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You should see what Nvidia does for CAD software...They used to force you to use Quadro cards only (which is maybe 2X-3X price of their consumer version) even though the GT/X series worked just as good. People figured out how to change the registry setting to make it work until they finally caved and supported it "somewhat" (where if it breaks it breaks and this was maybe 5 years after the registry hacking). Nvidia has always been notorious for making people use the "good stuff" (expensive) even though it's not really required.

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> Nvidia has always been notorious for making people use the "good stuff" (expensive) even though it's not really required.

Do you think that these Quadro features materialized out of thin air, or did they require engineering effort and additional silicon area?

If the latter, is it reasonable for Nvidia to expect to be compensated for that additional effort (which is born by, say, 2 orders of magnitude lower volume) ?

Additionally, would you be happier if Nvidia simply removed those features so that no home users would complain anymore (at the expense of Quadro users who would lose the ability to use real features.)

And, using my standard to-go-to argument, are you similarly upset that software companies are charging different amounts of money for different tiers of a software product (e.g. Microsoft Office Home vs Professional), even though these different tiers are only enabled by a license key? If not, why?

I personally think there's a pretty big difference between being compensated for their work and using software to limit where the hardware can be used (and Im not saying Nvidia is the only company that does this, like Tektronix who is even worse for it). This differs than a purely software product like you mentioned between home vs professional usage. When I buy a GPU, I expect to be able to use it as a....GPU regardless of the software it connects to. Sure, I get it, there is some additional software work such as CUDA and driver stuff depending on the package but at a basis with something like DirectX, this should be more or less software agnostic. Unfortunately our market is heading towards that direction (e.g Tesla and John Deere) where even "unlocking" the features via hardware means is a violation of DMCA.

The other choice would be to actually manufacture different product lines with different hardware, which would 1. increase costs, and 2. prevent the user from being able to upgrade via software, and have to buy completely new hardware. From a business, consumer, and environmental point of view, unlocking via software seems the superior solution.

It's not that simple though. It's cheaper to engineer one chip that does everything then selectively disable certain features for lower end SKUs.

Going to the effort of making different hardware for the lower end SKUs that completely lacks these features would end up raising prices for consumers because it makes engineering and manufacturing more costly.

The other alternative is they just don't offer lower price SKUs and make everyone buy top-end parts.

You say that this is different than a software product, but you don’t explain why.

You didn’t buy a GPU, you bought a consumer class GPU promised you the advertised consumer class features.

Why do you expect it to give you professional class features from a higher pricing tier?

> are you similarly upset that software companies are charging different amounts of money for different tiers of a software product (e.g. Microsoft Office Home vs Professional), even though these different tiers are only enabled by a license key?

Is there anyone who isn't upset by that?

Why would you be upset by that?

By lowering the price for an entry version, customers who otherwise couldn’t afford the full version still get the option to use a feature reduced version.

(See how I framed that?)

> Why would you be upset by that?

The former Microsoft Excel Program Manager explains it well:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

> this business about segmenting? It pisses the heck off of people.

> People want to feel they’re paying a fair price. They don’t want to think they’re paying extra just because they’re not clever enough to find the magic coupon code.

> God help you if an A-list blogger finds out that your premium printer is identical to the cheap printer, with the speed inhibitor turned off.

> So, while segmenting can be a useful tool to “capture consumer surplus,” it can have significant negative implications for the long term image of your product.

> Even assuming you’re willing to deal with a long-term erosion of customer goodwill caused by blatant price discrimination, segmentation is just not that easy to pull off. First of all, as soon as your customers find out you’re doing it, they’ll lie about who they are

> If your customers talk amongst themselves, they’re going to find out about the price you’re offering the other people, and you’ll find yourself forced to match the lowest prices for everyone.

If they only offered one tier, it would be Office Professional, at a price that made sense for most businesses, so they can recoup the cost of building and providing ongoing support for the product. This would absolutely price a huge number of people out from getting Office for personal use.

So, no, I don't think there are a lot of people upset that there exists an Office product they can afford.

Why do you suppose that? Surely there are many many more customers who can afford cheaper individual/student licenses.

Even if they offered an affordable ultimate Office package with everything, they'd recoup the development costs and even profit. This is not about "recouping costs", it's about market segmentation. It's about figuring out how much each group is willing to pay and then charging exactly that. If they could, they'd call customers and figure out their net worth before quoting them a price.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

> this business about segmenting? It pisses the heck off of people.

> People want to feel they’re paying a fair price. They don’t want to think they’re paying extra just because they’re not clever enough to find the magic coupon code.

I don't know a single normal person who's ever bought Office anyway. Their real customers are corporations, since they have money and can actually be sued for copyright infringement if they use Office without licensing it. Microsoft should simply give it away to normal people and charge corporations for it.

> Even if they offered an affordable ultimate Office package with everything, they'd recoup the development costs and even profit.

Mind sharing the development & support cost numbers, and the sale numbers for the Office suite that you're basing that statement on? If not, maybe a Fermi calculation to show that it's a reasonable statement?

This argument assumes that pricing is to be determined through some a priori philosophical consideration of what is "fair" or "reasonable" compensation for effort involved in creating supply, according to some subjective personal idea of what those terms mean.

Empirically, pricing is - always and everywhere - determined by the intersection of supply and demand, nothing more and nothing less. The labor theory of value and its relatives are empirically false.

Empirically, prices are set by the seller.

The seller can _ask_ for any price they like, not unilaterally "set" it.

They're only going to get that, and thus set the price, if there is also a buyer who agrees to pay that price.

In technical terms, I was using "set the price" to mean "discover the the market-clearing price that allows a transaction to happen."

Right, but this attitude allows neglecting any behavior that results in bad resource distribution as inevitable and immutable. That's not how economies work by all observation. Empirically supply/demand is insufficient to explain all the market behavior that's trivially observable, especially when you can easily manipulate both sides of that narrative with enough capital.

The labor theory of value certainly has issues but at the very least I would expect a critique to provide an alternative narrative of observable pricing pressures, such as scarcity and market controls. This type of reductive thinking doesn't have a clear end to my eyes.

Sure, but the seller is not guaranteed to get sales.

So there must be an agreement between the seller and the buyer on what the item is worth, and "worth" includes what alternatives both of them have available as well.

The big difference is that with hardware it feels wasteful. With software, you're not missing out on anything if they decide to lock certain features under a paywall. But if the hardware already exists and can perform a certain function and the only thing blocking it from doing that is a license key then doesn't that seem like a waste of good hardware? Software is unlimited but hardware isn't.

Sorry, complete noob here. How did nvdia control if CAD uses the gpu or not. Did the gpu know the type of application acting it?

The NVidia drivers are aware of which application is running and apply different profiles for popular applications. But I think in this case it was more that the drivers locked out particular APIs (e.g. overlay-related) that were used primarily by CAD applications rather than outright locking out those applications.

as a Nvidia shareholder I totally support this, you're free not to buy their hardware

I'm happy to hear that software locks make more rich.

or for running their GPUs in VMs...

Is that not a thing now?

It looks like they are still disabling it: https://youtu.be/AG_ZHi3tuyk?t=627

which ist completely user hostile, as the original idea (back with certified Z800s, RHEL5 and FX3800s) of a dual-OS-workstations has not panned out.

Today it's basically nagging developers and technical users, who don't want to run proprietary software unsandboxed (but want CUDA...) and have a hassle-free experience into buying quadros. I can't think of any business-case for that, because cracking down at the shady ML-cloud-vendors works out okish right now for them and at unis people won't notice at large...

With Ryzen's support of ECC, if AMD brought SR-IOV to its non-work station radeon cards, it would be another interesting feather in its cap. They do have product announcements coming up, bought doubt that is an important feature to most users.

I haven’t heard about this before and I’m curious - what software only allows Quadro cards?

Almost all CAD software prior to maybe 2016 was like this. If you ever run NX/Solidworks/Inventor, you will notice the GPU usage will be 0% unless there is a Quadro GPU. The main reason is that the graphic acceleration is disabled until you use a "proper" GPU. You are able to force graphic acceleration by turning on the correct registry key.

They also quietly disabled the use of their "Capture SDK" on Geforce cards in a driver update, before whitelisting Geforce Experience and presumably anyone else who would cough up the money to license it.

Developers without Quadro cards just updated their drivers one day and weren't able to use it anymore.

Same goes for their hypervisor checks. Just silently added in a driver update, with the reps only saying why after people started asking why it broke.

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