This is gonna suck
They’re AI only now.
As someone not looking to spend a ton of money on new hardware any time soon: good. The longer it takes to release faster hardware, the longer current hardware stays viable. Games aren’t going to get more fun by slightly improving graphics anyway. The tech we have now is good enough.
People don’t just use computers for gaming. If this continues people will struggle to do any meaningful work on their personal computes which is definitely not good. And I’m not talking about browsing facebook but about coding, doing research, editing videos and other useful shit.
Let Nvidia go bankrupt, we won’t miss it
If consumers can’t get new gpus, devs aren’t going to bother spec’ing for them. This’ll probably just result in a stalling of tech you’ll see at home for a few years. Honestly that seems to be happening already. The leaps we’d seen in previous generations seem to be slowing anyway. Maybe this is just a plateau of tech for a while. Good for consumers when they accept that they don’t have to always be on the bleeding edge.
I want devs to write games for £400 Steam Decks. I don’t want them to write games for £3000 GPUs.
There’s realistically no games that won’t run on PS5 level hardware. Every effect that can be done with raytracing can be done a little worse without it.
So that kind of means that the high-end AAA PC market will crash in the next years, right? No new GPUs, production stop for existing GPUs and rising prices for GPU & RAM in combination with inflation and a bad economy ensure that many people can’t afford a gaming computer. And that a lot of those younger gamers can’t afford to start this hobby.
And that means a shrinking audience for games, which need all this GPU power. If you’re an AAA publisher, it kind of looks crazy to invest multiple millions into a game that you can’t be sure that your audience will be able to afford to play
No not really. AMD is still producing cards. Most people play on older or used cards anyways. Maybe like don’t make Crysis level Graphics but other than that one year of less GPU releases won’t kill gaming. Once the AI bubble bursts NVDIA might have lost a lot of edge over AMD in the gaming market and they’ll scramble to get back
“dont you have phones?”
Yes, but think about the money in mobile and console gaming… PC gaming was niche even before that and we represent very small percentage of the overall gaming industry. Nobody gives a fuck about us since some time already. Now they just show it to us in daylight.
That’s a fact. PC gaming vs consoles is to gaming as Linux vs Winblows is to Computers. It has grown over the years, as has Linux desktop, but not enough to make or break an industry.
It’s a weird world we’re living in.
It’s not as niche as it used to be. In the last 10 years it’s grown quite a bit compared to what it was 20 years ago when bad pc ports were the norm. Due to AI, I guess console gaming will go back to being the main way people game again.
I agree with you that niche is not the correct word here, but comparing the market share to console and mobile we are like 20-25% of the gamers. That is relatively small in my opinion.
Don’t worry, you can Stream It From the CLOUD™️ for the low low price of 6x what a GPU would cost you over 5 years.
yea you can wait in a queue to play your unmodded single player experience game
Definitely a shrinking audience for AAA games, but I don’t think it will be too bad gamers overall. Consoles will keep marching forward, as will Valve with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
I think the highest of the high end graphics stuff has long since hit diminishing returns. You can do a hell of a lot with yesterday’s hardware and less-than-bleeding-edge process nodes for newer hardware. Consoles have never used bleeding edge GPUs and they’ve always done fine with sales (across the whole market, if not always individually). I think we’re highly unlikely to see a repeat of the 1983 gaming crash.
I think we’re highly unlikely to see a repeat of the 1983 gaming crash
What happened in 1983?
They do fine in sales because the consoles sold at loss and they make money on game sales.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would love to stop producing consoles and start selling you monthly service via a thin client. They just need a ready to go platform for it to gain enough mass first.
All games will be streamed, with a subscription
Retroarch disagrees. I don’t need your newfangled enshittified slop. I have megaman X and wine.
Any sub 500 dollar gpu can play any game that’s not ray traced unreal engine 5 slop. Lots of games to choose from the last 40+ years. The only limiting factor is ram prices sadly.
Shhh! Don’t give them any ideas!
They’ve already been pushing this for like a decade now. GeForce now has been a thing since like 2015.
Way too late. This has been a talking point for a while. The AI bubble will burst but that doesn‘t mean they‘ll just return to their roots. Those new data centers need a use case and they need a good reason to keep building more.
I guess the silver lining is that this plan B won‘t work out either so we‘ll have to see. But until then we better take good care of our current hardware. It will probably have to last a good while longer.
Cloud computing is the real endgame. The big tech bros want to price consumers out of the PC hardware market (GPUs, RAM, NVMe, etc.) so they can offer a cloud solution via subscription model.
These Chinese are catching up very quickly on GPUs, RAM, etc.
This would be a massive own goal for the existing incumbents.
If the end game is cloud, they will tariff the shit out of these. For exemple i bought slimeVR hard ware, from Europe 280€, from china (190€ + tarif 66€) from China coming from US 240€
Someone is going to make bank by catering to consumers. Will the market accept nvidia back with open arms if/when the ai investments fall through?
As a Linux gamer, nvidia was already on thin ice.
Also I had past them up on recentish purchases since they only really controlled the highest end of the market which I don’t have the budget for. So honestly I have no intention of welcoming them back unless there is literally no other option. You made your bed.
This is still a pain point for me. I have been looking for a laptop with an AMD GPU for years to use with Linux, but System76, Starlabs, framework, etc insist on only having Nvidia as a discreet option. Or is it that AMD does not have laptop GPUs? Could be.
That would be nice. But video cards are a VERY niche piece of engineering. The knowledge of HOW to make them is locked in a handful of people, and the ability to make them locked behind a very niche set of equipment that will ALSO be exploding in cost.
One does not simply start a graphics card company.
I don’t think a newcomer could do it, but a company like Intel is posed to be in a good position. They don’t have much market share but they have a good product.
The problem with that is Intel is subject to the same bullshit economic assessments as AMD and Nvidia… They’ll just as soon retool for ai as well.
Intel is arguably worse. They‘re in a bad spot right now so they can‘t do crazy things like Nvidia but they totally would and will go down the same path. I don‘t think US designed hardware will ever truly come back to end consumer products.
Nothing will. They’re moving us onto techno feudalism. We won’t earn anything and we’ll be wage slaves if they’re merciful to us, otherwise most people will be in camps and dead, unless we stand up real damn soon .
They’re actively moving away from the bottom 90% of consumers, it’s just not worth it anymore and maybe once it was worth advertising to us, but no longer. The top 10% owns 93% of stocks and control at least 55% of the market revenue as of early 2025, probably closer to 60-65% now, after tariffs, layoffs, and the nonexistent recession We’re all imagining and definitely isn’t real. /s
Well what do most victims of exploitation and abuse do?
Visiting Stockholm?
I hear it’s nice
Most people are willing to sell their morals. When nvidia comes crawling back it will be like nothing ever happened.
Intel, here’s your big chance!
Intel is partly owned by the US government now. You think they want tech going to the people when they themselves want them for skynet.
Maybe, unless it takes so long that everyone already has a chinese card or something
I hope they don’t have the production of non-ai chips then.
So they can sell them for even more thanks to scarcity I’m guessing.
Hey, I’ve seen this one before.
Last time it was crypto instead of AI, but other than that it’s just the same shit again.
Not really. It’s world economy times bigger now.
Would this mean AMD finally gets the supply demand it Reserves?
AMD is also partnered with OpenAI.
Unfortunately AMD is affected by RAM shortage too.
Amd is arguably more affected. Intels CPUs have memory built into it, and intel bought about a years worth of memory.
More and more gamers are seeing Linux as the OS of choice so hopfully that will mean more interest in AMD as well.
LOL fat fucking chance
Despite them being perfectly worthy competitors, gamers will literally never buy AMD.
Dude, I’ll trade my NVidia for an AMD card any day. Every time something goes wrong with my computer, the culprit is NVidia fucking things up. I’m sick of them.
They didn’t have a high end laptop option when I was shopping. If they want my money I expect an 80 series equivalent in my laptop. If not, I’ll probably just end up with a 7080 or 7090 if NVIDIA still does it then.
I buy the card with the highest benchmark scores that I can afford. It’s not a political green vs red choice.
I did :( I’m very happy with it too.
Same. I only buy AMD.
