Nvidia launches first SaaS Offering | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia launches first SaaS Offering

nvidianews.nvidia.com

37 pointskjkisielewicz36 comments

Tangentially related, but GeForce Now is absolutely incredible. It seems like they’ve finally cracked game streaming. If you have a solid wired connection, it is practically unnoticeable for single player games at this point. They also made the (genius) decision to integrate it with multiple existing stores like Steam and GOG rather than building their own. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy a gaming PC again.

If everyone thought this they'd put themselves out of the consumer hardware business.

I think they would rather be the group to put themselves out of that business than someone else, like amd + amazon for Luna or amd + google for stadia

Well, they may make it more accessible to get in to gaming, and then having increased the number of gamers they may find more customers looking for a local experience. Maybe college students gaming on the fiber network at school coming home to a poor internet connection, or nerds who start gaming on a laptop but decide to build out a whole gaming rig with the best performance. I think this kind of thing has some complexity to it.

I am moving in two weeks to a place that has gigabit fiber. Maybe I should give this a shot!

I've been a GeForce Now subscriber since the start. It's a good service that is prevented by publishers from being great.

Two major pain points for me:

1) I can't play my whole library. During the beta I was able to play pretty much my whole steam library but that changed after GFN went live. I accept that some titles may have technical limitations but thats far from universal. Like, why can't I play Red Dead Redemption II on GFN but I can on Stadia? Pure publisher bullshit, that's why

2) I wish Nvidia made it possible to apply mods to games. Steam workshop mods work if supported but the majority of games do not support that. I don't often mod but when I do its usually to correct some 'quality of life' issue.

I ended up buying a Steamdeck to game on instead of GFN.. I hope the arbitrary restrictions holding it back disappear someday

You can use Moonlight (an open source implementation of Nvidia's gamestream protocol) and a cloud PC like Paperspace or Shadow, to stream any game you want. I used Paperspace primarily, you can get a decent graphics card for about $0.50/hr. In Seattle with 100 Mbps internet I wasn't having many issues with latency or lag, and it was hard to tell I wasn't running it on my machine. I put a lot of hours into Elden Ring this way.

...until I got my 3060. At a certain point it just makes more sense to buy your own card.

They still have an issue with game compatibility, and I don't think the pricing model is competitive enough

Shadow is much better (not as cheap as GeforceNow), you basically get a PC with a dedicated GPU, you can do what ever you want with it

https://shadow.tech/

Also if you're interested in a bigger offering, I just ordered their upcoming Business Premium offering (not public yet, you need to contact them). It comes with an RTX6000 w/ 32GB vRAM, 6 cores of an Intel Platinum and 24GB RAM for 206€ per month. Here's their lineup: https://i.imgur.com/lWM3Vco.png. (129€ is the price until December 2022). Just find the business contact address on their site and shoot them a mail.

I've been working with Mathematica and PyTorch on it, and I played Stray, Cyberpunk and Ghost Recon all on max graphics with 120fps. It's insane and definitely moving the goalpost for me in terms of expectations.

Oh wow, are they officially entering the public cloud space?

It's not the first, Geforce Now has been around for a while.

I might misunderstand the exact definition of Saas, but I thought it referred to subscriptions specifically. I think GeForce Now is free, but just not particularly useful without having bought an nvidia GPU. Is there any sort of recurring payment aspect to it, or am I just assuming a more narrow definition of SaaS than you?

EDIT: I think I confused GeForce Now with the GeForce Experience or whatever the driver management/game overlay thing is. From searching, it definitely is a subscription service

Geforce Now is not really SaaS, the model is more PaaS (if you consider what you're actually doing - renting a gaming PC with a graphics card as a platform to run Steam/Epic/whatever).

Eventually, every company will tend towards services. Monthly income flows are more enticing than one-time ones.

And the internet is what makes such a thing possible...

Services doesn't necessarily mean internet based. If I run a local coffee shop, I can sell one bag of coffee or a subscription to monthly coffee, just pay upfront and come in to the store to pick it up.

And when that happens (and if buyers ever get fed up), the pendulum will swing back as it will be a competitive advantage to offer one-time pricing and someone will exploit that edge. But that supposes buyers will care enough.

> And when that happens (and if buyers ever get fed up), the pendulum will swing back as it will be a competitive advantage to offer one-time pricing and someone will exploit that edge.

Why would they? If it's more profitable for a company to charge their users forever, have tighter control over their product and how it's used, and have the option to collect massive amounts of personal data nobody is going to give all that up for a somewhat larger percentage of interested users.

There are all kinds of products consumers want and would pay good money for that nobody has any interest in providing because they can get much richer by not giving consumers those things.

If I get a one time opportunity to grab 100 million dollar in sales, I will take. I don't need recurring 100 million dollar revenue.

I'd be perfectly happy to take my millions and run (or so I say now at least) but very few would rather take 100 million in sales today but not another dime vs 100 million+ every year

Income flows and data flows. SaaS means you can constantly collect personal data to sell and exploit.

This is misleading about SaaS advantages. Most SaaS don't sell data, their main advantage is making money monthly by providing a service, not selling data.

I've yet to see a SaaS product that doesn't "share" personal data with 3rd parties. They may not be mainly about collecting and selling/exploiting personal data, but every one I've seen does it.

I'm _extremely_ excited about the NEMO LLM service. Looking forward to how this will turn out in reality. I hope the pricing will be attractive enough though.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gpu-cloud/nemo-llm-service/

> Easily customize and use massively large language models (LLMs) for high-performance AI.

Seeing more and more submissions recently break this guideline:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Time for guideline change or stricter enforcement?

> NVIDIA Launches Omniverse Cloud Services for Building and Operating Industrial Metaverse Applications

Is this really a better title? OPs contains just as much information.

It's not about which title is better (I agree OP's better) but the guideline saying do not editorialize the title.

So either a bad/irrelevant guideline or not properly enforced.

Or are guidelines instead of stead fast rules.

Good point. I (think I) remember seeing guidelines being used to enforce a mod action though, so then they would stop being guideliness and become rules.

I don't think things are so black and white. The mods can pretty much do whatever they want at the end of the day. They also give a lot of leeway.

I guess my engineering mind is wanting things to be more black and white.

I hear you. I'm the same way.

"NVIDIA Launches Omniverse Cloud Services for Building and Operating Industrial Metaverse Applications"

Seems a bit long for the title, and "Company’s First SaaS Offering" is the first four words of the subtitle. Seems pretty reasonable?

The last time I saw it enforced, it was for a MUCH more material change of the title. Something like, "New Product Announced!" to "Change you password now!", hiding it was basically an ad, etc. This doesn't mention the Metaverse part (which is material), but it's also more of a summarization and not an outright deception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com