[httpz]

I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)

[tomasphan]

There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming leather jacket just yet:

1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.

2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers.

3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring)

4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions)

5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)

[BizarroLand]

6. Techies who use NVidia GPUs in their PCs are more likely to play with AI and ultimately contribute to the space as either a developer or a user

[hyperbovine]

> 1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.

No way that is true any more. Five years ago, maybe.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1izlt9w/nvidi...

[venturecruelty]

Why would anyone sell a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us when they could sell a million GPUs for thousands apiece to a handful of big companies? We're speedrunning the absolute worst corpo cyberpunk timeline.

[kelnos]

Because when you lose even one of those big companies in your handful, it tanks your business. Customer diversity is a good thing.

And they're not selling a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us; they're selling millions of GPUs to millions of nobodies.

[CTDOCodebases]

The way things are going no one will be able to afford a PC.

Instead we will be streaming games from our locked down tablets and paying a monthly subscription for the pleasure.

[20after4]

You will own nothing and be happy.

[bluescrn]

Might almost be a good thing, if it means abandoning overhyped/underperforming high-end game rendering tech, and taking things in a different direction.

The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.

The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.

[whatevaa]

DLSS Transformer models are pretty good. Framegen can be useful but has niche applications dure to latency increase and artifacts. Global illumination can be amazing but also pretty niche as it's very expensive and comes with artifacts.

Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.

And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.

[swinglock]

The latest DLSS and FSR are good actually. Maybe XeSS too.

[babypuncher]

The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.

Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.

[bpye]

I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.

[pizlonator]

This is a huge reason.

[goda90]

They are already making moves that might suggest that future. They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source their own, probably at higher cost.

[whatevaa]

They will constrain supply before exiting. It's just not smart exiting, you can stop developing and it will be a trickle, also will work as insurance in case AI flops.

[leoc]

In the words of Douglas Adams, there are those who say that this has already happened.

[officeplant]

Honestly, I'd prefer it. It might get AMD and Intel more off their ass for GPU development. I already stopped buying Nvidia gpus ages ago before they saw value in the Linux/Unix market, and I'm tired of them sucking up all the air in the room.

[cmsj]

Intel GPUs are probably not going to last much longer, considering they did a deal with nvidia for integrated GPUs.

[Brainlag]

Jensen is to paranoid to do it. But whoever comes after him will do it ASAP.

[Macha]

They did get burned when crypto switched to dedicated hardware and nvida were left with for them huge surpluses of 10xx series hardware. But what they’re selling to AI companies now is a lot more different from their consumer gear

[adrr]

Keep the retail investors happy so they keep pumping your stock.

[pabs3]

Wonder if Google will ever start selling TPUs.

[cmsj]

They already have: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...

[gnabgib]

Beyond the Coral, you mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit#Edge_TP...