[trashface]

Game devs will have to optimize their code more, like in the old days. But GPUs are really powerful nowadays, so even scaled back GPUs are still really strong.

I don't expect them to go away entirely, if AMD or NVIDIA step back from it, there is still a market there, someone will fill it. Really doubt AMD would do that anyway as they don't have all the AI related sales to replacing gaming.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> there is still a market there, someone will fill it.

How? The cost to design a GPU from scratch is astronomical. Even if a bunch of top brass engineers from NVIDIA left the company to start their own, I'd be surprised if trying to apply as much of their knowledge as possible didn't result in patent violations.

Even ignoring the design part, you have to deal with actual manufacturing. TSMC is ostensibly the only guys in town that could make it, but their fabs are already occupied by NVIDIA's orders. Building your own fab is billions of dollars and several years.

[trashface]

Well there is intel, their GPUs have been a running joke of course for decades now in gaming but they've also been getting better too. The first generation of their GPUs in the aughts was essential silicon trash - I did some gamedev at that time and we essentially gave up on getting them to work. But I've (accidentally) fired up some games on my late 2010s laptop using the Intel onboard and they were actually somewhat playable - only clue was substantially reduced framerate.

And of course apple is now doing its own GPU thing. How ironic if they become the premier choice for gaming. Their CPUs already kick x86's ass, though throttling up all the cores and the GPU for extended periods of gaming might challenge their thermal management design.

But my guess is china would build discrete gaming GPUs if no one else is doing it. They don't rely on TSMC as much and probably not for much longer, and they are catching up on the machine learning GPUs. Since they can do that, they can surely add the additional hardware needed to make them suitable for gaming, which is simpler by comparison, and implementing a decent performing driver on top of that (like for D3D or Vulcan) would be straightforward.

Its quite unlikely the US will outlaw chinese gaming GPUs like we do their EVs - one reason being US policymakers simply don't care about gaming since unlike autos there isn't a massive domestic industry to protect.