Earlier gamers got punished by crypto and now they are being punished by AI.

"Punished" implies a moral valence to the whole thing which isn't there. It's not like the AI companies were aware of gamers and set out to do this. You simply got run over, like everyone else in front of the trillion dollar bulldozer.

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numpad0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GPUs before crypto had a lot less amount of VRAM. Crypto investment funded a lot of stupid experiments, of which some did stick to the wall. I don't think gamers had lives completely ruined by crypto in the end.

	▲	jayd16 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Crypto didn't need vram did it? It was just about hash rate no? Besides, a 1080 had 8GB, a 5080 has 16GB. Double in 10 years isn't ground breaking. The industry put VRAM into industrial chips. It didn't make it to consumer hardware. What games have had to deal with instead is inference based up-scaling solutions. IE using AI to sharpen a lower rest image in real time. It seems to be the only trick being worked on at the moment. I can't think of anything useful crypto did.

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high_na_euv 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what?

Why gamers must be the most important group?

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Gamers are important because they are consistent customers. Crypto buying of GPUs is done (anyone still in this area is buying ASICs). Meanwhile gamers are still buying GPUs - they do sometimes hold off when the economy doesn't allow, but you can trust that gamers will continue to buy GPUs to play their games and thus they are a safe investment. It is rational to sell CPUs to a gamer for much less than someone in crypto because the gamer will be back (even if the gamer "grows up" there are more replacing them). Thus gamer is an important group while crypto is not.

The above was their prediction during the crypto boom and it turns out correct. I'm not sure how AI will turn out, but it isn't unreasonable to predict that AI will also move to dedicated chips (or die?) in a few years thus making gamers more important because gamers will be buying GPUs when this fad is over. Though of course if AI turns out to be a constant demand for more/better GPUs long term they are more important.

Gamers are not the only important GPU market. CAD comes to mind as another group that is a consistent demand for GPUs over the years. I know there are others, they are all important.

	▲	blibble 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		the "value" of nvidia to the "AI" companies is their tsmc fab contract they don't need CUDA, they don't need the 10 years of weird game support, even the networking tech they need none of nvidia's technology moats exactly same as the crypto, where they just needed to make an ASIC to pump out sha1 as quickly as possible which is really, really easy if you have a fab contract at which point their use of nvidia dropped to zero

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1shooner 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they're just a proxy/alias for 'state-of-the-art personal computing'.

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Gud 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’d rather prefer that the average Joe has a good entertainment system than our corporate overlords has a good surveillance system.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The growth curve of technology has always pointed at the world becoming tiny and non-private.

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Gud 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Disagree.

Mass surveillance by corporations can be outlawed. Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it must be necessarily so.

I travel a lot for work to different nations. The cultural differences are stark.

In the UK for example, they love their CCTVs. In Switzerland, they’re only allowed where they are deemed necessary.

	▲	pixl97 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I mean back in the cold war we started losing privacy to foreign governments. A parade of overhead satellites is capturing everything you do all the time. As much as we expound about the rule of law, might makes right if the population isn't vigilant. Simply put technology gives capability. In 1900 we didn't have the capability to monitor everything that everybody did all the time and keep those records their entire life. Now we have technology that can do just that. This has nothing to do with the law. Zip, zilch, nada. Switzerland is one dark day away from having all their behaviors recorded by businesses/governments. At the end of the day legality is a theoretical construct, and technological capability is reality.

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decremental 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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