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Nvidia won, we all lost

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977 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 04 Jul 25 21:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.418s | source
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cherioo ◴[04 Jul 25 22:56 UTC] No.44468628[source]▶
High end GPU has over the last 5 years slowly turning from an enthusiast product into a luxury product.

5 or maybe 10 years ago, high-end GPU are needed to run games at reasonably eye candy setting. In 2025, $500 mid-range GPUs are more than enough. Folks all over can barely tell between High and Ultra settings, DLSS vs FSR, or DLSS FG and Lossless Scaling. There's just no point to compete at $500 price point any more, that Nvidia has largely given up and relegating to the AMD-built Consoles, and integrated graphics like AMD APU, that offer good value in low-end, medium-end, and high-end.

Maybe the rumored Nvidia PC, or the Switch 2, can bring some resurgence.

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1. gxs ◴[05 Jul 25 00:54 UTC] No.44469261[source]▶
I think this is the even broader trend here

In their never ending quest to find ways to suck more money out of people, one natural extension is to just turn the thing into a luxury good and that alone seems to justify the markup

This is why new home construction is expensive - the layout of a home doesn’t change much but it’s trivial to throw on some fancy fixtures and slap the deluxe label on the listing.

Or take a Toyota, slap some leather seats on it, call it a Lexus and mark up the price 40% (I get that these days there are more meaningful differences but the point stands)

This and turning everything into subscriptions alone are responsible for 90% of the issues I have as a consumer

Graphics cards seem to be headed in this direction as well - breaking through that last ceiling for maximum fps is going to be like buying a bentley (if it isn’t already) where as before it was just opting for the v8

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2. bigyabai ◴[05 Jul 25 01:12 UTC] No.44469343[source]▶
Nvidia's been doing this for a while now, since at least the Titan cards and technically the SLI/Crossfire craze too. If you sell it, egregiously-compensated tech nerds will show up with a smile and a wallet large enough to put a down-payment on two of them.

I suppose you could also blame the software side, for adopting compute-intensive ray tracing features or getting lazy with upscaling. But PC gaming has always been a luxury market, at least since "can it run Crysis/DOOM" was a refrain. The homogeneity of a console lineup hasn't ever really existed on PC.