I think it's maybe time for game developers to spend more effort/time on gameplay and a bit less on AAA+++ graphics that only top GPUs can handle. Maybe hard targeting iGPU/APU for mid-level support in games.
For that matter, plenty of room to remake/reskin older (fun) games... Bring the Black Mesa effect to lots of existing games.
Games now don’t even look good enough to justify the enormous computing power they require. They’re a stuttery and blurry mess, augmented by fake AI frames, LOD popping, weird screen space rendering defects, and so on. Graphics peaked 10 years ago.
After I read this article, I realized that I have a huge backlog of unplayed/partially played games in my steam library. Significant chunk of those games are from Indie devs. Probably enough games to last me a year or two. Plus, most of them seem like they will run just fine at max to high settings using my 3080 Ti on a 1440p display. Point is, I really need to stop looking for the next hardware refresh so I can keep playing newer big budget titles. This and current memory prices made it easy for me to forget about upgrading for the next 2-3 years.
Nvidia is chasing trends again, they did it for crypto mining, and I bet some new fad will come up soon. It looks like the gaming industry needs to move to something else than the current GPU ecosystem in the long term. Intel Arc and Moore Threads have tried, but we really need a new way of designing and rendering graphics.
before (what? when? covid?) nvidia annual revenues were circa us$10b and amd was competing with it to make GPUs. after (what? when? covid?)..or now.. nvidia is a accelerator manufacturer with a small legacy GPU business and revenues are closer to us$200b. and amd is still no closer to competing with nvidia at making GPUs. intel started something in the mean time though. but everyone seems to be expecting them to try compete with nvidia at making accelerators. nobody is interested in GPUs anymore. accelerators seem to be the much bigger and more interesting market.
I do feel there might be a day of reckoning where Nvidia bet the farm too hard on this AI bubble and it ends up blowing up in their face.
I hope gamers, systems integrators, and regular PC enthusiasts don't have memories of goldfish and go back to business as usual. It needs to hurt Nvidia in the pocketbook.
Will this happen? Unlikely, but hope springs eternal.
NVidias share price will take a hit when consolidation starts in AI, because their business won't be growing as fast as their PE ratio implies. Also the circular deals could hurt them if one of the AI providers they've invested in goes bust.[1],[2]. They won't go out of business but holders of their shares may lose lots of money. But will this happen after Anthropic and OpenAI have their IPOs, possibly next year? NVidia stands to make a lot on paper if those IPOs do well.
If OpenAI has their IPO, this is likely going to result in retail getting fleeced, given how their return on their investments to date has been absolutely pitiful. They are seeing revenues of around $13 billion for 2025, with an alleged over $100 billion or more by 2030, but the investments they are making are orders of magnitude greater. Who is ultimately going to pay for this?
Surely OpenAI has customers buying their pro packages for ChatGPT, but that can't really be it. And businesses are starting to realize that AI can't replace the workforce that easily either.
Hardly taking this personally. Just calling out how I see it going most likely. Also... Nvidia has done quite a bit unethically. Namely violating anti-monopoly laws (though with our current US administration - they may as well be not worth the paper they are printed on), screwing with product reviewers, pulling a 90s-era Microsoft to obliterate their competition at all costs, and screwing over their board partners, like EVGA. GamersNexus on Youtube has covered plenty of this.
That said, although AI has some uniquely good applications, this AI mania is feeding into some ridiculous corporate feedback loop that is having a negative impact on the consumer.
Having to pay several thousands of dollars for a top tier consumer GeForce when it was possible to do the same with only a few hundred dollars less than a decade ago is telling me the customer is being taken for a ride. It stinks.
I don't get this. Nvidia didn't "bet the farm" on AI. They are simply allocating limited resources (in this case memory) to their most profitable products. Yes, it sucks for gamers, but I see Nvidia more reacting to the current marketplace than driving that change.
If/when the AI bubble bursts, Nvidia will just readjust their resource allocation accordingly.
I also don't understand common sentiment that if/when the AI bubble pops and hardware manufacturers come crawling back, we consumers are going to make manufacturers regret their decision.
Isn't the whole problem that all the manufacturers are pivoting away from consumers and toward AI? How are we going to "hurt Nvidia in the pocketbook?" Buy from their competitors? But they are also making these pivots/"turning their backs on us." Just abstain from buying hardware out of protest? As soon as prices go down there's gonna be a buying frenzy from everyone who's been waiting this whole time.
If/when the bubble pops, manufacturers will find that they can't butter their bread like they could when the datacenter craze was booming. In a world that is paved by growth, companies aren't very good at shrinking.
It doesn't matter what consumers do or don't do -- we plebians are a tiny portion of their present market. We can buy the same GPUs from the same folks as before, or we can do something different, and it won't matter.
Whatever we do will be a rounding error in the jagged, gaping, infected hole where the AI market once was.
This is an even-handed take. I still think consumers in general should vote with their wallets, even if all of them put together won't hold a candle to their datacenter customers. If nothing else, it can grant the competition more market share, and maybe AMD and Intel can invest more into Radeon and Arc, respectively. That can only be a good thing, since I'd love to see more broad support for FSR and XeSS technologies on games, and ROCm and oneAPI for compute.
Oh, for sure. It's often good to bet on the underdog in a competitive market -- it helps ensure that competition continues to exist.
When I sold PC hardware, I'd try to find the right fit for a customer's needs and pricepoint. Way back then, that often meant selling systems with relatively-inexpensive Cyrix or AMD CPUs and more RAM instead of systems with more-expensive Intel CPUs that had less RAM at any given price -- because those were good tradeoffs to make. By extension, I did a very small part to help foster competition.
But gamers drive the bulk of non-datacenter GPU sales and they don't necessarily act that way.
Having observed their behavior for decades, I feel confident in saying that they broadly promote whatever the top dog is today (whether they can afford to be in that club or not), and aren't shy about punching down on those who suggest a less-performant option regardless of its fitness for a particular purpose.
Or at least: The ones who behave this way sure do manage to be loud about it. (And in propaganda, loudness counts.)
I suspect they'll be fawning over nVidia for as long as nVidia keeps producing what is perceived to be the fastest thing, even if it is made from pure unobtanium.
I had one of those for what seemed like an eternity.
At first, right out of the gate: I overclocked it from 300MHz to 350MHz just to see what would happen. It worked perfectly without further adjustment (and the next step did not), so I left it right there at 350MHz. For the price, at that time, it kept up great compared to what my peers had going on.
As the years ticked by and it was getting long in the tooth, it stayed around -- but it shifted roles.
I think the last thing it was doing for me was running a $25 SoundBlaster Live! 5.1's EMU10k1 DSP chip under Windows, using the kX audio drivers.
kX let a person use that DSP chip for what it was -- an audio-oriented DSP with some audio-centric IO. With kX, a person could drop basic DSP blocks into the GUI and wire them together arbitrarily, and also wire them into the real world.
I used it as a parametric EQ and active crossover for the stereo in my home office -- unless I was also using it as a bass preamp, in a different mode. Low-latency real-time software DSP was mostly a non-starter at that time, but these functions and routings were all done within the EMU10k1 and end-to-end latency was low enough to play a bass guitar through.
Of course: It still required a computer to run it, and I had a new family at that time and things like the electric bill were very important to me. So I underclocked and undervolted the K6-2 for passive cooling, booted Windows from a CompactFlash card (what spinning HDD?), and hacked the power supply fan to just-barely turn and rotate air over the heatsinks.
It went from a relatively high-cost past-performer to a rather silent low-power rig that I'd remote into over the LAN to wiggle DSP settings on that only had one moving part.
Neat chips, the K6-2 and EMU10k1 were.
Fun times.
(And to bring it all back 'round: We'd be in a different place right now if things like the K6-2 had been more popular than they were. I don't know if it'd be better or worse, but it'd sure be different.)
I certainly have no delusions of Nvidia going bankrupt. In fact, they will certainly make it to the other side without much issue. That said, I do foresee Nvidia taking a reputational hit, with AMD and (possibly) Intel gaining more mindshare among consumers.
I think it's maybe time for game developers to spend more effort/time on gameplay and a bit less on AAA+++ graphics that only top GPUs can handle. Maybe hard targeting iGPU/APU for mid-level support in games.
For that matter, plenty of room to remake/reskin older (fun) games... Bring the Black Mesa effect to lots of existing games.
Games now don’t even look good enough to justify the enormous computing power they require. They’re a stuttery and blurry mess, augmented by fake AI frames, LOD popping, weird screen space rendering defects, and so on. Graphics peaked 10 years ago.
After I read this article, I realized that I have a huge backlog of unplayed/partially played games in my steam library. Significant chunk of those games are from Indie devs. Probably enough games to last me a year or two. Plus, most of them seem like they will run just fine at max to high settings using my 3080 Ti on a 1440p display. Point is, I really need to stop looking for the next hardware refresh so I can keep playing newer big budget titles. This and current memory prices made it easy for me to forget about upgrading for the next 2-3 years.
Nvidia is chasing trends again, they did it for crypto mining, and I bet some new fad will come up soon. It looks like the gaming industry needs to move to something else than the current GPU ecosystem in the long term. Intel Arc and Moore Threads have tried, but we really need a new way of designing and rendering graphics.
Or nvidia could be broken up and different companies could focus on consumer and enterprise divisions.
I'm sure half their employees will love being removed from the AI profit train.
I am starting to find it funny. Even if it is sad... Well thankfully Finnish has term for this surkuhupaisa...
Nag screen
https://archive.ph/dJt9D
Gamers be damned, they are going to keep those prices high.
before (what? when? covid?) nvidia annual revenues were circa us$10b and amd was competing with it to make GPUs. after (what? when? covid?)..or now.. nvidia is a accelerator manufacturer with a small legacy GPU business and revenues are closer to us$200b. and amd is still no closer to competing with nvidia at making GPUs. intel started something in the mean time though. but everyone seems to be expecting them to try compete with nvidia at making accelerators. nobody is interested in GPUs anymore. accelerators seem to be the much bigger and more interesting market.
Gamers should be glad they have google and openai funding the development of their GPUs
I do feel there might be a day of reckoning where Nvidia bet the farm too hard on this AI bubble and it ends up blowing up in their face.
I hope gamers, systems integrators, and regular PC enthusiasts don't have memories of goldfish and go back to business as usual. It needs to hurt Nvidia in the pocketbook.
Will this happen? Unlikely, but hope springs eternal.
NVidias share price will take a hit when consolidation starts in AI, because their business won't be growing as fast as their PE ratio implies. Also the circular deals could hurt them if one of the AI providers they've invested in goes bust.[1],[2]. They won't go out of business but holders of their shares may lose lots of money. But will this happen after Anthropic and OpenAI have their IPOs, possibly next year? NVidia stands to make a lot on paper if those IPOs do well.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-back-anthrop...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/12/nvidias-ai-empire-a-look-a...
If OpenAI has their IPO, this is likely going to result in retail getting fleeced, given how their return on their investments to date has been absolutely pitiful. They are seeing revenues of around $13 billion for 2025, with an alleged over $100 billion or more by 2030, but the investments they are making are orders of magnitude greater. Who is ultimately going to pay for this?
Surely OpenAI has customers buying their pro packages for ChatGPT, but that can't really be it. And businesses are starting to realize that AI can't replace the workforce that easily either.
Why take this personally. They are a business. It’s one thing if they did something unethical, but I don’t think this is grudge worthy.
If anything this shows how small the gaming market really is for them. This opens the playing field for new companies to capture.
I find it admirable that they are able to intensify focus on an area they see the most value.
Hardly taking this personally. Just calling out how I see it going most likely. Also... Nvidia has done quite a bit unethically. Namely violating anti-monopoly laws (though with our current US administration - they may as well be not worth the paper they are printed on), screwing with product reviewers, pulling a 90s-era Microsoft to obliterate their competition at all costs, and screwing over their board partners, like EVGA. GamersNexus on Youtube has covered plenty of this.
That said, although AI has some uniquely good applications, this AI mania is feeding into some ridiculous corporate feedback loop that is having a negative impact on the consumer.
Having to pay several thousands of dollars for a top tier consumer GeForce when it was possible to do the same with only a few hundred dollars less than a decade ago is telling me the customer is being taken for a ride. It stinks.
I don't get this. Nvidia didn't "bet the farm" on AI. They are simply allocating limited resources (in this case memory) to their most profitable products. Yes, it sucks for gamers, but I see Nvidia more reacting to the current marketplace than driving that change.
If/when the AI bubble bursts, Nvidia will just readjust their resource allocation accordingly.
I also don't understand common sentiment that if/when the AI bubble pops and hardware manufacturers come crawling back, we consumers are going to make manufacturers regret their decision.
Isn't the whole problem that all the manufacturers are pivoting away from consumers and toward AI? How are we going to "hurt Nvidia in the pocketbook?" Buy from their competitors? But they are also making these pivots/"turning their backs on us." Just abstain from buying hardware out of protest? As soon as prices go down there's gonna be a buying frenzy from everyone who's been waiting this whole time.
If/when the bubble pops, manufacturers will find that they can't butter their bread like they could when the datacenter craze was booming. In a world that is paved by growth, companies aren't very good at shrinking.
It doesn't matter what consumers do or don't do -- we plebians are a tiny portion of their present market. We can buy the same GPUs from the same folks as before, or we can do something different, and it won't matter.
Whatever we do will be a rounding error in the jagged, gaping, infected hole where the AI market once was.
This is an even-handed take. I still think consumers in general should vote with their wallets, even if all of them put together won't hold a candle to their datacenter customers. If nothing else, it can grant the competition more market share, and maybe AMD and Intel can invest more into Radeon and Arc, respectively. That can only be a good thing, since I'd love to see more broad support for FSR and XeSS technologies on games, and ROCm and oneAPI for compute.
Oh, for sure. It's often good to bet on the underdog in a competitive market -- it helps ensure that competition continues to exist.
When I sold PC hardware, I'd try to find the right fit for a customer's needs and pricepoint. Way back then, that often meant selling systems with relatively-inexpensive Cyrix or AMD CPUs and more RAM instead of systems with more-expensive Intel CPUs that had less RAM at any given price -- because those were good tradeoffs to make. By extension, I did a very small part to help foster competition.
But gamers drive the bulk of non-datacenter GPU sales and they don't necessarily act that way.
Having observed their behavior for decades, I feel confident in saying that they broadly promote whatever the top dog is today (whether they can afford to be in that club or not), and aren't shy about punching down on those who suggest a less-performant option regardless of its fitness for a particular purpose.
Or at least: The ones who behave this way sure do manage to be loud about it. (And in propaganda, loudness counts.)
I suspect they'll be fawning over nVidia for as long as nVidia keeps producing what is perceived to be the fastest thing, even if it is made from pure unobtanium.
Now you have me getting misty eyed a bit! I remember when my dad had a Cyrix PC and later an AMD K6 II+ whitebox build. :)
At any rate, you do have a point. I can't argue that Nvidia has an inferior product; yet I just wish Nvidia wasn't abusing their position so much.
The K6-2 was a trooper.
I had one of those for what seemed like an eternity.
At first, right out of the gate: I overclocked it from 300MHz to 350MHz just to see what would happen. It worked perfectly without further adjustment (and the next step did not), so I left it right there at 350MHz. For the price, at that time, it kept up great compared to what my peers had going on.
As the years ticked by and it was getting long in the tooth, it stayed around -- but it shifted roles.
I think the last thing it was doing for me was running a $25 SoundBlaster Live! 5.1's EMU10k1 DSP chip under Windows, using the kX audio drivers.
kX let a person use that DSP chip for what it was -- an audio-oriented DSP with some audio-centric IO. With kX, a person could drop basic DSP blocks into the GUI and wire them together arbitrarily, and also wire them into the real world.
I used it as a parametric EQ and active crossover for the stereo in my home office -- unless I was also using it as a bass preamp, in a different mode. Low-latency real-time software DSP was mostly a non-starter at that time, but these functions and routings were all done within the EMU10k1 and end-to-end latency was low enough to play a bass guitar through.
Of course: It still required a computer to run it, and I had a new family at that time and things like the electric bill were very important to me. So I underclocked and undervolted the K6-2 for passive cooling, booted Windows from a CompactFlash card (what spinning HDD?), and hacked the power supply fan to just-barely turn and rotate air over the heatsinks.
It went from a relatively high-cost past-performer to a rather silent low-power rig that I'd remote into over the LAN to wiggle DSP settings on that only had one moving part.
Neat chips, the K6-2 and EMU10k1 were.
Fun times.
(And to bring it all back 'round: We'd be in a different place right now if things like the K6-2 had been more popular than they were. I don't know if it'd be better or worse, but it'd sure be different.)
I certainly have no delusions of Nvidia going bankrupt. In fact, they will certainly make it to the other side without much issue. That said, I do foresee Nvidia taking a reputational hit, with AMD and (possibly) Intel gaining more mindshare among consumers.
AMD will eat their lunch, and are. If AMD can properly replace CUDA, rtx hdr, they could win the market.