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Comment by lemoncookiechip | Hacker News Reader

No worries, gamers.

You can subscribe to our GeForce NOW service to rent a top of the line card through our cloud service for the low low price of 11€$£ or 22€$£ a month with *almost no restrictions.

*Except for all the restrictions.

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I just bought a 5070 Ti a week ago and can attest I have used it for maybe 3-4 hours since then. It begs the question maybe I should have rented the compute instead instead of paying 900 eur on spot - that's like 3 years worth of rent.

Because it'll set a precedent and eventually kill off being able to own the hardware to run things locally anymore in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

Currently after 3 years the price of the GPU if you decide to sell it might be a wash, much like it was after the crypto boom. Granted you have to pay for electricity to run it, but you also have full control over what it runs.

If the compute is the unit of value under consideration, maybe. But there's more - you have access, freedom from supervision, the capability to modify, upgrade, tweak, adjust anything you want, resell compute under p2p cloud services when idle, etc. And then if the market for these gets hot, you can sell and recoup your initial costs and then some. The freedom and opportunity benefit - as opposed to the dependence and opportunity cost of renting - is where I personally think you come out on top.

Where the hell is 900 eur 3 years of rent

Haha. I read that the same way the first time I read it. The commenter means 3 years of renting GPU from nvidia via cloud services.

I think that's comparing to 3 years of GeForce Now at ~22EUR/month for the Ultimate plan, for a total of ~800 EUR. For someone using in 3h/week then you might as well go for the free plan and pay nothing. But renting has while owning can only have financial cost, renting has a hidden cost on top of that. It leads to "atrophy" of the ownership right and once you lose that option you'll never get it back. That will have incalculable costs.

It cost 900eur because nvidia is shafting you

The correct calculation is not 900€/36 months but (900€-$resell_value)/36 months. If you sell your GPU for 450€ after three years you saved a good bit of money. If the AI bubble doesn't pop, your resale value might even be a good bit higher than that. I've had a used 1080TI that I used for five years and then sold for nearly the same price, making it effectively free (minus electricity use and opportunity cost)

Even if you don't resell it, at the end of the three years you still have a GPU that you can keep using, or gift, or whatever. After three years of renting, you have nothing.

And what about the extra energy consumption of the RTX 5070 TI vs. a iGPU? If you go GPU cloud then you can save on energy as well in your PC. Less energy means also less noise by the way.

To get an idea, if you go gaming via cloud then fast internet + office PC or Laptop is enough. So you save way more than the GPU only in a proper comparison.

This is why I play consoles only. I can play games for years without ever changing HW and save tons of money compared to my PC gaming times.

The GeForce Now service is actually a decent deal for casual gamers.

The hardcore and frequent gamers won’t like it but it was never really for them.

So is a Steam Deck, really

The problem is that they're always a great deal, the best even, while there are alternatives. The noose tightens only after everyone is onboard.

And the competition on the GPU market is soft to say the least.

Yes! Then you want to play one of the FromSoftware game and you are doomed.

Damn nvidia

I briefly considered doing the GPU rental thing, but the added latency and video encoding artifacts annoy me endlessly.

If you buy, you still own the 5070 at the end of three years and can sell it. If you rent, you have nothing.

It's 33 eurodollar now. I'm sorry I meant 44

China will save us, except no, we'll just ban their hardware sales, sucks to suck.

Does China have any cutting edge fabs yet? I thought it was still just TSMC, Samsung, and maybe Intel.

Maybe consumer electronics will move backwards by a process node or two?

They've just recently been able to reverse engineer ASML's EUV machines. They're years and years behind, although the way things are moving forward with hardware prices skyrocketing (RAM, SSD, GPUs...) regular consumer won't have much choice in anything anyway for a while.

So at a rough guess would that be expected to put them on the equivalent of TSMC 7 nm a few years from now?

I wonder if a bunch of consumer electronics will move back to something like 12 nm for a while? Seems like there's a lot of capacity in that range. Zen 2 wasn't so bad, right?

Good thing I got my 5070ti when I did.

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