alt Hacker NewsWhy would gamers want to pay for any features they don't use?
Obviously they don't want to. Now flip it around and ask why HPC people would want to force gamers to pay for something that benefits the HPC people... Suddenly the blog post makes perfect sense.
Replies
rustyhancock • today at 4:33 AM
Similar to when Nvidia released LHR GPUs that nerfed performance for Ethereum mining.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 LHR which tried to hinder mining at the bios level.
The point wasn't to make the average person lose out by preventing them mining on their gaming GPU. But to make miners less inclined to buy gaming GPUs. They also released a series of crypto mining GPUs around the same time.
So fairly typical market segregation.
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-anti-min...
NVIDIA could make 2 separate products, a GPU for gamers and a FP accelerator for HPC.
Thus everybody would pay for what they want.
The problem is that both NVIDIA and AMD do not want to make, like AMD did until a decade ago and NVIDIA stopped doing a few years earlier, a FP accelerator of reasonable size and which would be sold at a similar profit margin with their consumer GPUs.
Instead of this, they want to sell only very big FP accelerators and at huge profit margins, preferably at 5-digit prices.
This makes impossible for small businesses and individual users to use such FP accelerators.
Those are accessible only for big companies, who can buy them in bulk and negotiate lower prices than the retail prices, and who will also be able to keep them busy for close to 24/7, in order to be able to amortize the excessive profit margins of the "datacenter" GPU vendors.
One decade and a half ago, the market segmentation was not yet excessive, so I was happy to buy "professional" GPUs, with unlocked FP64 throughput, at a price about twice greater in comparison with consumer GPUs.
Nowadays, I can no longer afford such a thing, because the similar GPUs are no longer 2 times more expensive, but 20 to 50 times more expensive.
So during the last 2 decades, first I shifted much of my computations from CPUs to GPUs, but then I had to shift them back to CPUs, because there are no upgrades for my old GPUs, any newer GPU being slower, not faster.