I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)
1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.
2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers.
3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring)
4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions)
5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)
If they're unemployed, they'll just rent from the cloud
How many of you still manage your own home server?
No way that is true any more. Five years ago, maybe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1izlt9w/nvidi...
basically, the gaming segment is the beta-test ground for the datacenter segment. and you have beta testers eager to pay high prices!
we see the same in CPUs by the way, where the datacenter lineup of both intel and amd lags behind the consumer lineup. gives time to iron out bios, microcode and optimizations.
And they're not selling a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us; they're selling millions of GPUs to millions of nobodies.
Tell that to Micron.
Instead we will be streaming games from our locked down tablets and paying a monthly subscription for the pleasure.
The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.
The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.
Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.
Do I, as a player, appreciate the extra visual detail in new games? Sure, most of the time.
But, if you asked me what I enjoy playing more 80% of the time? I'd pull out a list of 10+ year old titles that I keep coming back to, and more that I would rather play than what's on the market today if they only had an active playerbase (for multiplayer titles).
Honestly, I know I'm not alone in saying this: I'd rather we had more games focused on good mechanics and story, instead of visually impressive works that pile on MTX to recoup insane production costs. Maybe this is just the catalyst we need to get studios to redirect budgets to making games fun instead of spending a bunch of budget on visual quality.
Ray tracing has real implications not just for the production pipeline, but the kind of environments designers can make for their games. You really only notice the benefits in games that are built from the ground up for it though. So far, most games with ray tracing have just tacked it on top of a game built for raster lighting, which means they are still built around those limitations.
These massive production budgets for huge, visually detailed games, are causing publishers to take fewer creative risks, and when products inevitably fail in the market the studios get shuttered. I'd much rather go back to smaller teams, and more reasonable production values from 10+ years ago than keep getting the drivel we have, and that's without even factoring in how expensive current hardware is.
Ray tracing is a hardware feature that can help cut down on a chunk of that bloat, but only when developers can rely on it as a baseline.
Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.
And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.
Somebody should tell that to the AAA game developers that think hitting 60fps with framegen should be their main framerate target.