Nvidia takes 88% of the GPU market share | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia takes 88% of the GPU market share

xda-developers.com

18 pointssharpshadow12 comments

How long before the M-word starts being thrown around? In all seriousness, is it possible, likely or inevitable that Nvidia be 'broken up' due to effective monopoly?

I'm just curious, I'm ignorant about how these things go or went in the past, just young enough to not have paid attention when this was about to happen to Microsoft, and don't really have a predisposed position.

Edit: a quick wikipedia search tells me that MS was just barely spared breaking up, and had to settle with a few concessions regarding non-MS software. I can't draw a parallel from this to Nvidia, though

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

having a large market share because your product is superior to your competitors' is hardly anti-consumer

It's not clear to me how you would even go about a break up of Nvidia. They're almost unique in their success. With any other large company - Microsoft, Apple, Meta all have distinct segments of their business. Meta actually spent a huge amount of effort trying to embed their separate products in each other to avoid exactly that threat. With Nvidia, what would you even separate? They don't do the fabrication, all they do is designs and then variations on those designs for market segments. Are you going to break up their design team? I don't think it makes sense.

88% is definitely strong evidence for a monopoly position. But having a monopoly isn't illegal, only abusing a monopoly is illegal.

For example, it would be legal for AMD to sign deals with game makers to make games AMD-exclusive. But if Nvidia did that, anti-trust would likely act to prevent that.

> How long before the M-word starts being thrown around?

The US government at least mentioned "antitrust" 2 days ago, which could count depending on one's interpretation of various stages of these investigations. More discussion from more informed and opinionated people in the following thread:

"U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI" (nytimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275

AMD doesn’t bother to compete for unknown reasons.

Intel will likely catch up in time and they are very good at competing so this will change but not for a long time.

I seriously don’t understand AMDs move here, does anyone have any insight?

I don't know, but I always buy AMD GPUs, simply because their open source graphics driver knocks the socks off of the NVidia one.

Yeah I’ve switched to AMD card as well, its price to performance justifies it. I would have to save for a LOT longer if I wanted to buy a new Nvidia card.

They realized that people wait for AMD to compete and drop prices just so that they can buy Nvidia at reduced prices. AMD doesn't actually gain any new market share because people simply like Nvidia that much more.

This seems like a misleading title.

I think it's just desktop computers where it's 88%.

Pretty sure if you account for gaming consoles then it's a lot different.

Well when the competition decides their strategy should be to sell 105% of the raster performance for 95% of the cost while having none of the software features that consumers want, no wonder Nvidia is dominating. Some features like DLSS are simply more important than raw raster performance and customers will buy those with such features.

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