[aunty_helen]

This is 100% going to kill the home built pc market. When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD). Now they’re 10,000 just for the gpu and another 1-2000 for ram.

People used to get into gaming pcs as an affordable hobby, now it’s making general aviation look like plan B.

[tpurves]

This has already happened. Home PC market is practically dead already due to memory, ssd and graphics card price inflation. Makers of components like PC cases and power supplies etc. are seeing demand down 30-40% year over year and this is going to put many suppliers out of business. NVDIA has stopped even listing gaming revenue on their earnings reports. Both NVDIA and AMD are not seriously interested in supplying the consumer GPU market anymore either.

The only hope left is really Apple, but even apple has conspicuously delayed the launch of M5-gen mac minis and mac studio. Mostly because even Apple can't source enough DRAM to fully supply all their product lines.

[Joel_Mckay]

Indeed, Gamers Nexus is doing interviews with PC component manufacturers, and some are hurting bad right now. The PC market is no longer in competition, but rather survival mode. =3

https://www.youtube.com/@GamersNexus/videos

[luqtas]

there's much more than triple A video-games running at 240 Hz on Ultra settings... a 200 USD laptop/computer has enough power to run hundreds of interesting indie games and AAA from the past

[Gigachad]

My 2019 gaming PC is considered unusable ewaste by most pc gamers. The RX5700 XT GPU is super cheap second hand right now and I've been able to play every game I want including new releases like Kingdom Come Deliverance II on great settings with no noticeable issues.

You don't even have to drop down to old indie games. You just have to turn off the FPS counter and stop pixel peeping screenshots.

[jayd16]

Yeah sure, but some folks were in it for the hot rods too.

[Fnoord]

Were in for the hot rods.

You can still play fantastic games with amazing gameplay, great storytelling, and even requiring quite a GPU. But you won't upgrade your GPU or RAM. If it gets broken, people have already gotten their money back instead of replacement (whether that is legal or not, depends on your jurisdiction, and regardless: it is happening). So the demand and adoption of say 240 Hz 4k OLED gaming is going to slow. I currently sport two 1440p IPS capable of 144 Hz, with an AMD 6700 XT, 64 GB DDR4, and a 5700X3D. I'll wait upgrading that to a 4k rig.

What I will do is buy a Nintendo Switch 2 before the price increase hits. Why? Great gameplay for kids.

[doom2]

It might kill the console gaming market, too. Typically consoles get cheaper over time post-release. Instead, all the latest gen consoles are getting price hikes and at least one company is potentially pushing back the next gen release (PS6). A PlayStation 5 for $900? I'll just wait and be happy with my perfectly usable Switch 1 (since the 2 is also more expensive than it should be).

[Ray20]

I don't understand the threat to the PC market.

Prices haven't risen THAT much and are quite affordable. And if you look at the improved quality of upscalers (DLLS 4.5 for example), gaming is now more affordable than ever, despite the increased cost of components.

Of course, the 5090 prices are insane, as are for SOME memory models, but that's nothing new and represents a fairly small market share.

> When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD)

When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics. Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin. And even then, it wasn't always reliable, and it resulted in stuttering, lags, and graphical artifacts (in cases when it worked). Today, even $700 graphics cards are a much better product from a user perspective than the high-end cards of that time (and that's not even taking into account that $700 cards back then were much more expensive).

[theshackleford]

> When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics.

When would this have been? I can not remember a time this was accurate for the games of the time, outside of a handful of meme titles like the original crysis that made bad hardware bets. Most of them fulfilled the needs of the software and hardware of the time. I'd say the biggest issue was that for a time, software and hardware were advancing so rapidly that you wouldnt get very long out of your hardware, but that's just the reality of rapid development and not the fault or failure of any specific hardware release.

> Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin.

SLI was aimed squarely at enthusiasts, not at joe-average PC gamer and it was certainly never a requirement. It existed as a halo feature for people chasing maximum performance, benchmark scores, and bragging rights.

[aunty_helen]

Improved quality used to be the justification for buying new hardware at a similar price to the old hardware when it came out new. Now the 5060/70s are 4 figure cards.

As for how much the prices have actually risen, it’s not hard to see if this is true or not. If doubling of prices doesn’t raise your eyebrows, I’m not sure what will.

[johnvanommen]

Yes, this will definitely renew interest in Stadia type products.

[Gigachad]

Why? Those servers still have to pay the same price for components plus a markup for the service. In theory you can serve more gamers per GPU, but these GPUs have to be physically located in your city to have a usable latency, and that means you'll have issues with peak utilization being most users gaming at the same time of day.

I just don't see the cost savings of sharing a GPU overcoming the extra expense + profit such a service would need.

[HDBaseT]

The GPUs do not have to be "psychically located in your city" to have usable latency.

Of course, less latency is always better although running a traceroute between my IP and major city (Sydney) from 1,500 km equates to about 11ms latency with optimal routing. (Real life test, traceroute via an ISP Looking Glass).

[Gigachad]

1500km is still largely the same timezone though. To actually get consistent usage of the GPUs you'd want users on the other side of the planet using them while the current side is sleeping/etc.

[simoncion]

> Those servers still have to pay the same price for components...

Not if Nvidia is running the service.

Seems quite possible to me that Nvidia sells to the public just enough graphics cards to keep any frisky antitrust investigators off its back and reserves the rest for GeForce NOW, its "pay monthly for limited access to a remote gaming PC" service. The cards for NOW are billed to the BU running NOW at or below cost, the few cards available to consumers and System Integrators naturally have a huge markup due to extremely constrained supply, and Nvidia uses the fact that they are the thing behind the LLM Boom to ensure that they have -what a System Integrator in 2022 would recognize as- a reasonable price for just enough RAM for the computers that NOW rents access to.

Downvoters: notice the speculative nature of the previous paragraph. I'm not claiming that this is happening right now. I'm claiming that it's quite possibly more profitable for Nvidia to bill monthly for limited remote access to computers with Nvidia graphics cards in them than it is to sell those cards at retail and to SIs.

[Gigachad]

These kinds of conspiracies require everyone to collude, which just about never happens since the reward to defect increases. If nVidia tries this, they would just lose the market to AMD who would spam out as many GPUs to gamers as they could. If both AMD and nVidia teamed up, it would leave a gap that either intel or some Chinese startup would jump on.

It's just far more likely that these GPUs actually do cost a ton to make right now.

[simoncion]

> These kinds of conspiracies require everyone to collude...

No, only Nvidia makes and sells Nvidia GPUs. They're the sole supplier of the GPUs used in 95% of the graphics cards sold in the US.

> If both AMD and nVidia teamed up, it would leave a gap that either intel or some Chinese startup would jump on.

Fascinating.

a) Explain why the only even vaguely-recent cheap video cards were made by Intel, and why it looks like Intel has pretty much stopped making video cards? [0]

b) Tell me how that Chinese startup gets past USian Sinophobic/protectionist trade barriers?

c) Tell me how that Chinese startup convinces the big gaming development houses to ignore the advice of Nvidia's driver engineering team that just so happens to make their games work great on the hardware in NOW and really, really poorly on that unknown-to-US-customers Chinese startup?

> It's just far more likely that these GPUs actually do cost a ton to make...

You seem to have not been paying much attention to the reports of Nvidia, AMD, and major RAM and storage suppliers changing focus from the consumer market to the far more profitable datacenter (read as "LLM") market. Several such suppliers have exited the consumer space entirely. As any residential renter in San Francisco [1] can tell you, extremely limited supply drives price up to obscene levels.

[0] This shift in Intel's focus may or may not be related to Nvidia becoming the third- or fourth-largest Intel shareholder.

[1] ...or any other "hot" market with large, artificial barriers to entry...

[Gigachad]

Not sure the hostility is required here. Gamers don't need nvidia GPUs, they just need GPUs.

Nvidia happens to have been the best option for a long time. But there are many alternatives, game consoles for example aren't particularly tied to the Nvidia/amd market and the ARM space offers tons of options. Apple makes a powerful GPU for their macbooks that isn't dependent on either of the major two.

Valve, Sony, and Nintendo are in a good position to move away from AMD in the future if they aren't providing competitively priced GPUs. Valve has been working on an x86 emulator for ARM for their Steam Frame which would pave the way towards PC games running on ARM chips.

This whole situation is largely like this because demand for hardware spiked rapidly. Processes and production take a long time to change, and no one knows if these prices are long term or if it's going to crash back to normal in a year. If the elevated prices remain for the future, competitors will move in. But they aren't going to develop new products and production in the case where it all crashes back to normal and nvidia continues selling affordable GPUs to gamers.

I just don't see any scenario where nvidia remains the only option while also not selling their GPUs to consumers and requiring them to rent them. By the time that happens the competition would have crushed them.

[throwatdem12311]

Don’t you worry - Microsoft and Amazon will have you covered with cloud streaming.

Can’t afford a computer because they bought up all the supply? They’ll conveniently sell it back to you with a subscription!

You’ll own nothing and be happy.

[themafia]

It's more likely to kill the AI market. They're overbuilding capacity and most of it is going unused. The upcoming haircut is going to kill a lot of the major players.

They've intentionally crafted an unsustainable business model in an effort to get users in the front door and raise their MAUs. We've seen this story before. We should know precisely where it's headed.

[aunty_helen]

When you consider how much an employee costs, AI makes a ton of sense. Lots of businesses are stacked with staff doing basic data entry / shuffling. Even if it’s 1000usd a month, AI is still a bargain.

[no-name-here]

> most of it is going unused

Sorry that “it is going unused”? From what I've read, most AI providers are capacity constrained.