| people absolutely SCREAMED a year ago when there was a rumor going around that NVIDIA was pulling back on new chip starts, it was going all around that it was a plan to "spike prices during the holidays". In the end 2021Q4 shipments were actually up according to JPR, of course. But people were mad, and I still see that MLID article brought up as proof that NVIDIA was deliberately trying to "worsen the shortage" and "spike prices during the holidays". https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-allegedly-halting-RTX-3... https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/q421-sees-a-nominal... Now, what MLID may not really know, is that wafer starts typically take about 6 months, so if he's hearing about reduced starts in October, it's probably more like NVIDIA is pulling back on expected Q1/Q2 production... which indeed did come down a bit. But as to the public reaction... people were fucking mad about any sign of pulling back on production. People are just unreasonably mad about anything involving NVIDIA in general, every single little news item is instantly spun into its worst possible case and contextualized as a moustache-twirling plan to screw everyone over. Like, would it have really been a bad thing to pull back on chip starts a year ago? That actually looks pretty sensible to me, and gamers will generally also suffer from the delay of next-gen products while the stockpile burns through anyway. It's nowhere near the "sure miners may be annoying, but deal with it for 6 months and then we all get cheap GPUs and everyone holds hands and sings" that LTT and some other techtubers presented it as. Like, yeah, if you want a cheap 30-series card at the end of its generation/lifecycle great, but, you'll be waiting for 4050/4060/4070 for a while. Even AMD pushed back their midrange chips and is launching high-end-only to allow the miner inventory to sell through. And people hate that now that they've realized the consequence, but they were cheering a year ago and demanding the removal of the miner lock / etc. More cards for the miners! Wait, no, not like that! It's just so tiresome on any article involving NVIDIA, even here you've got the "haha linus said FUCK NVIDIA, that makes me Laugh Out Loud right guys!?" and the same tired "turn everything into a conspiracy" bullshit, constantly. |
In the end, Nvidia is still a business. Putting any money towards supporting desktop Linux isn't going to have an adverse effect on their overall sales. We're just lucky that they patch in DLSS/ray tracing support to Linux games and software like Blender.