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The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming? (www.pcworld.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 25 points 10 months ago* (6 children)
  1. Nvidia abandons x86 desktop gamers
  2. The only hardware that gamers own are ARM handhelds
  3. Some gamers stream x86 games, but devs start selling ARM builds since the x86 market is shrinking
  4. AI bubble pops
  5. Nvidia tries to regain x86 desktop gamers
  6. Gamers are almost entirely on ARM
  7. Nvidia pulls an IBM and vanishes quietly into enterprise services and not much else
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  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Nvidia does not care about the ISA of the CPU at all. They don't make it after all. Also not clear how they would kill x86. If they leave the consumer GPU market they cede it to AMD and Intel.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Nvidia has drivers for arm. They're not in as good a shape as the X86 one is. But I don't think it's that big of a roadblock.

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  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Sure, but do you need a discrete video card if you’re gaming on an ARM SoC? And we’ve seen from the struggles of x86 iGPUs that graphics APIs pretty much have to choose whether they’re going to optimize for dedicated VRAM or shared memory, cuz it has inescapable implications for how you structure a game engine. ARM APIs will probably continue optimizing for shared memory, so PCI-E GPUs will always be second-class citizens.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Yes, even for applications other than gaming. There are legitimate mad lads out there running steam games with discrete video cards on Raspberry Pi's and LLMs. Not to mention there are non soc arm machines. And soc Intel machines.

    Sometimes getting the integrated graphics on any of these SOCs working is a much harder prospect than getting a discrete one.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    You need a discrete video card on ARM exactly as much as you do on x86.

    The GPU is independent of the CPU architecture, so if you don't like x86 iGPU performance expect to not like ARM iGPU performance either.

    Of course you can dump a full desktop dGPU into the same package as your CPU, like Apple did with the M4 Max, but again this can be done on x86 as well. None of that is dependent on the ISA.

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