Nvidia won, we all lost

The real issue here is actually harebrained youtubers stirring up drama for views. That's 80% of the problem. And their viewers (and readers, for that which makes it into print) eat it up.

Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly, posting to social media, and youtubers jumping on the trend for likes.

These are 99% user error issues drummed up by non-professionals (and, in some cases, people paid by 3rd party vendors to protect those vendors' reputation).

And the complaints about transient performances issues with drivers, drummed up into apocalyptics scenarios, again, by youtubers, who are putting this stuff under a microscope for views, are universal across every single hardware and software product. Everything.

Claiming "DLSS is snakeoil", and similar things are just an expression of the complete lack of understanding of the people involved in these pot-stirring contests. Like... the technique obviously couldn't magically multiply the ability of hardware to generate frames using the primary method. It is exactly as advertised. It uses machine learning to approximate it. And it's some fantastic technology, that is now ubiquitous across the industry. Support and quality will increase over time, just like every _quality_ hardware product does during its early lifespan.

It's all so stupid and rooted in greed by those seeking ad-money, and those lacking in basic sense or experience in what they're talking about and doing. Embarrassing for the author to so publicly admit to eating up social media whinging.

If you've ever watched a GN or LTT video, they never claimed that DLSS is snakeoil. They specifically call out the pros of the technology, but also point out that Nvidia lies, very literally, about its performance claims in marketing material. Both statements are true and not mutually exclusive. I think people like in this post get worked up about the false marketing and develop (understandably) a negative view of the technology as a whole.

> Idiots doing hardware installation, with zero experience, using 3rd party cables incorrectly

This is not true. Even GN reproduced the melting of the first-party cable.

Also, why shouldn't you be able to use third-party cables? Fuck DRM too.

I'm referring to the section header in this article. Youtubers are not a truly hegemonic group, but there's a set of ideas and narratives that pervade the group as a whole that different subsets buy into, and push, and that's one that exists in the overall sphere of people who discuss the use of hardware for gaming.

Well, I can't speak for all youtubers, but I do watch most GN and LTT videos and the complaints are legitimate, nor are they random jabronis yolo'ing hardware installations.

As far as I know, neither of them have had a card unintentionally light on fire.

The whole thing started with Derbauer going to bat for a cable from some 3rd party vendor that he'd admitted he'd already plugged in and out of various cards something like 50 times.

The actual instances that youtubers report on are all reddit posters and other random social media users who would clearly be better off getting a professional installation. The huge popularity for enthusiast consumer hardware, due to the social media hype cycle, has brought a huge number of naive enthusiasts into the arena. And they're getting burned by doing hardware projects on their own. It's entirely unsurprising, given what happens in all other realms of amateur hardware projects.

Most of those who are whinging about their issues are false positive user errors. The actual failure rates (and there are device failures) are far lower, and that's what warrantys are for.

I'm sure the failure rates are blown out of proportion, I agree with that.

But the fact of the matter is that Nvidia has shifted from a consumer business to b2b, and they don't even give a shit about pretending they care anymore. People take beef with that, understandably, and when you couple that with the false marketing, the lack of inventory, the occasional hardware failure, missing ROPs, insane prices that nobody can afford and all the other shit that's wrong with these GPUs, then this is the end result.

GN were the OG "fake framers" going back to their constant casting shade on DLSS, ignoring it on their reviews, and also crapping on RT.

AI upscaling, AI denoising, and RT were clearly the future even 6 years ago. CDPR and the rest of the industry knew it, but outlets like GN pushed a narrative(borderline conspiracy) the developers were somehow out of touch and didn't know what they were talking about?

There is a contingent of gamers who play competitive FPS. Most of which are, like in all casual competitive hobbies, not very good. But they ate up the 240hz rasterization be-all meat GN was feeding them. Then they think they are the majority and speak for all gamers(as every loud minority on the internet does).

Fast forward 6 years and NVidia is crushing the Steam top 10 GPU list, AI rendering techniques are becoming ubiquitous, and RT is slowly edging out rasterization.

Now that the data is clear the narrative is most consumers are "suckers" for purchasing NVidia, Nintendo, and etc. And the content creator economy will be there to tell them they are right.

Edit: I believe too some of these outlets had chips on their shoulder regarding NVidia going way back. So AMDs poor RT performance and lack of any competitive answer the the DLSS suite for YEARS had them lying to themselves about where the industry was headed. Essentially they were running interference for AMD. Now that FSR4 is finally here it's like AI upscaling is finally ok.