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Posted by todsacerdoti 7/4/2025

Nvidia won, we all lost(blog.sebin-nyshkim.net)
995 points | 571 commentspage 3
hiAndrewQuinn 7/5/2025|
To anyone who remembers econ 101 it's hard to read something like "scalper bots scoop up all of the new units as soon as they're launched" and not conclude that Nvidia itself is simply pricing the units they sell too low.
yunyu 7/4/2025||
If you are a gamer, you are no longer NVIDIA's most important customer.
bigyabai 7/4/2025||
A revelation on-par with Mac users waking up to learn their computer was made by a phone company.
ravetcofx 7/5/2025|||
Barely even a phone company, more like a app store and microtransactions services company
hot_gril 7/6/2025|||
Aside from iTunes getting gimped, I don't feel like the Mac is neglected at all. Was annoyed about the 2016-2019 MBPs though.
theshackleford 7/5/2025|||
Yes but why should I care provided the product they have already sold me continues to work? How does this materially change my life because Nvidia doesnt want to go steady with me anymore?
Rapzid 7/5/2025|||
Sounds like an opening for AMD then. But as long as NVidia has the best tech I'll keep buying it when it's time to upgrade.
dcchambers 7/4/2025||
Haven't been for a while. Not since crypto bros started buying up GPUs for coin mining.
frollogaston 7/4/2025||
Because they won't sell you an in-demand high-end GPU for cheap? Well TS
tiahura 7/5/2025|
Not to mention that they are currently in stock at my local microcenter.
snarfy 7/5/2025||
I'm a gamer and love my AMD gpu. I do not give a shit about ray tracing, frame generation, or 4k gaming. I can play all modern fps at 500fps+. I really wish the market wasn't so trendy and people bought what worked for them.
alt227 7/5/2025|
Yeah I was exactly the same as you for years, holding out against what I considered to be unecessary exrtravagence. That was until I got a 4k monitor at work and experienced 4k HDR gaming. I immediately went out and bought an RTX 4070 and a 4k monitor and I will never be going back. The experience is glorious and I was a fool for not jumping sooner.

4K HDR gaming is not the future, is has been the standard for many years now for good reason.

liendolucas 7/5/2025||
I haven't read the whole article but a few things to remark:

* The prices for Nvidia GPUs are insane. For that money you can have an extremely good PC with a good non Nvidia GPU.

* The physical GPU sizes are massive, even letting the card rest on a horizontal motherboard looks like scary.

* Nvidia has still issues with melting cables? I've heard about those some years ago and thought it was a solved problem.

* Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time.

Looks as if Nvidia at the moment is only looking at the AI market (which as a personal belief has to burst at some point) and simply does not care the non GPU AI market at all.

I remember many many years ago when I was a teenager and 3dfx was the dominant graphics card manufacturer that John Carmack profethically in a gaming computer magazine (the article was about Quake I) predicted that the future wasn't going to be 3dfx and Glide. Some years passed by and effectively 3dfx was gone.

Perhaps is just the beginning of the same story that happened with 3dfx. I think AMD and Intel have a huge opportunity to balance the market and bring Nvidia down, both in the AI and gaming space.

I have only heard excellent things about Intel's ARC GPUs in other HNs threads and if I need to build a new desktop PC from scratch there's no way to pay for the prices that Nvidia is pushing to the market, I'll definitely look at Intel or AMD.

int_19h 7/5/2025|
> Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time.

CUDA outlived several attempts to offer an open alternative by now, starting with OpenCL.

It's really ironic for a hardware company that its moat, such as it is, is largely about software. And it's not even that software around CUDA is that great. But for some reason AMD is seemingly incapable of hitting even that low bar, even though they had literally decades to catch up.

Intel, on the other hand, is seriously lagging behind on the hardware end.

fracus 7/5/2025||
This was an efficient, well written, TKO.
anonymars 7/5/2025|
Agreed. An excellent summary of a lot of missteps that have been building for a while. I had watched that article on the power connector/ shunt resistors and was dumbfounded at the seemingly rank-amateurish design. And although I don't have a 5000 series GPU I have been astonished at how awful the drivers have been for the better part of a year.

As someone who filed the AMD/ATi ecosystems due to their quirky unreliability, Nvidia and Intel have really shit the bed these days (I also had the misfortune of "upgrading" to a 13th gen Intel processor just before we learned that they cook themselves)

I do think DLSS supersampling is incredible but Lord almighty is it annoying that the frame generation is under the same umbrella because that is nowhere near the same, and the water is awful muddy since "DLSS" is often used without distinction

voxleone 7/5/2025||
It’s reasonable to argue that NVIDIA has a de facto monopoly in the field of GPU-accelerated compute, especially due to CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). While not a legal monopoly in the strict antitrust sense (yet), in practice, NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC, and increasingly in professional content creation — is extraordinarily dominant.
arcanus 7/5/2025||
> NVIDIA's control over the GPU compute ecosystem — particularly in AI, HPC

The two largest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD. I don't think it's accurate to say Nvidia has monopoly on HPC

Source: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/

infocollector 7/5/2025||
It’s misleading to cite two government-funded supercomputers as evidence that NVIDIA lacks monopoly power in HPC and AI:

- Government-funded outliers don’t disprove monopoly behavior. The two AMD-powered systems on the TOP500 list—both U.S. government funded—are exceptions driven by procurement constraints, not market dynamics. NVIDIA’s pricing is often prohibitive, and its dominance gives it the power to walk away from bids that don’t meet its margins. That’s not competition—it’s monopoly leverage.

- Market power isn't disproven by isolated wins. Monopoly status isn’t defined by having every win, but by the lack of viable alternatives in most of the market. In commercial AI, research, and enterprise HPC workloads, NVIDIA owns an overwhelming share—often >90%. That kind of dominance is monopoly-level control.

- AMD’s affordability is a symptom, not a sign of strength. AMD's lower pricing reflects its underdog status in a market it struggles to compete in—largely because NVIDIA has cornered not just the hardware but the entire CUDA software stack, developer ecosystem, and AI model compatibility. You don't need 100% market share to be a monopoly—you need control. NVIDIA has it.

In short: pointing to a couple of symbolic exceptions doesn’t change the fact that NVIDIA’s grip on the GPU compute stack—from software to hardware to developer mindshare—is monopolistic in practice.

yxhuvud 7/5/2025|||
Strict antitrust sense don't look at actual monopoly to trigger, but just if you use your standing in the market to gain unjust advantages. Which does not require a monopoly situation but just a strong standing used wrong (like abusing vertical integration). So Standard Oil, to take a famous example, never had more than a 30% market share.

Breaking a monopoly can be a solution to that, however. But having a large part of a market by itself doesn't trigger anti trust legislation.

hank808 7/5/2025||
Thanks ChatGPT!
parketi 7/5/2025||
Here’s my take on video cards in general. I love NVIDIA cards for all out performance. You simply can’t beat them. And until someone does, they will not change. I have owned AMD and Intel cards as well and played mainly FPS games like Doim, Quake, Crysis, Medal of Honor, COD, etc. all of them perform better on NVIDIA. But I have noticed a change.

Each year those performance margins seem to narrow. I paid $1000+ dollars for my RTX 4080 Super. That’s ridiculous. No video card should cost over $1000. So the next time I “upgrade,” it won’t be NVIDIA. I’ll probably go back to AMD or Intel.

I would love to see Intel continue to develop video cards that are high performance and affordable. There is a huge market for those unicorns. AMDs model seems to be slightly less performance for slightly less money. Intel on the other hand is offering performance on par with AMD and sometimes NVIDIA for far less money - a winning formula.

NVIDIA got too greedy. They overplayed their hand. Time for Intel to focus on development and fill the gaping void of price for performance metrics.

scrubs 7/5/2025||
Another perspective: Nvidia customer support on their mellanox purchase ...is total crap. It's the worst of corporate America ... paper pushing beurceatric guys who slow roll stuff ... getting to a smart person behind the customer reps requires one to be an ape in a bad mood 5x ... I think they're so used to that now that unless you go crazy mode their take is ... well I guess he wasn't serious about his ask and he dropped it.

Here's another nvdia/mellanox bs problem: many mlx nic cards are finalized or post assembled say by hp. So if you have a hp "mellanox" nic nvidia washes their hands of anything detailed. It's not ours; hp could have done anything to it what do we know? So one phones hp ... and they have no clue either because it's really not their IP or their drivers.

It's a total cluster bleep and more and more why corporate america sucks

grg0 7/5/2025||
Corporate America actually resembles the state of government a lot too. Deceptive marketing, inflated prices that leave the average Joe behind, and low quality products on top of all that.
scrubs 7/5/2025||
In the 1980s maybe a course correction was needed to help capitalism. But it's over corrected by 30%. I'm not knocking corporate america or capitalism in absolute terms. I am saying customers have lost power... whether it's phone trees, right to fix, a lack of accountability (2008 housing crisis), the ability to play endless accounting games to pay lower taxes plus all the more mundane things ... it's gotten out of whack.
ksec 7/5/2025||
I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X support are great.
scrubs 7/5/2025||
>I have guessing you have HP "mellanox"? Because Connect-X support are great.

I'll have to take your word on that.

And if I take your word: ergo not Connect-X support sucks

So that's sucks yet again on the table ... for what the 3rd time? Nvidia sucks.

tricheco 7/5/2025|
> The RTX 4090 was massive, a real heccin chonker

Every line of the article convinces me I'm reading bad rage bait, every comment in the thread confirms it's working.

The article provides a nice list of grievances from the "optimized youtube channel tech expert" sphere ("doink" face and arrow in the thumbnail or GTFO), and none of them really stick. Except for the part where nVidia is clearly leaving money on the table... From 5080 up no one can compete, with or without "fake frames", at no price, I'd love to take the dividends on the sale of the top 3 cards, but that money is going to scalpers.

If nvidia is winning, it's because competitors and regulators are letting them.

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