I will never get how Nvidia got THAT popular amongst gamers
It was the only gfx card maker that doesn’t sucks, and the only real competitor is AMD and they kinda sucked. Games made back then are mostly optimised for nvidia. And then they have shadowplay which capture footage from x second/minute ago with a press of a button, which popularised sharing funny clips. AMD only get better like a few years ago, then Intel enter the race. Today Nvidia doesn’t really offer much advantage for most people because of the price. If chinese gfx card maker catch up, Nvidia will probably have to pivot to AI company to survive.
Nerdulous@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I honestly blame AMD for consistently missing every opportunity to actually be competitive in the space. So much so that they’ve spawned a phrase. “AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
It’s not hard for Nvidia to capture the market when AMD doesn’t compete at all for anything other than the low end market except in a blue moon. Their name is synonymous with mid range at best cards. If you want high end you literally only have one choice and I say that as someone who owns a 7900 XTX. Even that card, which was designed to be competitive with the 4080, comes with a whole lot of compromises that make the card only competitive in pure raster performance, Linux compatibility, and literally nothing else.
You mentioned some of the technologies that Nvidia cards have. You’re right that not everyone needs every feature but being on the other end of that spectrum also sucks. Not having compatible hardware encoders means you take a performance hit every time you screen share your game in discord. Not having CUDA means your card is basically ONLY good for video games (yes I know rocm exists but trying to use it is a frustrating experience compared to CUDA). Having Ray tracing performance that’s so far behind the competition means you’ll always be making a sacrifice in either quality or performance. Choosing AMD means consistently watching Nvidia create new technologies and waiting for AMD to reinvent them a generation later to lackluster support.
Damage@feddit.it 11 hours ago
I’ve been AMD-only since forever, since before AMD cards even existed, my computer ran an ATi card when AMD bought them and when they went from being team green to team red. I swore off nVidia after they killed 3dfx, that’s decades ago.
I never had problems running games except when they were infected by nVidia’s fuckery, and I never had to put much effort in avoiding them.
Gamers just care more about big numbers and shiny things more than they care for the well-being of their hobby, and are directly responsible for part of the AI-shitshow we’re in nowadays.
Nerdulous@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Not having problems is the bare minimum. But my point is that the reason we have such a skewed market is because despite AMD making good cards, Nvidia makes better cards. They’re more feature packed and more performant. The only thing they’re not is cheaper than AMD. Cheaper gets you some customers but as long as the goal is to eventually “upgrade” to an Nvidia card they’ll never be the market leader. People just want to play games and whatever is able to play games the best is what they’ll want. Politics be damned. AMD has had 20+ years to fight Nvidia and their own reputation but failed at nearly every turn. That’s why we’re here.
Blaming consumers for AI doesn’t truly track to me when these companies feed into each other’s profits like some kind of snake of Ouroborus. Gamers never asked for ai. Games just became another place where ai is (unfortunately).
Damage@feddit.it 11 hours ago
Yeah, you’re confirming that
gamerspeople care more about numbers and shiny things than principles. Who cares if lighting is slightly better in a game when having that destroys your hobby?Gamers made nVidia’s fortune and nVidia is one of the main reasons for the crypto and ai messes. It’s not the only factor but it’s one.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
But this is exactly what you get for “not caring for anything but raw performance and features”. You get features that noone asked for and especially features that’ll bind you into their ecosystem. They tried since forever. Hairfx, physx and now dlss/“ai”.
You’re right though, I might sadly add. People don’t care. 5090 is fastest? Then 5090 it’ll be.
Hond@piefed.social 11 hours ago
I agree. Especially the marketing department hyping up their upcoming products to an unhealthy degree really hurt their reputation. Because those promises always failed to deliver in the last >decade.
But personally i’m now 12(?) years only on AMD cards and i was never plagued by all the famous downsides AMD GPUs supposedly and actually have. Which doesnt mean there are tons of valid criticism to made against them.
I get why Nvidia was and is the market leader. They offered the most feature complete and fastest products most of the time. Always with a bit of proprietary fuckery involved which personally always turned me off. There are a lot of valid reasons why somebody would prefer a Nvidia card right now or in the past.
My point was that i dont get why they are so disproportionally more popular. If you wanted the fastest halo product… sure there wasnt a contest since the 290X(which still is debatable). But AMD had almost always pretty great midrange offerings which most consumer buy anyway. Especially in the last three generation they had their shit together and were IMHO pretty competitive in every price bracket besides the very high end. Still, they lost even more market share.
Nerdulous@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Personally I think they’re recent losses are probably a result of the fact that Nvidia is so dominant and Intel entered the market. It’s hard to compete against someone who’s got ~70% market share while a new guy shows up and manages to only steal from your slice. The advantage Nvidia has of being the world’s most valuable company has got to be near insurmountable for AMD at this point. Even if AMD had an outright better product there’s a, not so small amount of people, who would probably still buy Nvidia just to be on the winning team.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
In the US maybe. Any time I looked at AMD cards in recent years, they were more expensive than nVidia equivalents. And that was even before Lisa Su started courting Donald Trump and the AI industry. There’s a cult following around AMD and they and retailers both abuse that.
Hond@piefed.social 10 hours ago
I’m not in the US and AMD has always been cheaper for me. Hardware Unboxed made a few videos about pricing in recent years and in the regions they covered AMD was also always cheaper than Nvidia. Aside from a few outliers.