alt Hacker News40 year old gamer here having a flashback of all anti- competition practices Nvidia sustained for decades. Who here remembers GameWorks and PhysX effectively sabotaging multi-vendor optimization in titles like Witcher 3 and Watch Dogs? Expensive Gsync monitors? Trying to force OEMs to be GeForce partners in exchange for full GPU support? Forcing EVGA exit from the market? And then completely shafting gamers when crypto and AI markets opened up?
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There was an article on here just a few days ago about an Nvidia crypto GPU that was sold a few years ago. This lady discovered that via voltage glitches she could turn back on features that Nvidia had turned off. She had cards that were sold with only 8 gigs of VRAM enabled that actually had 80 gigs of VRAM.
54 year old TF2 player here, I do remember.
NVIDIA has been terrible to countless groups over the years(even more than you listed). They survived by being really good. You know who else have been jerks? Every other leading successful tech company (NVIDIA is nothing compared to Microsoft's misdeeds for example). Microsoft still going after 51 years. And now a new generation having never remembered the browser wars have fully embraced Microsoft products like VSCode. Your trip down memory lane reminded me about the numerous 'gamer boycotts' that all failed. There used to be a meme about how people signing a pledge boycotting a title would then be seen 'online' on Steam playing said game. At the end of the day most consumers didn't care. They wanted the best products and NVIDIA more often than not delivered. A company that is super polite to all their customers and partners is a company that will still be dropped the second their products stop delivering the value that customers expect.
Yup, they've been sleezebags all along. Nvidia has always treated their software as a tool to nobble the competition.
They're just another rank monopolist. We should celebrate their fall, maybe there will be room for some real competition.
Another 40 year old gamer here. I remember all of it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF36_qMd8M one my fav videos on the matter)
I also had the displeasure to work with nvidia. After years of pushing gaming cards on us for compute, the years I spent working with nvidia was full of conversations where they would list silly excuse after excuse as to why we should use the expensive enterprise-grade cards instead. All the while, we begged them to unlock driver features that were available to Quadro cards but not GeForce cards, features as simple as hardware acceleration pass-through on a remote desktop connection. It took them a full-on epidemic, where remote work became super common, to allow some of those features to GeForce cards.
So it's really on brand that they tried creating a fake scarcity to keep their prices up. I don't envy the situation Jensen is in but I won't be sorry for him.