US Gaming Hardware Sales Reach 35-Year Low as Prices Soar
techpowerup.com
techpowerup.com
Back in the 90s hardware aged like lettuce.
What happens if in a couple years from now, NVIDIA decides that the opportunity cost of manufacturing gaming GPUs instead of data center GPUs becomes so high that they decide to step out of the gaming hardware business altogether, what happens to PC gaming?
NVIDIA and AMD both use TSMC to manufacture the GPUs, so if NVIDIA made that decision, presumably, AMD would do so as well. That basically leaves Intel, but their GPUs are lackluster and the drivers are awful.
Gaming PCs have become ludicrously expensive. Even mid-grade builds are $2,000. You can't really build a decent gaming PC for under $1,500 if you want to play the latest AAA games.
There was a sweet spot in ~1999 where you could buy an A-Bit BH6 motherboard, 300 Mhz Celeron A (overclocked to 450 Mhz), 3dfx Banshee, and all the other components to make a PC for only ~$500 and have a respectable gaming machine.
I don't expect them to go away entirely, if AMD or NVIDIA step back from it, there is still a market there, someone will fill it. Really doubt AMD would do that anyway as they don't have all the AI related sales to replacing gaming.
How? The cost to design a GPU from scratch is astronomical. Even if a bunch of top brass engineers from NVIDIA left the company to start their own, I'd be surprised if trying to apply as much of their knowledge as possible didn't result in patent violations.
Even ignoring the design part, you have to deal with actual manufacturing. TSMC is ostensibly the only guys in town that could make it, but their fabs are already occupied by NVIDIA's orders. Building your own fab is billions of dollars and several years.
And of course apple is now doing its own GPU thing. How ironic if they become the premier choice for gaming. Their CPUs already kick x86's ass, though throttling up all the cores and the GPU for extended periods of gaming might challenge their thermal management design.
But my guess is china would build discrete gaming GPUs if no one else is doing it. They don't rely on TSMC as much and probably not for much longer, and they are catching up on the machine learning GPUs. Since they can do that, they can surely add the additional hardware needed to make them suitable for gaming, which is simpler by comparison, and implementing a decent performing driver on top of that (like for D3D or Vulcan) would be straightforward.
Its quite unlikely the US will outlaw chinese gaming GPUs like we do their EVs - one reason being US policymakers simply don't care about gaming since unlike autos there isn't a massive domestic industry to protect.
Precisely, what we're seeing is hoarding of hardware to starve the consumer space of advanced computing resources, create a cartelized and monopolized market and not only extract hyper-profits but also remove the freedom of independent technology use or advancement.
Realistically, I think that if AMD and NVIDIA both abandon the gaming market entirely (unlikely, IMO) then Intel or some Chinese no-name brand will pick up the slack. Video cards for gaming don't need to be bleeding edge any more. 99.999% of experiences gamedevs want to create don't require that horsepower, and consumers can't afford it anyway (at least not when effectively bidding for fab capacity against billionaires who are convinced they can be immortal Gods if they win the auction). Most likely, no-name chips from non-frontier fabs (or by Chinese fabs trying to claw their way upmarket) will be badge-engineered as AMD/Nvidia/Intel.
Alternatively, we have WW3 and either advanced, PC-gaming civilization ends completely, or we at least have to sacrifice consumer goods like video cards for the duration.
Having the latest gaming PC is more of a hobby than a requirement.
Requirement, probably not. You can run Cyberpunk on minimal settings on a 2060. But on Maximum settings in 4K with HDR, even an RTX 5090 requires DLSS frame gen. But it looks stunning.
I think PC gamers have a higher standard when it comes to graphical quality and performance. Many console gamers have been convinced that 30 fps is fine. Meanwhile, PC gamers are likely on 144 hz or higher monitors and expect 144+ fps.