path tracing at 4k is sort of nuts really. I still consider it a
bit of a miracle we can do it at all.
Personally, I wish there was more research by big players into
things like texture space lighting, which makes shading aliasing
mostly go away, plays nice with alpha blending and would make MSAA
viable again. The issue there is with shading only the stuff you
see and not wasting texels.
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
There's another path, which is to raise the pixel densities so
high we don't need AA (as much) anymore, but I'm going to guess
it's a) even more expensive and b) not going to fix all the
problems anyway.
MindSpunk wrote 1 day ago:
That's just called super sampling. Render at 4k+ and down
sample to your target display. It's as expensive as it sounds.
kbolino wrote 1 day ago:
No, I mean high pixel densities all the way to the display.
SSAA is an even older technique than MSAA but the results are
not visually the same as just having a really high-DPI screen
with no AA.
int_19h wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
Up to a point. I would argue that 8K downsampled to 4K is
practically indistinguishable from native 8K.
ohdeargodno wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
ohdeargodno wrote 1 day ago:
So, there is a way to make it so that TAA and various temporal
techniques look basically flawless. They need a _lot_ of
information and pixels.
You need a 4k rendering resolution, at least. Modern effects
look stunning at that res.
Unfortunately, nothing runs well at 4k with all the effects on.
ryao wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
Nitpicking it doesn't change the fact that the 12v2x6 connector
_also_ burns down.
numpad0 wrote 1 day ago:
(context: 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 are the exact same thing. The latter
is supposed to be improved and totally fixed, complete with the
underspecced load-bearing "supposed to be" clause.)
AzN1337c0d3r wrote 1 day ago:
They are not the exact same thing.
[1]: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/power...
ryao wrote 1 day 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.
MindSpunk wrote 1 day ago:
The 50 series connectors burned up too. The issue was not fixed.
ryao wrote 1 day ago:
It seems incredibly wrong to assume that there was only 1 issue
with 12WHPWR. 12V-2x6 was an improvement that eliminated some
potential issues, not all of them. If you want to eliminate all
of them, replace the 12 current carrying wires with 2 large
gauge wires. Then the wires cannot become unbalanced. Of
course, the connector would need to split the two into 12 very
short wires to be compatible, but those would be recombined on
the GPU’s PCB into a single wire.
Gracana wrote 1 day ago:
It still has no fusing, sensing, or load balancing for the
individual wires. It is a fire waiting to happen.
ryao wrote 1 day 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: [1] 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.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-suppl...
Gracana wrote 1 day ago:
Previous well-designed video cards used the technologies I
described. Eliminating the sense circuits and fusing is a
recent development.
I do like the idea of just using big wires. It’d be so much
cleaner and simpler. Also using 24 or 48V would be nice, but
that’d be an even bigger departure from current designs.
ryao wrote 1 day ago:
> Previous well-designed video cards used the technologies
I described. Eliminating the sense circuits and fusing is a
recent development.
My point is that the PCB is where such features would be
present, not the connector. There are connectors that have
fusing. The UK’s AC power plugs are examples of them. The
connectors inside PCs are not.
Gracana wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, sure, I’m not proposing that the connector itself
should have those features, rather that it shouldn’t be
used without them present on the device.
leakycap wrote 1 day 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.
theshackleford wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 15 hours 49 min 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 wrote 8 hours 25 min 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: [1] Now go on, I eagerly await
any evidence that supports your claim. Take all the time you
need.
[1]: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rt...
pixl97 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day 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.
d00mB0t wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds about right :D
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