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Comment by nh23423fefe | Hacker News Reader

> "geforce is sold out all over the world"

not a flex

Agree. It's a terrible time to want a new Nvidia card for gaming or AI projects. I had a 4070 Ti Super in my cart for a while at a cool $700 on Amazon - now it's out of stock and secondhand I can find it for double that now.

If one doesn't require the latest DLSS or need first-class AI support, get an AMD card.

AMD’s is coming up in support for things like torch and xformers. But it isn’t there yet.

If you want for AI, your best bet is a used 3090 for $700-800. The ram is more important and that card is still faster than a 4070.

AMD has documentation for its assembly language as I remember. Or one needs more documentation to run AI?

Isn’t a documentation issue.

The entire ecosystem is built around CUDA currently. There was someone implementing Cuda on AMD hardware but as I understand it, AMD shut that down.

There are two alternatives to CUDA for AMD right now, but I forget their names.

AMD has STRIX coming, which is a single board embedded ram machine, and is being targeted at AI loads with lots of low latency ram. So we’ll see what happens there.

Thankfully the ONNX runtime supports AMD's ROCm. The performance is nowhere close to Nvidia's TensorRT, but doing inference on an AMD GPU is doable. I haven't ran the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get more throughput per dollar on an AMD GPU for at least some scenarios. AFAIK there aren't any great options for training though, so if you want to do anything besides running ONNX models your options are limited.

easy to do when you don't ship any cards :P

oddly just bought one (5090) right after you posted this so not quite true

For how much? In Europe they are in stock. For 3500€. For the MSRP, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

It was a full computer, $5200 for an i9-14900KF, 64 GB, 4TB NVMe machine with a 5090.

I’ve been trying since release with stock notifications and have barely had the chance to even try to add one to a cart.

> "we've left money on the table because we can't manage our supply chain. Oh, and we've pissed off an entire market segment."

It's probably false to say they're leaving money on the table. They'd be leaving a lot more money on the table if they allocated chips towards consumer gaming GPUs instead of maxing out the server AI/GPU compute segment. The entire gaming market constitutes like 15%-or-less of their revenue nowadays.

And Nvidia has enough mindshare that they could piss on consumers for the next 3 release cycles and still have more than half the market. I don't like it but it's reality.

The top end should at least be stocked because a lot of us are using cards locally for AI that eventually runs in the cloud.

So yeah they did leave $2600 from me on the table that is now becoming more likely to be spent on a bootleg 48GB 4090 than a 5090 and if I get that they won’t see money from me for many years till they beat 48GB in consumer form factor.

"You PC people got us where we are now - so screw you, we don't need you anymore because the AI bubble will go forever!"

Yep, all 10 they shipped sold instantly at 2x MSRP. Prices on 3090's (not a typo) are going up ffs, because there is nothing out there on the NVIDIA front.

This is sick. Lucky I kept mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42618996

My 3090 Ti appreciated in price for about 20% in 2 years (1300->1600)

nVidia GPUs have basically been an inflation hedge for the past few years lol

This made me curious, so I just took a look on eBay.

My 4070 Ti that I bought (new, oops) this past December has appreciated 20 - 25%! At least according to what people have them listed for... no idea if anyone is actually buying them at those prices.

Of course even if I managed to sell it, everything else has gone up in that time, so it's not like I'd get to make money on the deal. Pretty wild, nonetheless!

Or quite a flex. If you want to create artificial scarcity to keep your prices high.

Reminds me of the current egg "crisis".

Egg production fell because of avian flu, which the US has regulatory restrictions limiting the usage of the vaccine in agriculture compared to other developed nations. Its not an intentional crisis.

Egg prices didn’t raise because of a flu.

Egg prices raised because the government asked for the killing of a hundred million of chickens - for fear of spreading bird flu. It may have been the right call, we’ll never know.

Small difference, but important.

Here, CNN is obscuring the fact that the chickens killed were not tested or confirmed to have flu, but some around them might have so they had to go too.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/28/business/chickens-avian-flu/i...

That’s not why they cull flocks once one gets it. They cull the flocks because all of those birds will be dead in days anyways.

> Egg production fell because of avian flu

Well... Yes but no.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-b...

NVidia doesn't make the chips, they just design them, so it is a flex. People are literally buying their cards faster than they can be produced. TSMC is building new fabs to make more nvidia chips faster.

NVidia decide how they allocate their wafer starts at TSMC. Consumer chips have lower margin than datacenter parts, so they almost certainly allocated comparatively little volume to consumer chips.

On the one hand, this is a great situation to be in for Nvidia in terms of overall revenue.

On the other hand, this has allowed AMD to grab market share with the RX 9000 series launch, at least in the short term. So the narrow point that Geforce is sold out is decidedly not a flex.

But the datacenter GPUs are sold out too even at ~90% profit margin. I heard somewhere lead time is in years.

Literally the worst thing about Nvidia is the fact they don’t take the core product end to end serious enough.

The idea it’s hard to buy a standard Nvidia GPU in the consumer lineup is absurd.

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