Comment by resfirestar
1 day ago
This is just DRAM hysteria spiraling out to other kinds of hardware, will age like fine milk just like the rest of the "gaming PC market will never be the same" stuff. Nvidia has Amazon, Google, and others trying to compete with them in the data center. No one is seriously trying to beat their gaming chips. Wouldn't make any sense to give it up.
It's not related to the DRAM shortage. Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI and there was controversy years before that about most "gaming" GPUs going to crypto miners. They won't exit the gaming market but from a shareholder perspective it does look like a good idea.
> Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI
Well, actually it's that the AI business made NVidia 10x bigger. NVidia now has a market cap of $4.4 trillion. That's six times bigger than General Motors, bigger than Apple, and the largest market cap in the world. For a GPU maker.
A GPU designer.
They don't make GPUs!
Well, technically, they do assemble some of them, but almost all of the parts are made by other companies.
yet another reason to not listen to your shareholders.
if it were up to them, cuda would be a money losing initiative that was killed in 2009
Furthermore, I would wager a giant portion of people who have entered the ML space in the last five years started out by using CUDA on their gaming rigs. Throwing away that entrenchment vector seems like a terrible idea.
It's a bad idea and yet everyone does it.
Took what, four years for PC cases to get back to reasonable prices after COVID? And that’s a relatively low-tech field that (therefore) admits new entrants. I don’t know, I’m not feeling much optimism right now (haven’t at any point after the crypto boom), perhaps because I’ve always leaned towards stocking up on (main) RAM as a cheap way to improve a PC’s performance.
The fact that a case is literally a sheet metal box and can cost $150 is so bewildering to me. All those $400 nas builds like 25% of the cost is literally just the case. CPU might be only $25 and requires an advanced fab lab not just someone with a lasercutter.
Huh? Only thing I noticed during COVID was a few GPUs and some HDDs getting insanely expensive. Surprise surprise, not even 18 months later (I think more like 14 on my local market) the sellers finally got it through their thick skulls that economy is not what you see in simulations and that 95% of people absolutely will not pay ~$4000 for an RTX 3090 / 4090. And similar for the 18TB HDDs.
I am not saying you are wrong but here in Eastern Europe, while we did suffer the price hikes (and are suffering those of the DDR5 RAM now as well), the impact was minimal. People just holed up, said "the market's crazy right now, let's wait it out", and shrugged. And lo and behold, successfully wait it out they did.
As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I highly doubt high RAM prices will survive even to 2027. Sure a good amount of stores and suppliers will try to hold on to the prices with a death grip... but many stores and vendors and suppliers hate stale stock. And some other new tech will start coming out. They would not be able to tolerate shelves full of merchandise at prices people don't want to buy at.
They absolutely _will_ budge.
I predict that by July/August 2026 some price decreases will start. They are likely to be small -- no more than 15% IMO -- but they will start.
The current craze of "let's only produce and sell to the big boys" has happened before, happens now, and will happen again. I and many others don't believe the hysteric "the market will never be the same again after" narrative either.
If Nvidia did drop their gaming GPU lineup, it would be a huge re-shuffling in the market: AMD's market share would 10x over night, and it would open a very rare opportunity for minority (or brand-new?) players to get a foothold.
What happens then if the AI bubble crashes? Nvidia has given up their dominant position in the gaming market and made room for competitors to eat some (most?) of their pie, possibly even created an ultra-rare opportunity for a new competitor to pop up. That seems like a very short-sighted decision.
I think that we will instead see Nvidia abusing their dominant position to re-allocate DRAM away from gaming, as a sector-wide thing. They'll reduce gaming GPU production while simultaneously trying to prevent AMD or Intel from ramping up their own production.
It makes sense for them to retain their huge gaming GPU market share, because it's excellent insurance against an AI bust.
Yeah, sure, every tech company now acts like a craven monopolist hellbent on destroying everything that isn't corporate-driven AI computing, but not this time! This time will be different!
I guess time will tell, will it? Your sarcastic remark does not bear any prophetic value.
They can act as monopolist as they want. They can try anything and cackle maniacally at their amazing business acumen all they want.
Turns out, total addressable market is not infinite. Turns out people don't want to spend on RAM as much as they would on a used car. How shocking! And I am completely sure that yet again the MBAs would be unprepared for these grand revelations, like they are, EVERY time.
Still, let us wait and see. Most of us are not in a rush to build a gaming machine or a workstation next month or else puppies will start dying.
I am pretty sure the same people now rubbing hands and believing they have found the eternal gold, will come back begging and pleading for our measly customer dollars before not too long.