I wonder when they will give up on the gaming market because that could take down several publishers and developers. I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought at this point (they removed the standalone gaming revenue report from the financial reports this summer). Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.
AMD would step in, they where behind nvidia but they've been closing that gap for a while and the 9070XT is the current value king (in this fucked up market) for mid-high gaming and you can actually buy them.
Demand for Nvidia cards has outstripped supply even on the mid-high cards specifically because they do better with local models than AMD cards with the same VRAM do broadly.
AI has completely broken the PC gaming market (and PC/Laptop market more broadly but gaming is really hit hard because it's the exact components that matter for both that overlap).
Nvidia had the mind share among gamers but so did Intel once, inertia only lasts so long they've been thoroughly intent on burning that to the ground for a while, back to the post 1080's
If RDNA5 is good (and 4 was it closed the gap on RT) they'll been in a solid place to take the spot if Nvidia do cede the ground.
I have a 7900XTX the last flagship card AMD did (about equal to a 9070XT for raster but 24GB VRAM not 16GB) and it has been and is a stellar card for gaming (let down only if you care about RT and the games I play don't have it).
Flawless under Linux, weaker on the AI behind nvidia but it runs Qwen surprisingly well and I didn't and don't care too much about that except to poke it occasionally.
Why would AMD willingly go into a low margin business with the consumer when they can focus on the enterprise?
Cryptocurrency mining had it broken before that. PC gaming's golden years are behind us, as AI, even if not LLMs, seems like it's not going away, so the gaming market is now the niche hobby while AI takes center stage.
RIP. My first gaming ~GPU~ (we called them 3d accelerators back then) was a Diamond Monster II with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 chip.
I'm not sure (pc) gaming could ever really actually pay for the continued advancement and mass production of state of the art silicon.
The prices of gpus are nuts right now due to demand, but theoretically speaking demand causes more supply to appear and thus decrease prices* and then gamers can reap the benefits of massive amounts of investment.
* or at least thats what people on this site keep telling me.
ish. The problem is data center cards won't easily fit a gamer computer chassis, so an H200 for $1,000 in however many years isn't going to be usable unless you also have a chassis which will support it.
> Diamond Monster II with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 chip
Oh shit, I had file deleted that. I remember now. I think I used that with the first N64 emulator, I think Project something to play Turok the first person dinosaur hunter game. Life before the internet was better I think.
The Glide API was the only hardware acceleration in there for a good while before it got OpenGL. I remember using a third party wrapper or something to make it work on whatever it was I had in 1999.
Maybe this is silly of me, but maybe gaming would enjoy an era of hardware upgrades being rather unviable so the focus turns to optimization and aesthetic.
This is basically already the case in the flourishing indie space, but for different reasons.
The only developers chasing cutting-edge hardware features are the AAA studios and I honestly think a lot of them would just die before successfully relearning how to make games that play well instead of just look pretty.
The thing is really that even entry level gaming is getting expensive. I was considering building a pc and everything is expensive, I was going to replace the disk of my ps4 thag I bought used for 100$ and the 1tb ssd costs 150$
Is $150 a lot in the grand scheme of hobbies?
That'll buy you:
- a set of used golf clubs
- a couple years of fishing licenses, bait, tackle, used fishing rods and line
- a couple really entry level tennis rackets, balls, and court reservation fees
- maybe a used bicycle
- a decent pair of running shoes from last year
Yeah but that was for my console. For building a entry level gaming pc you can be spending 1000-2000$
The ssd example was to illustrate how much more expensive pc components have gotten just a few years before you could buy it for 50$
It will be interesting times but I don't think anyone will enjoy a plateau because it's expensive. Even replacing existing hardware is expensive now. Hardly enjoyabe.
A retraction from the gaming market wouldn't necessarily mean they'd still even produce the current crop of products. I could (and I would argue would) involve a complete shuttering of the GeForce brand, halting current production. On the assumption that Intel and AMD would follow, that wouldn't be an end of upgrades, but an end to the market.
Gaming is a larger market than Hollywood. Maybe it becomes a distraction for Nvidia, but someone will step in. That might actually be a good thing and why Nvidia wont do that: it creates an under served market in which newcomers can cut their teeth.
Much of the gaming market is phone games however, not traditional consoles or PCs.
Edit: about half in fact! The rest is shared between the other traditional gaming types.
Most of the publishers make money on their pc and console games, mobile users barely pay for games although they do pay for microtransactions stuff
This feels so insane to me, because I don't think I know anyone who plays phone games
I think we would see an increased push towards cloud gaming. That's probably what Nvidia would want.
It’s not silly. games use far more hardware than they really need. It also pushes out release dates of aggressive console schedules like ps6 because even if it’s a massive upgrade and you have IP locked into your console, no one is going to pay $4000 to play a game like wolverine.
We wouldn't be here today if the video game industry hadn't continued pushing the envelope for decades.
> Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them.
It's kind of weird. nVidia kind of has the PC market cornered, but AMD has had the last couple of generations of Xbox and Playstation. Also, they power the Steam Deck/Machine, and Valve has been contributing a lot of AMD graphics features into the Linux drivers. There is a world where AMD (and maybe even Linux on AMD specifically) becomes the de facto standard for gaming.
Well AMD does have the Steam Machine now, they really like doing console integrations. Shame it won't really sell given the pricing situation.
> It's kind of weird. nVidia kind of has the PC market cornered, but AMD has had the last couple of generations of Xbox and Playstation
I have been getting the vibes that Sony is positioning themselves to back out of videogames. I don't think we're going to see a PS6.
There will be a PS6 and a NextBox… it’s just that Sony is cracking down on what some idiot MBAs have decided are “unrealized monitary streams”.
Everyone likes to deride idiot MBAs while also enjoying a stock market that returns on avg 8-10% per year vastly outpacing inflation in a developed, stable, wealthy country of all places. It's like that scene from margin call about normal people in big houses they can't actually pay for and big cars who pretend but would actually croak if things got really fair really quickly.
MBAs aren’t making the stock market go up.
Inflation is.
Inflation isn’t making anything go up faster than inflation though!
Well… yes.
But I think the undersold part would be inflation is likely far more correlated to rate and values the stock market going up, than the disclosed and reported inflation numbers given to you by the people directly responsible for monetary adjustments.
They're advertising DLSS5 just now though.
> I really don't think it's an if question but a when because it almost feels like an afterthought
I feel your reasoning is very weird. Are they losing money by selling consumer GPU? Just because the profit isn't that much compared to AI it doesn't mean that it's negative, and for-profit companies are not known for leaving money on the table. Apple doesn't reveal how much Apple TV+ makes for them either but I don't see it be gone anytime soon.
NVidia is limited by the number of chips they can produce.
If you can fab 1000 chips, and can sell some for $500 and some for $80000 what are you going to do?
The game GPU is at once profitable, but causes them to give up far more profits than they're gaining from it.
They're maintaining the game market to have multiple markets and not go all in, but it's strategic hedging at this point. When NVidia makes a gaming GPU instead of a data center GPU they are leaving money on the table in the short term since they're constrained at the fab level.
This almost seems like we need a strategic reserve for semiconductors- kinda like we have it for food, to prevent suppliers from throwing it away when they are suddenly able to sell something much more lucrative.
The CHIPS Act in the US did set aside a reserve for older processes used for automobile, defense, and industrial semiconductors - but that's not gaming GPUs that used the previous process node.
Sure, semiconductors for important industrial uses are critical & I agree gaming GPUs are much less critical. Still RAM & storage multiplying in price over such a short ammount of time also can't be good for the economy & society, so some sort of strategtic reserve could help there as well.
An alternative example would be Apple & the Mini 12 & 13. They made money on those, too, but here we are.
Which is distinctly different both in purpose and technology than the previous versions. DLSS 5 is no longer about frame improvements. It’s about increasing graphical fidelity with active AI rendering.
DLSS 5 is trying to relight and retexture the scene using AI. DLSS 4 is just trying to take a lower quality image and upscale it using AI
Thank for explaining what DLSS5 is! I don't think it has anything to do with "Nvidia is going to give up gaming market" narrative though.
Nvidia is limited by the number of engineers they have. It might turn out that the AI market is so lucrative that it’s best to reallocate their gaming-focused engineers to AI.
Apple TV is at least a growth market for them, whereas gaming is sort of capped and clearly a tiny piece of nvidia’s revenue atm.
AAA gaming is cooked, and AMD/Intel is plenty able to support indie to AA needs.
That seems a bit overzealous, most consoles[0] run on AMD chips today.
Both PS 5 and Xbox are based on AMD APUs and both serve the AAA market quite well. GTA 6, Assassin's Creed and CoD are probably good enough indicators that the performance is enough, even if there is always room for more (as PC ports show). The PC market will also probably be fine even if stagnation in perfomance gains has been creeping in for a few years now.
[0]: except Nintendo which relies on NVIDIA although their APU there focuses more on efficiency than top performance.
Kushner and MBS bought Electronic Arts for $55 billion, so at least there will be a bailout or instructions to Nvidia to continue gaming cards.
How so? I have a 5070ti but from what I've read the 9070xt keeps up well enough. As long as you don't need the cuda or dlss AMD is a good option
A Chinese company like CXMT will surely fill that unaddressed market the way CXMT is doing for memory. It would be rather unwise for nvidia to leave the door to the market open. AMD is positioned well to grow right now due to their non-Apple sillicon unified ram hardware coming soon.
AMD and Intel would be HAPPY to replace them, and plenty capable.
Game consoles like PS5 have been AMD for a few generations. Steamdeck/Steam Machine are AMD.
But really, Nvidia has no reason to leave gaming behind. They can just start dialing back their ambition on the gaming side and providing GPUs that aren't too useful for inference or training. All gaming needs is stability so that devs can aim for something. Games looked great 20 years ago and they'll look great 20 years from now, as long as developers know what they are building for.
I kind of feel like this topples the house of cards a bit. What else is all the visual genAI tech for besides consumer entertainment?
Fraud?
It's still a 15B market for Nvidia, it's not nothing. But I'm curious how they're going to turn Rubin into a gaming GPU. I think at this point consumer GPU upgrades are going to be AI-related upgrades that happen to also help raster capabilities. Blackwell was already kind of a dud on performance uplift from Ada beyond the new LLM features.
That 15B also includes people buying 5090s for local LLMs.
And it’s maybe 5-10% of their revenue at lower profit margins.
Consumer cards just don’t matter very much to nVidia anymore.
In 2020 it was half of their revenue.
Hermes still makes saddles that are somewhat reasonably priced compared to their handbags.
It's still profitable, it's their original raison d'etre, and there's no real reason for them to stop even if it its rounding error on their regular business.
Probably will never, ever see an Nvidia card with >32GB of VRAM though unless they start making dies that lack LLM performance like the gimped ethereum mining cards.
Question: wouldn’t the fab be the actual bottleneck? In other words, why wouldn’t TSMC make more NVIDIA chips instead of AMD ones? I assume they’ll just do whichever is paying more, so if NVIDIA chips are better, gamers would be willing to pay more for them and in turn TSMC will be willing to make more of them?
> I wonder when they will give up on the gaming market because that could take down several publishers and developers.
It really shouldn't: the most money in games are those games that don't require high end GPUs.
You must not be paying attention, they already have.
Intel is going nowhere but we all knew that anyways.
And again, you must not be paying attention, AMD is doing exactly what they said they would. No flagship for RDNA4 (just like RDNA2), RDNA5 flagship (10900 XT) coming right on schedule
I think they'll keep the gaming market alive for a while because renting gaming hardware from the cloud (GeForce NOW) is very congruous with AI keeping consumer hardware prices sky-high.
It continues modern trend of chow companies don't want consumers to truly own anything. Finance a car, pay a monthly subscription fee for heated seats, rent a phone, stream a movie, get rid of physical media, rent a GPU.
But if GeForce NOW doesn't take off, and they get convinced that the AI bubble will not pop, I could see them pulling a Micron and ending their consumer product lines.
Eh, AMD makes a lot of video game console SoCs. If you look at the steam hardware survey most people are running ancient computers.
> I really don't think it's an if question but a when
Nvidia still will ship gaming products. The upcoming RTX Spark laptop APUs are still gaming-capable - we also have Blackwell gaming GPUs and the Nvidia-powered Nintendo Switch 2.
People echoed this sentiment during the crypto mining crunch, and we still got gaming hardware designs after that blew over. One of CUDA's core value props is the consumer market, and Nvidia probably won't surrender it unless hardware becomes unreasonably scarce.
I don't think crypto is comparable. They barely made some dedicated crypto GPUs that market was always fickle due to ASCIs. Look at the nvidia revenue breakdown chart, the AI boom looks quite different.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/nvidias-revenue-fro...
> that market was always fickle due to ASCIs.
The GPU crunch came because cards like the 3060 were extremely cheap and could outrun most sub-$1000 ASICs at the time. The dedicated crypto GPUs were too-little too-late; hundreds of thousands of ordinary CUDA-capable GPUs had already been repurposed for mining by the time they launched.
> Also I don't think AMD and Intel is capable "to step in" to replace them
AMD has powered 2 generations each of Sony and Xbox consoles, Steam deck and shops a ton of GPUs especially if you count APUs. And then Intel literally ship more GPUs than Nvidia and AMD combined.
The gaming market doesn't need Nvidia. Especially as AAA is cratering.
They may allocate different number of resources every year based on market conditions but they'll never give up on gaming, that would be extremely silly.