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Comment by TechnicolorByte | Hacker News Reader

It’s a very good summary. Nvidia to me gets a lot of flak (sometimes rightfully so) in large part to being the big risk-taker in the GPU/graphics/AI space that pushes forward industry trends. AMD, meanwhile, is largely a follower in the GPU/graphics space with few contributions to rendering research. Even worse, they even use their marketing to angle themselves as consumer-friendly when I reality they’re just playing catch-up. For instance, they started off badmouthing ray-tracing as not being ready back when Turing launched (when is any new paradigm ever “ready” when it requires developers to adapt?) before adopting it with much worse performance the following generation.

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Well, if that "consumer friendliness" is usable Linux drivers, then I don't give a shit about NVidia pushing the envelope, even if it means the graphics holy grail of real time raytracing.

And is NVidia really the primary pusher of graphics algorithms and AI? Yeah, I doubt it. SUre they might contribute some things, but modern fabs have so much available transistor real estate that really NVidia is just trying to maintain market control by defining the computing interfaces rather than some fundamental achievement in computing theory.

Raytracing algorithms aren't new, and they are "embarrassingly parallel" like most graphics algorithms, very well suited for modern chip fab design. If NVidia went away, Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo would just find another graphics vendor for real time raytracing. There were "processor per pixel" raytracer experiments in the mid 1990s when 66 MHz was "fast". If anything, real time raytracing likely has been suppressed by the massive investments in rasterization toolchains.

I mean one of the pain points are mainly that they treat other companies so poorly many in the industry just kinda hate their guts, not just AIB partners as shown by EVGA's messy divorce, but also others such as Apple or the Linux Foundation. While this happens their consumers are ambivalent towards them due to the fact that all their "envelope pushing" mostly being proprietary tech that drags the performance of other competitor's cards and the fact that their high end cards are price gouged akin to Intel CPUs prior to 2017 due to a lack of meaningful competition. All that and their recent negative pr from price gouging the mining boom, the "4080" 12gb, and Jensen being publicly out of touch about the price of computer hardware "unfortunately never going down" in this context has dragged their goodwill a bit lately.

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