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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

I personally find it "sort of" funny how nvidia is caught between what they need for gamers and what they need for IA, and how they're trying to pull all the tricks to not have their gamer cards eat up their "AI enthousiast" cards sales.

Absurd pricing, ridiculous vram offering, I'm sure they're trying very hard to find a way to stop AI like SD or LLMs to run on their gamer cards at this point.

It's reached a point where not only has ATI/AMD essentially caught up to them in rasterization, but they're frankly a better offer at every price point against the 4XXX generation for pure gaming, with only DLSS and brand recognition keeping nvidia ahead.

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We just need some fierce foreign competition. I hope the Chinese will soon catch up and able to produce high performance gpus.

It won't happen.

The equipment from ASML and the know how of TSMC and Samsung is far far out of reach of china now.

Intel can't even seem to get down to 5nm.

I wouldn't underestimate China: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/huawei-quietly-annou...

Meteor Lake on Intel 4 launched last month.

It seems super weird to say that given who they are and how many times they tried, but Intel is my hope right now. Their arc card where very good for a first salvo, they do great stride in drivers and modern tech (XeSS beating FSR on its first try for exemple), and they're really so scared of behing left behind by arm + cuda card that they just might take it seriously this time instead of killing it when it starts working.

I want to be hopeful, but these corporations will never do anything for the consumer. At their core they think in terms of squeezing the customer as much as they can. As Steve Jobs said, when the sales people run the company don't expect a good product.

A wonderful thing would be a GPU with open source drivers and a standartized API. AMD could do that and it would kill nVidia marketshare in a few years, but they don't do that because they want the server gpu money at a very inflated margin. Maybe Intel will do it but that depends who runs the company. With open source often corporations publish a feture stripped solution and keep the full drivers closed source. Sad reality we live in.

I've got my fingers crossed on them cramming a lot of vRAM in there. They were putting 16gb in the Xeon Phi 7110P when 8GB was acceptable for system RAM in gaming machines. If they dropped a 64GB+ prosumer card, I'd be so happy. Even if it was something like 32GB of super-fast memory and another 64-128 of slightly slower-but-unified memory, I'd be ecstatic. Being able to fine-tune a 175B LLM locally would be incredible.

AMD is still lagging on software though. I wish they would get their act together but their drivers are just not anywhere near as stable or compatible as Nvidia's. And then there's Intel, and it makes you appreciate the state of AMDs...

For pure gaming on windows I would disagree, as of the 7xxx cards. And I'm one who was on team ATI for a few generations before moving to nvidia because of terrible drivers.

Only reason I still have a nvidia card is the VR issues. Unless it’s been fixed recently they can’t compete in high end VR.

Stopping SD or LLMs from their consumer cards would be dumb.

If 300M people in the US, let alone 7B in the world, need even a 4060 to run basic business workloads, NVidia is sitting pretty.

The reason is because they want to sell entre/medium business workloads cards at 1/2k€, and gamers cards at 4-700€. Right now, it's burning them on both side, and the only "fix" they found was to give just enough vram on their card to not be useless.

That's why you have an 8 GB 4060 Ti then a 16 GB one then the 4070 Ti with 12 GB ... It's a mess.

Elsewhere in the comments they make a good case for this card being positioned for Enterprise computing and not for gaming or ML.

Why can't they just focus on improving manufacturing output and satisfy both markets by having enough supply?

Fabs cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to build.

Because then they are committing the mortal sin of capitalism: leaving money on the table.

They artificially segment the market because "pro" users are willing to pay almost 10k for a good card. So why not offer just that?

Because people who do AI are willing to pay several k€ per card, gamers are hitting a wall before 1k€. It's the same cards, only the vram change, and the vram is "cheap" to add, comparatively of the total price.

So now you have gamers who are pissed off at their 4060 Ti or 4070 Ti barely having enough vram for 1440p at modern quality of gaming, and AI enthousiast wondering why buy they "pro" card when a 4090 is not even 2k€.

essentially, they're trying to virtually segment a market that is not segmented, to take advantage of the much higher buying power in one of the segment.

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