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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 bu

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.

CuriouslyC 4d ago
AAA gaming is cooked, and AMD/Intel is plenty able to support indie to AA needs.
- 12ha6 4d ago
  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.
- Synthetic7346 4d ago
  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
- c0balt 4d ago
  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.
traverseda 4d ago
Eh, AMD makes a lot of video game console SoCs. If you look at the steam hardware survey most people are running ancient computers.
raincole 4d ago
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.
- thrownawaysz 4d ago
  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
  - raincole 4d ago
    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.
- rootusrootus 4d ago
  An alternative example would be Apple & the Mini 12 & 13. They made money on those, too, but here we are.
- jmalicki 4d ago
  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.
redox99 4d ago
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.
bigyabai 4d ago
> 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.
- the8472 4d ago
  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-from-data-centers-and-ai-has-grown-1300-fold-in-the-last-12-years https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/nvidias-revenue-fro...
  - bigyabai 4d ago
    > 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.
Waterluvian 4d ago
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.
- delusional 4d ago
  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.
  - Waterluvian 4d ago
    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.
    - bubblemoth 4d ago
      I think we would see an increased push towards cloud gaming. That's probably what Nvidia would want.
    - Espressosaurus 4d ago
      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.
      - bluefirebrand 4d ago
        This feels so insane to me, because I don't think I know anyone who plays phone games
        4d ago
selectodude 4d ago
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.
- Espressosaurus 4d ago
  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.
  - selectodude 4d ago
    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.
nerevarthelame 4d ago
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.
pdpi 4d ago
> 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.
- bluefirebrand 4d ago
  > 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.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4d ago
    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”.
    - aprilthird2021 4d ago
      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.
      - bluefirebrand 3d ago
        > 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 Sounds great until the wheels fall off because MBAs decided to save a few bucks on "unnecessary" bolts to hold them on
monster_truck 4d ago
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
noir_lord 4d ago
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.
- fragmede 4d ago
  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.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4d ago
    > 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.
    - kridsdale1 4d ago
      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.
jayd16 4d ago
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?
- dexterdog 4d ago
  Fraud?
Ecco 4d ago
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?
dismalaf 4d ago
> 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.
MachineMan 4d ago
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.
lelanthran 4d ago
> 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.
bentt 4d ago
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.
moomoo11 4d ago
i'd be happy moving on from gaming as "the" entertainment option on computers, in favor of something more entertaining like can we get some new more interesting entertainment? maybe that's just me but all games look and feel the same now or worse dumbed down sometimes where even puzzles in the game have like basic or grindy aspect to them ...
- haunter 3d ago
  That really depends on the kind of games you play. There are plenty of 0 hand holding games which are respecting your intelligence and also challenging enough

CuriouslyC 4d ago

AAA gaming is cooked, and AMD/Intel is plenty able to support indie to AA needs.

12ha6 4d ago
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.
Synthetic7346 4d ago
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
c0balt 4d ago
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.

traverseda 4d ago

Eh, AMD makes a lot of video game console SoCs. If you look at the steam hardware survey most people are running ancient computers.

raincole 4d ago

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.

thrownawaysz 4d ago
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
- raincole 4d ago
  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.
rootusrootus 4d ago
An alternative example would be Apple & the Mini 12 & 13. They made money on those, too, but here we are.
jmalicki 4d ago
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.

redox99 4d ago

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.

bigyabai 4d ago

> 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.

the8472 4d ago
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-from-data-centers-and-ai-has-grown-1300-fold-in-the-last-12-years https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/nvidias-revenue-fro...
- bigyabai 4d ago
  > 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.

Waterluvian 4d ago

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.

delusional 4d ago
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.
- Waterluvian 4d ago
  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.
  - bubblemoth 4d ago
    I think we would see an increased push towards cloud gaming. That's probably what Nvidia would want.
  - Espressosaurus 4d ago
    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.
    - bluefirebrand 4d ago
      This feels so insane to me, because I don't think I know anyone who plays phone games
      - 4d ago

selectodude 4d ago

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.

Espressosaurus 4d ago
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.
- selectodude 4d ago
  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.

nerevarthelame 4d ago

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.

pdpi 4d ago

> 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.

bluefirebrand 4d ago
> 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.
- SV_BubbleTime 4d ago
  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”.
  - aprilthird2021 4d ago
    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.
    - bluefirebrand 3d ago
      > 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 Sounds great until the wheels fall off because MBAs decided to save a few bucks on "unnecessary" bolts to hold them on

monster_truck 4d ago

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

noir_lord 4d ago

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.

fragmede 4d ago
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.
- SV_BubbleTime 4d ago
  > 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.
  - kridsdale1 4d ago
    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.

jayd16 4d ago

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?

dexterdog 4d ago
Fraud?

Ecco 4d ago

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?

dismalaf 4d ago

> 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.

MachineMan 4d ago

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.

lelanthran 4d ago

> 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.

bentt 4d ago

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.

moomoo11 4d ago

i'd be happy moving on from gaming as "the" entertainment option on computers, in favor of something more entertaining like can we get some new more interesting entertainment? maybe that's just me but all games look and feel the same now or worse dumbed down sometimes where even puzzles in the game have like basic or grindy aspect to them ...

haunter 3d ago
That really depends on the kind of games you play. There are plenty of 0 hand holding games which are respecting your intelligence and also challenging enough