As long as AMD and Intel continue their open source drivers, I'm fine with it.

AFAIK, the H100 and up (Nvidia’s bestselling data center GPUs) can technically game, but they’re missing so many ROPs that they’re really bad at it. There will be no repurposing all those AI datacenters for cloud gaming farms.

Uh, then AMD wins the PC GPU wars, due to unexpected resignation of Nvidia, and Intel becomes the new AMD, in that market segment.

And also some Chinese companies emerge as new PC GPU manufacturers, though what exact market strategy they would try to specialize in or pursue, is hard to predict.

Anybody who either just wants a local compute gaming pc, or doesn't have the best internet access / data caps... goes with AMD/Intel, 'casuals' go with renting their remote game rendering.

The economic/cultural dynamics of pc gaming begin to resemble buying a new/used car vs leasing one, both get more financialized in their own ways.

... Why does there need to be a whole article about this?

With China working hard to catch up with chip production, it is only a matter of time before we start seeing attractively priced Chinese made GPUs on the market. No idea how long it will take though.

I'd rather pay for chinese gpus than cloud gaming. The article, by focusing solely almost considers than nothing else exists, especially in China where moore threads gpu start to have reasonnable perf for gaming. I don't think Europe can't produce something as long as it stays neoliberal, but some weird stuff could happen with RISCV

All I have to say is thank God and good riddance may your stock price collapse

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

PC gaming itself will hardly change, because AMD cards work just fucking fine. They've only ever been a little bit behind on the high end. They've routinely been the better value for money, and offered a much lower low end. If they don't have to keep chasing the incomparable advantages Nvidia pulls out of their ass, maybe they can finally get serious about heterogenous compute.

Or hey, maybe Nvidia ditching us would mean AMD finds the testicular fortitude to clone CUDA already, so we can end this farce of proprietary computation for your own god-damn code. Making any PC component single-vendor should've seen Nvidia chopped in half, long before this stupid bubble.

Meanwhile:

Cloud gaming isn't real.

Anywhere after 1977, the idea that consumers would buy half a computer and phone in to a mainframe was a joke. The up-front savings were negligible and difference in capabilities did not matter. All you missed out on were your dungeon-crawlers being multiplayer, and mainframe operators kept trying to delete those programs anyway. Once home internet became commonplace even that difference vanished.

As desktop prices rose and video encoding sped up, people kept selling the idea you'll buy a dumb screen and pay to play games somewhere else. You could even use your phone! Well... nowadays your phone can run Unreal 5. And a PS5 costs as much as my dirt-cheap eMachines from the AOL era, before inflation. That console will do raytracing, except games don't use it much, because it doesn't actually look better than how hard we've cheated with rasterization. So what the fuck is a datacenter going to offer, with 50ms of lag and compression artifacts? Who expects it's going to be cheaper, as we all juggle five subscriptions for streaming video?

They are in cahoots with the RAM cartels to push gaming onto their cloud services so that competitors like AMD don't just pick them up. Trying to make everything into a service is just a side benefit, although I'm sure they realize 16 bit SNES games are still fun and that people will just be driven to less powerful entertainment platforms.

Games and gaming have fully become like Hollywood and Silicon Valley and I expect zero good things from them at this point. As with movies and music, now most of the good stuff will be from individuals and smaller enterprises. The fact is today's GPUs have enough power to do extraordinary things. The hardware these days moves so fast, no one is squeezing any performance out of anything like they used to have to do. And not every game needs photo realistic ray traced graphics, so these GPUs will be fine for many gamers so long as they remain supported through drivers.

My framerates have never been better since I went full AMD. My friend with a 5080 complains about low framerates on almost every new game, while I'm at max framerate.

Don't let the door hit ya on the way out Nvidia.

Huge gap in the market for some talented ASIC engineers.

Good. Please do. Their design philosophy has pushed the industry in the wrong direction for decades.

I've abandoned nvidia. I boycott all companies that contribute to the rejection of peace and human rights.

If I buy a GPU or any computer parts in the future, it will either be from a company that has pledged to not facilitate authoritarian regimes, mass surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Or it will be a used part on the second hand market.

Oh boy, here I go playing sprite games again.

Good, frankly? CUDA's monopoly has been a pox on computing. Vendor lock-in on PC is an artificial abuse.

Linux + AMD was a nobrainer when upgrading this time around

I’ve been running into a slew of performance issues on Linux with my 4070 across a range of games that all ran fine under Windows. I’ve been tempted to trade for the AMD equivalent just so I don’t have to deal with more nVidia driver nonsense. My roommate has an AMD card that I’ll be doing a trial run on later this week. Depending on how that goes, I might finally make the switch to Red Team.