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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

> the modified GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will not face any Nvidia driver issues as the graphics card is seemingly supported and working without vBIOS modifications.

That seems very surprising. Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update soon, and then you'll have bricked and unbricked cards.

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Easy enough to get around - don't update your BIOS/drivers when they do. Same game that used to be played with pirated software and even iPhone updates for jailbreaking.

the speed at which open source models are moving, that's not a long term solution

There aren’t really VBIOS updates for GPUs like there are for motherboards. They exist, but for the most part NVidia nerfs cards with driver updates. For a while, to mine Ethereum you just needed to use a specific GPU driver version. It really was that simple.

The market buying these would probably be savvy enough to avoid driver interference

>Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update

The attempt on their profits has left them scarred and deformed

> Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update soon, and then you'll have bricked and unbricked cards.

The crazy potential for that backfiring is, IMHO, reason alone for them to not even try.

What possible consequences could there be? Are people going to start buying GPUs from the competition?

There is no competition. There's no choice for the consumer. You buy nvidia or you don't get to play.

Nvidia's reputation is already in the toilet. They have literally nothing to lose. There's no consequences for their actions.

People may start calling for monopoly abuse investigation in US and EU.

> People may start calling for monopoly abuse investigation in US and EU.

And (sadly) how long will that take, if it happens at all?

People can "start to call" all they want, but it won't matter unless NVIDIA has something to fear.

Aren't they already? That's still not much of a consequence. If anything happens, it'll be years from now, which is totally out of scope for quarterly profit management.

Don't think nVidia is a company run for the quarterly profit report.

If that were the case, they wouldn't be running these anticompetitive strategies and leaving regular consumers at the mercy of GPU scalpers.

You think anti competitive strategies are only effective for 3 months?

Or scalpers stop their business after 3 months?

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