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▲ esalman 2 hours ago

40 year old gamer here having a flashback of all anti- competition practices Nvidia sustained for decades. Who here remembers GameWorks and PhysX effectively sabotaging multi-vendor optimization in titles like Witcher 3 and Watch Dogs? Expensive Gsync monitors? Trying to force OEMs to be GeForce partners in exchange for full GPU support? Forcing EVGA exit from the market? And then completely shafting gamers when crypto and AI markets opened up?

▲diabllicseagull an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Another 40 year old gamer here. I remember all of it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF36_qMd8M one my fav videos on the matter)

I also had the displeasure to work with nvidia. After years of pushing gaming cards on us for compute, the years I spent working with nvidia was full of conversations where they would list silly excuse after excuse as to why we should use the expensive enterprise-grade cards instead. All the while, we begged them to unlock driver features that were available to Quadro cards but not GeForce cards, features as simple as hardware acceleration pass-through on a remote desktop connection. It took them a full-on epidemic, where remote work became super common, to allow some of those features to GeForce cards.

So it's really on brand that they tried creating a fake scarcity to keep their prices up. I don't envy the situation Jensen is in but I won't be sorry for him.

▲esalman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for sharing the video. What's funny is that YouTube tagged a 10 year old video as AI-generated. Google is another company that's fallen hard from grace.

▲marcus_holmes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I don't envy the situation Jensen is in but I won't be sorry for him.

Connected. Complete lack of integrity.

If he cheats on his wife, and on his customers, he'll probably cheat on his shareholders. Hence having to quit before he's pushed.

▲shevy-java 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well - the situation with his wife or being unable to control his Jenwong or whatever one would call it, is still a private matter (the allegation of the spy situation is a bit more complex, but the other affair he had going, or at the least one, losing track here of his personal love life), is at the end of the day not really something that is or should be in the spotline for others, even though it has already generated tons of meme videos. People are very happily putting memes about the ex CEO right now - he is probably one of the top #3 meme people right now. The other day I saw where he approached two female podcasters; it suddenly had such a creepy vibe, given his weakness for females ... (though that was not a meme as such, just some seemingly accidental Jensen sneakily creeping in situation ... can't stop him zooming in on the ladies, apparently)

But customers having to pay more due to NVIDIA milking them - now that's something that really would require mandatory jail time for all NVIDIA folks involved here, IF true and verified in court (right now we can only speculate, even if we have extremely convincing proof; the courts would have to come to such a conclusion at the end of the day; and for this, the court systems have to work. I have severe doubts the courts work in the USA right now. It seems a billionaires-controlled court. Why is the whole Epstein network not investigated? Why is only Ghislaine in jail? A single person master-minded +5000 sex slaves over some 20 years or so? How is that even logistically possible?).

▲Fr0styMatt88 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not defending NVIDIA by any stretch, but I think Intel is the only one that allows ‘enterprise’ features on their consumer cards, like SR-IOV.

Such a complete failure of the market that NVIDIA hasn’t had any real competition. All of the vendors abandoned PC gamers though. Though the price choke point is memory, not cores.

Which makes me curious, if AMD did another HBM-based card like the Vega series, would that RAM be cheaper now than GDDR?

▲kogepathic 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> but I think Intel is the only one that allows ‘enterprise’ features on their consumer cards, like SR-IOV.

They do not. SR-IOV is only available on Arc Pro cards.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-SR-IOV-Only-For-Arc-Pro

▲doctorpangloss 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> real competition?

many have asked why AMD doesn't make its GPUs cheaper.

lisa su and jensen huang not competing with each other on price and being related is as much of a coincidence as wuhan having a virology institute experimenting on COVID-19 and being the center of the COVID-19 outbreak

▲adrianN 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Owning three percent of one of the most valuable companies in the world is a completely unbearable situation to be in.

▲thijson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was an article on here just a few days ago about an Nvidia crypto GPU that was sold a few years ago. This lady discovered that via voltage glitches she could turn back on features that Nvidia had turned off. She had cards that were sold with only 8 gigs of VRAM enabled that actually had 80 gigs of VRAM.

▲esalman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah I never really shared the adulation the AI community still seems to have for Jensen. To me he was always a sleazebag.

▲ankitg12 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was the discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451903

▲thin_carapace 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

selective binning of semiconductors is not a new or inherently evil practice. that being said, someone managing to get a 170hx to 80 gigs is possibly the most prominent example of unlocking manufacturer restricted features.

▲omgwtfbyobbq an hour ago | parent [-]

80gb to 8gb seems like a bit more than normal binning (eg 5800x3d with bad core/etc cut down to 5600x3d).

▲wmf 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

HBM is quite expensive so it's strange to see so much disabled.

▲sp0rk 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As another almost 40 year old gamer, I find myself wondering why nobody else ever brings up 3dfx when discussing Nvidia. I've been salty with them since the buyout and I've remained an ATI/AMD user all this time because of it.

▲KingOfCoders 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

54 year old TF2 player here, I do remember.

▲saturn8601 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NVIDIA has been terrible to countless groups over the years(even more than you listed). They survived by being really good. You know who else have been jerks? Every other leading successful tech company (NVIDIA is nothing compared to Microsoft's misdeeds for example). Microsoft still going after 51 years. And now a new generation having never remembered the browser wars have fully embraced Microsoft products like VSCode. Your trip down memory lane reminded me about the numerous 'gamer boycotts' that all failed. There used to be a meme about how people signing a pledge boycotting a title would then be seen 'online' on Steam playing said game. At the end of the day most consumers didn't care. They wanted the best products and NVIDIA more often than not delivered. A company that is super polite to all their customers and partners is a company that will still be dropped the second their products stop delivering the value that customers expect.

▲ahartmetz a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Google used to be not jerks, Valve still are. HP - often considered the company that started Silicon Valley - were somewhat famously not jerks for a long time, but that ended decades ago when Hewlett and Packard left.

▲ 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
▲esalman an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

True. As much as we hate on companies like Microsoft and Nividia, or people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, it has to be acknowledged that above a certain level, it's a eat-or-be-eaten world, and I'll never reach that level.

▲nutjob2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yup, they've been sleezebags all along. Nvidia has always treated their software as a tool to nobble the competition.

They're just another rank monopolist. We should celebrate their fall, maybe there will be room for some real competition.

▲saturn8601 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>We should celebrate their fall, maybe there will be room for some real competition.

How are you going to get more competition when the entry cost is so high? The only competition will be the Chinese willing to dump endless cash into this but they are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts either and it will still take years. If NVIDIA starts to falter then in the short term things will get even more painful for consumers as AMD becomes the new crummy company people love to hate.

▲diabllicseagull an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I always thought that Nvidia's presence in the Khronos Group was a farce. On one hand they were vendor-locking as much as possible at the expense of the industry, and on the other they were "contributing" to the open languages and protocols.

▲cowlevel 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

Dirty secret of "open" source: it's a strategic collaboration between big vendors. It's very rarely someone's hobby project. Almost all Linux changes come from hardware vendors.