But if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a slow death of the democratization of tech.
At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the very raw tech (chips).
On graphics: there is a threshold where realistic graphics make the difference.
Not all games need to be that, but Ghost of Tsushima in GBA Pokemon style is not the same game at all. And is it badly designed ? I also don't think so. Same for many VR games which make immersion meaningful in itself.
We can all come up with a litany of bad games, AAA or indie, but as long as there's a set of games fully pushing the envelope and bringing new things to the table, better hardware will be worth it IMHO.
Man, I remember playing UT GOTYE back in the 00s and the graphics blew us away when we fired it up and then Return to Castle Wolfenstein made my brother cry from the "realistic" zombies (on a CRT even!). It's amazing what you can take for granted when even a fraction of a modern card would have been called "photorealistic" back then.
AMD will be very happy when they do. They are already making great cards, currently running an RX7800XT (or something like that), and it's amazing. Linux support is great too
My very gaming experienced and data oriented 13 year old wants to switch from Nvidia to AMD. I don’t understand all his reasons/numbers but I suppose that’s as good an endorsement as any for AMDs GPUs.
I keep hearing this and yet history has proved, time and again, that any overly greedy monopolist achieves the reverse effect of monopoly.
Don't get too worried. People still can and do vote with their wallets. Additional vector of attack against greedy capitalists is also the fact that the economy is not doing great either.
They cannot increase prices too much.
I also predict that the DDR5 RAM price hikes will not last until 2027 or even 2028 as many others think. I give it maximum one year, I'd even think the prices will start slightly coming down during summer 2026.
Reading and understanding economy is neat and all but in the modern age some people forget that the total addressable market is not infinite and that the regular customers have relatively tight budgets.
Similar with nvidia, you've got to consider what partner companies AMD likes working with. AMD/nvidia design chips, contract TSMC to make them, then sell the chips to the likes of ASUS/MSI/gigabyte/etc to put them on cards the consumer buys. The other market AMD serves is Sony/MS for their consoles and I'd argue they're a major motivator driving radeon development as they pay up-front to get custom APU chips, and there's synergy there with Zen and more recently the AI demand. Ever since ATi bought up the company (ArtX) that made the Gamecube GPU it seems to me that the PC side is keeping the motor running in-between console contracts as far as gaming demands go, given their low market share they definitely don't seem to prioritize or depend on it to thrive.
Really, I have been gaming before even getting my Timex 2068 in the mid 80's, starting with Game & Watch handhelds, and I don't get "build your aquarium" culture of many PC gamers nowadays.
It is so bad that is almost impossible to buy a traditional desktop on regular computer stores, there are only fish tanks with rainbows on sale.
Gaming got me into coding. Messing with Warcraft 3 world editor back when there were a lot of dota clones. Good times. I think blizzard had their own language JASS that was very lua like
Unfortunately you’re right re:dating prospects but that’s mostly because game devs haven’t been able to reproduce the insane success of valorant at getting the better gender to want to play hardcore games.
If NVIDIA exits the market, there is still AMD, Intel and PowerVR (Imagination Technologies is back at making discrete PC GPUs, although currently only in China).
NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU.
The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce revenue without reducing costs.
Well the good thing for NVIDIA AI business is that most of your chips can sit unused in warehouses and still get rich. 6 million H100s sold but infrastructure (water cooled dc) for only a third of them exists in the world.
The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.
Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end and thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even for the lowest settings.
> Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end
All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience that spend a lot of money on games.
It’s totally fine and good to build premium content that requires premium hardware.
It’s also good to run on low-end hardware to increase the TAM. But there are limits. Building a modern game and targeting a 486 is a wee bit silly.
If Nvidia gamer GPUs disappear and devs were forced to build games that are capable of running on shit ass hardware the net benefit to gamers would be very minimal.
What would actually benefit gamers is making good hardware available at an affordable price!
Everything about your comment screams “tall poppy syndrome”. </rant>
One wonders what would happen in a SHtF situation or someone stubs their toe on the demolition charges switch at TSMC and all the TwinScans get minced.
Would there be a huge drive towards debloating software to run again on random old computers people find in cupboards?
> The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.
They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses.
Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.
They're not targeting high-end PCs. They're targeting current generation consoles, specifically the PS5 + 1080p. It just turns out that when you take those system requirements and put them on a PC—especially a PC with a 1440p or 2160p ultrawide—it turns out to mean pretty top of the line stuff. Particularly if as a PC gamer you expect to run it at 90fps and not the 30-40 that is typical for consoles.
Gaming performance is so much more than hardware specs. Thinking that game devs optimizing their games on their own could fundamentally change the gaming experience is delusional.
And anyone who knows just a tiny bit of history of nvidia would know how much investment they have put into gaming and the technology they pioneered.
I have a 9 year old gaming PC with an RX480 and it is only now starting to not be able to run certain games at all (recent ones that require ray tracing). It can play Cyberpunk and Starfield on low settings very acceptably.
Consoles and their install base set the target performance envelope. If your machine can't keep up with a 5 year old console then you should lower expectations.
And like, when have onboard GPUs ever been good? The fact that they're even feasible these days should be praised but you're imagining some past where devs left them behind.
That way they will not only burn the most good will but will also get themselves entangled even more into the AI bubble - hopefully enough to go down with it.
This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.
Then Intel and AMD carry on, tbh having sewn up handhelds and consoles and made gaming on integrated graphics mainstream many won't notice.
An AI bubble burst leaving loads of GPU laden datacenters is much more likely to hasten cloud gaming.
Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora.
Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well.
More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going.
Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting.
Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones. The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a niche of a niche.
Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable market: enterprises and especially AI companies.
PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity? Cloud stream them.
I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other side.
It would be great if more GPU competition would enter the field instead of less. The current duopoly is pretty boring and stagnant, with prices high and each company sorta-kinda doing the same thing and milking their market.
I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI, but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all doing their own thing and there were so many options.
If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.
> Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab.
I'm not sure it would matter. It doesn't seem that graphics are the limiting factor in games anymore. Plenty of popular games use variations on cartoon-style graphics, for example - Fortnight, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. Seems gameplay, creativity, and player community are more determining factors.
That said, things like improved environmental physics and NPC/enemy AI might enable new and novel game mechanics and creative game design. But that can come from AMD and others too.
Game graphics are still a high margin silicon business. Someone will do it.
Frankly, the graphics chops are plenty strong for a decade of excellent games. The big push in the next couple decades will probably be AI generated content to make games bigger and more detailed and more immersive
I don’t understand why most people in this thread think that this would be such a big deal. It will not change the market in significant negative or positive ways. AMD has been at their heals for a couple of decades and is more competitive than ever, they will simply fill their shoes. Most games consoles have been AMD centric for a long time regardless, they’ve always been fairly dominant in the mid range and they have a longstanding reputation of having the best price/performance value for gamers.
Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years, depending on how the AI bubble develops.
63 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadBut if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a slow death of the democratization of tech.
At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the very raw tech (chips).
Not all games need to be that, but Ghost of Tsushima in GBA Pokemon style is not the same game at all. And is it badly designed ? I also don't think so. Same for many VR games which make immersion meaningful in itself.
We can all come up with a litany of bad games, AAA or indie, but as long as there's a set of games fully pushing the envelope and bringing new things to the table, better hardware will be worth it IMHO.
Don't get too worried. People still can and do vote with their wallets. Additional vector of attack against greedy capitalists is also the fact that the economy is not doing great either.
They cannot increase prices too much.
I also predict that the DDR5 RAM price hikes will not last until 2027 or even 2028 as many others think. I give it maximum one year, I'd even think the prices will start slightly coming down during summer 2026.
Reading and understanding economy is neat and all but in the modern age some people forget that the total addressable market is not infinite and that the regular customers have relatively tight budgets.
It is so bad that is almost impossible to buy a traditional desktop on regular computer stores, there are only fish tanks with rainbows on sale.
NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU.
The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce revenue without reducing costs.
B200 doesn't have any graphics capabilities. The datacenter chips don't have any graphical units, it's just wasted die space.
As long as gaming GPUs will compete for same wafer space that AI chips use, the AI chips will be far more profitable to NVIDIA
If it does, I think it would be a good thing.
The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.
Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end and thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even for the lowest settings.
This is an insane thing to say.
> Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end
All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience that spend a lot of money on games.
It’s totally fine and good to build premium content that requires premium hardware.
It’s also good to run on low-end hardware to increase the TAM. But there are limits. Building a modern game and targeting a 486 is a wee bit silly.
If Nvidia gamer GPUs disappear and devs were forced to build games that are capable of running on shit ass hardware the net benefit to gamers would be very minimal.
What would actually benefit gamers is making good hardware available at an affordable price!
Everything about your comment screams “tall poppy syndrome”. </rant>
Would there be a huge drive towards debloating software to run again on random old computers people find in cupboards?
They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses.
Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.
And anyone who knows just a tiny bit of history of nvidia would know how much investment they have put into gaming and the technology they pioneered.
And like, when have onboard GPUs ever been good? The fact that they're even feasible these days should be praised but you're imagining some past where devs left them behind.
That way they will not only burn the most good will but will also get themselves entangled even more into the AI bubble - hopefully enough to go down with it.
It would still suck if they left the market because who does AMD have to compete with with? Intel? LOL
Increased prices for everyone. Lovely. I can’t despise AI enough.
Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora.
Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well.
More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going.
Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting.
Update: Adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)
Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones. The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a niche of a niche.
Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable market: enterprises and especially AI companies.
PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity? Cloud stream them.
I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other side.
I'm kind of nostalgic for the Golden Age of graphics chip manufacturers 25 years ago, where we still had NVIDIA and ATI, but also 3DFX, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and even smaller players, all doing their own thing and there were so many options.
So.. a smart phone?
i predict that the "pc" is going to be slowly but surely eaten bottom-up by increasingly powerful SoCs.
That said, things like improved environmental physics and NPC/enemy AI might enable new and novel game mechanics and creative game design. But that can come from AMD and others too.
Frankly, the graphics chops are plenty strong for a decade of excellent games. The big push in the next couple decades will probably be AI generated content to make games bigger and more detailed and more immersive
Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years, depending on how the AI bubble develops.