alt Hacker NewsI wonder when they will give up on the gaming market because that could take down several publishers and developers. I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought at this point (they removed the standalone gaming revenue report from the financial reports this summer). Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.
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Maybe this is silly of me, but maybe gaming would enjoy an era of hardware upgrades being rather unviable so the focus turns to optimization and aesthetic.
> Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.
It's kind of weird. nVidia kind of has the PC market cornered, but AMD has had the last couple of generations of Xbox and Playstation. Also, they power the Steam Deck/Machine, and Valve has been contributing a lot of AMD graphics features into the Linux drivers. There is a world where AMD (and maybe even Linux on AMD specifically) becomes the de facto standard for gaming.
A Chinese company like CXMT will surely fill that unaddressed market the way CXMT is doing for memory. It would be rather unwise for nvidia to leave the door to the market open. AMD is positioned well to grow right now due to their non-Apple sillicon unified ram hardware coming soon.
They're advertising DLSS5 just now though.
> I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought
I feel your reasoning is very weird. Are they losing money by selling consumer GPU? Just because the profit isn't that much compared to AI it doesn't mean that it's negative, and for-profit companies are not known for leaving money on the table. Apple doesn't reveal how much Apple TV+ makes for them either but I don't see it be gone anytime soon.
Question: wouldn’t the fab be the actual bottleneck? In other words, why wouldn’t TSMC make more NVIDIA chips instead of AMD ones? I assume they’ll just do whichever is paying more, so if NVIDIA chips are better, gamers would be willing to pay more for them and in turn TSMC will be willing to make more of them?
AAA gaming is cooked, and AMD/Intel is plenty able to support indie to AA needs.
I kind of feel like this topples the house of cards a bit. What else is all the visual genAI tech for besides consumer entertainment?
It's still a 15B market for Nvidia, it's not nothing. But I'm curious how they're going to turn Rubin into a gaming GPU. I think at this point consumer GPU upgrades are going to be AI-related upgrades that happen to also help raster capabilities. Blackwell was already kind of a dud on performance uplift from Ada beyond the new LLM features.
You must not be paying attention, they already have.
Intel is going nowhere but we all knew that anyways.
And again, you must not be paying attention, AMD is doing exactly what they said they would. No flagship for RDNA4 (just like RDNA2), RDNA5 flagship (10900 XT) coming right on schedule
I think they'll keep the gaming market alive for a while because renting gaming hardware from the cloud (GeForce NOW) is very congruous with AI keeping consumer hardware prices sky-high.
It continues modern trend of chow companies don't want consumers to truly own anything. Finance a car, pay a monthly subscription fee for heated seats, rent a phone, stream a movie, get rid of physical media, rent a GPU.
But if GeForce NOW doesn't take off, and they get convinced that the AI bubble will not pop, I could see them pulling a Micron and ending their consumer product lines.
Eh, AMD makes a lot of video game console SoCs. If you look at the steam hardware survey most people are running ancient computers.
> Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them
AMD has powered 2 generations each of Sony and Xbox consoles, Steam deck and shops a ton of GPUs especially if you count APUs. And then Intel literally ship more GPUs than Nvidia and AMD combined.
The gaming market doesn't need Nvidia. Especially as AAA is cratering.
> I really don't think it's an if question but a when
Nvidia still will ship gaming products. The upcoming RTX Spark laptop APUs are still gaming-capable - we also have Blackwell gaming GPUs and the Nvidia-powered Nintendo Switch 2.
People echoed this sentiment during the crypto mining crunch, and we still got gaming hardware designs after that blew over. One of CUDA's core value props is the consumer market, and Nvidia probably won't surrender it unless hardware becomes unreasonably scarce.
They may allocate different number of resources every year based on market conditions but they'll never give up on gaming, that would be extremely silly.
AMD would step in, they where behind nvidia but they've been closing that gap for a while and the 9070XT is the current value king (in this fucked up market) for mid-high gaming and you can actually buy them.
Demand for Nvidia cards has outstripped supply even on the mid-high cards specifically because they do better with local models than AMD cards with the same VRAM do broadly.
AI has completely broken the PC gaming market (and PC/Laptop market more broadly but gaming is really hit hard because it's the exact components that matter for both that overlap).
Nvidia had the mind share among gamers but so did Intel once, inertia only lasts so long they've been thoroughly intent on burning that to the ground for a while, back to the post 1080's
If RDNA5 is good (and 4 was it closed the gap on RT) they'll been in a solid place to take the spot if Nvidia do cede the ground.
I have a 7900XTX the last flagship card AMD did (about equal to a 9070XT for raster but 24GB VRAM not 16GB) and it has been and is a stellar card for gaming (let down only if you care about RT and the games I play don't have it).
Flawless under Linux, weaker on the AI behind nvidia but it runs Qwen surprisingly well and I didn't and don't care too much about that except to poke it occasionally.