Sorry if I’m not the first to bring this up. It seems like a simple enough solution.
People did stop buying them. Their consumer GPU shipments are the lowest they’ve been in over a decade.
But consumer habits aren’t the reason for the high prices. It’s the exploding AI market. Nvidia makes even higher margins on chips they allocate to parts for machine learning in data centers. As it is, they can’t make enough chips to fill the demand for AI.
Just like Chrome will stop being anti-consumer when people stop using it. Or Blizzard will stop being terrible if people stop buying their games. People are not very good at this whole “voting with your wallet” thing.
What’s funny is that I vote with my wallet, and I tell my friends about it and they think I’m the weird one for not having a Facebook account, not having insta or Twitter, or shopping at Amazon or Walmart or Chick-fil-A.
Then I explain it and they say, “that makes sense” and not 30 minutes later are telling me about how I should look up somebody on tiktok, which I don’t have, or asking about windows 11, which I don’t use, or telling me I should buy a Tesla, which I don’t want, and its for all the same reasons I keep explaining to them.
You vote with your wallet. My vote goes for people over countries and corporations.
As a side effect, countries and corporations have ensured that anyone who doesn’t comply gets ostracized.
Almost like people with more money than sense can outvote everyone else.
How do you even count “people who didn’t buy product X”? There could be millions more, either out of revolt or sheer disinterest, but that just doesn’t matter for the companies selling a product. The only votes that end up counting are the ones from people buying.
People really need to drop that saying, because the market was never a democracy and it will never be. Hell, companies can even ignore the paying customers to do something else entirely because the ones who have the most money are the investors.
Almost like voting with your wallet doesn’t actually work. Or only works in same way ‘communism’ and ‘well regulated free market capitalism’ concepts work… in theory only.
It works a lot better when there are many choices, fair competition in the market, and the traits being voted on are painfully obvious.
Because the free market is bullshit. It always results in a few major companies hand-shaking and fucking over consumers. Smaller businesses almost never have a chance and are just as easily bought out. To win in this capitalist iteration of society, you have to be the worst and greediest you can be. Add in the fact most people prefer to remain ignorant or are just generally apathetic from years of conditioning, and ‘voting with your wallet’ rarely really works. You should still do it though of course.
It’s a struggle. Boycotts are historically very hard to be effective and I feel that the Internet has made it even more difficult. Protests need their own marketing and companies at an international scale feel almost immune from any public movements.
That said, voting with your wallet, like boycotts, do work. They just need people to be consistent and informed. But it does work.
Look at Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the 2nd). Prerelease it got over -600k downvotes and substantially hurt the game to the point that they reworked the entire system. If gamers had just bought the game and played anyway, EA wouldn’t have needed to actually rework it. But they were so worried about the performance of the game that they actually made a change.
Same for Sonic the Hedgehog. He looked so, so terrible that the fear of losing money made him get fixed.
Granted, these two are examples of something becoming changed before full release, but in spirit the effect is the same. Corporation scared to lose money so changes are made to help make money. Voting with your wallet does work. It just needs to be marketed right. Edit: and I completely forgot the context here, which is that for something like tech, while consumers can have a choice, corporations do too. That’s where the struggle comes in
Well… I bought an AMD card, I have been using Firefox for a few years now, and I’m not buying anything from Blizzard. There are literally dozens like me… Unfortunately, only a small number of people know these things and have these views and care enough to boycott. These companies will continue to do what they do until there is sufficient pushback (if ever) to make it less profitable than alternatives.
They are also not very good in voting for politicians that actually act in their interest. It baffles me every day… what do you guys think is the reason for this?
undereducation. The missing skill here is critical thinking, and critical thinking is something that you don’t usually get a lot of practice with until college. The conservative strategy of raising the price of college, refusing to spend money on student aid, and demonizing college professors as liberal brainwashers has been quite effective in keeping their constituents away from higher education.
I think quality of education is a big one too, but as long as teachers are underpaid, schools underfunded, understaffed and stretched as far as they can go, things can’t improve ☹️
No, actually I don’t need to buy the worse product. Privacy considerations are part of the package, just like price and performance are.
I use firefox, because in the performance - privacy - price consideration it beats chrome.
I have a Nvidia graphics card, because being able to run CUDA applications at home beats AMD.
You don’t have to do anything, but you’re still encouraging this behavior no matter how you choose to look at it. If that doesn’t bother you, then idk why you’re even replying.
All of Lemmy and all of Reddit could comply with this without it making a difference.
And the last card I bought was a 1060, a lot of us are already basically doing this.
You have not successfully unionized gaming hardware customers with this post.
Buddy all of reddit is hundreds of millions of people each month. If even a small fraction of them build their own PCs, they’d have a massive impact on nVidia sales
What other company besides AMD makes GPUs, and what other company makes GPUs that are supported by machine learning programs?
Exactly, Nvidia doesn’t have real competition. In gaming sure, but no one is actually competiting with CUDA.
AMD has ROCm which tries to get close. I’ve been able to get some CUDA applications running on a 6700xt, although they are noticeably slower than running on a comparable NVidia card. Maybe we’ll see more projects adding native ROCm support now that AMD is trying to cater to the enterprise market.
They kinda have that, yes. But it was not supported on windows until this year and is in general not officially supported on consumer graphics cards.
Still hoping it will improve, because AMD ships with more VRAM at the same price point, but ROCm feels kinda half assed when looking at the official support investment by AMD.
I don’t own any nvidia hardware out of principal, but ROCm is no where even close to cuda as far as mindshare goes. At this point I rather just have a cuda->rocm shim I can use, in the same was as directx->vulkan does with proton. Trying to fight for mindshare sucks, so trying to get every dev to support it just feel like a massive uphill battle.
AMD supports ML, its just a lot of smaller projects are made with CUDA backends, and dont have developers there to switch from CUDA to OpenCL or similar.
Some of the major ML libraries that used to built around CUDA like Tensorflow has already made non CUDA branches, but thats only because tensorflow is open source, ubiquitous in the scene and litterally has google behind it.
ML for more niche uses basically is in the chicken and egg situation. People wont use other gpus for ML because theres no dev working on non CUDA backends. No ones working on non CUDA backends because the devs end up buying Nvidia, which is basically what Nvidia wants.
There are a bunch of followers but a lack in of leaders to move the direction in a more open compute environment.
No joke, probably intel. The cards won’t hold a candle to a 4090 but they’re actually pretty decent for both gaming and ML tasks. AMD definitely needs to speed up the timeline on their new ML api tho.
Problem with Intel cards is that they’re a relatively recent release, and not very popular yet. It’s going to be a while before games optimize for them.
For example, the ARC cards aren’t supported for Starfield. Like they might run but not as well as they could if Starfield had optimized for them too. But the card’s only been out a year.
The more people use Arc the quicker it becomes mainstream and optimised for but arc is still considered “beta” and slow in peoples minds even though there were huge improvements and the old benchmarks don’t hold any value anymore. chicken and Egg problem. :/
Disclaimer: i have an arc 770 16GB because every other sensible upgrade path would have cost 3x-4x more for the same performance uplift (and I’m not buying an 8GB card in 2023+) but now I’m starting to get really angry at people blaming Intel for “not supporting this new game” - all that gpus should support is the graphics API to the letter of the specification, all this day-1 patching and driver hotfixes to make games run decent is bs. Games need to feed the API and GPUs need to process what the API tells it to, nothing more nothing less. It’s a complex issue and i think Nvidia held the monopoly for too long, everything is optimised for Nvidia at the cost of making it worse for everyone else.
Funnily enough I just, like an hour before reading this post bought an AMD card. And I’ve been using NVIDIA since the early 00’s.
For me it’s good linux support. Tired of dealing with their drivers.
Will losing me as a customer make a difference to NVIDIA? Nope. Do I feel good about ditching a company that doesn’t treat me well as a consumer? Absolutely!
Suddenly your video card is as mundane and trivial a solved problem as your keyboard or mouse.
It just works and you never have to even think about it.
To even consider that a reality as someone who’s used Linux since Ubuntu 8.10… I feel spoiled.
Don’t even get me started on linux audio support.
I recall exactly once back in the day that Ubuntu actually just played audio through a laptop I installed it on and I damn near lost my mind.
like 30 minutes ago I installed Mint on a laptop and literally everything just worked as if I installed windows from the backup image. (I’m not sure power states are working 100% but it’s close enough and probably would with 3rd party driver)
I used some Ubuntu derivative for recording shitty music me and my buddy made in a trailer. OSS off of a turtle beach soundcard with a hacked together driver, crammed into a shitty Windows Vista era desktop.
I felt like some sort of junk wizard.
I use arch these days, Garuda mainly. I’ve done the whole song and dance from Arch to Gentoo. I know the system, now I want to relax and let something I suck at, giving myself features be more in the hands of a catering staff of folks and the Garuda boys know how to pamper.
The dragons kinda… yeah, the art’s kinda cringe but damn, this is the definition of fully featured.
Those were rough days. I started with Dapper Drake but there was no way to actually get my trackpad drivers until 8.04. Kudos for sticking with linux
I was hooked. It was the first time my PC felt as transparent and lie-free as notebook paper.
Like, there’s nothing to hide because nothing is. It’s pure, truthful freedom and that meant more to me than raw usability. I tried to do everything possible on Linux that i was told I couldn’t do, hell, I ran Team Fortress 2 and Half Life in wine way pre-proton.
and it sucked, but it was cool tho!
Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.
I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.
I’m not familiar with that video but I’m intrigued. I’ll have to check it out.
I don’t know. I don’t have much faith in people to act against companies in a meaningful way. Amazon and Walmart are good examples. I feel like it’s common knowledge at this point that these companies are harmful but still they thrive.
Have a 3060ti, was thinking of moving to Linux. Is there no support from Nvidia?
You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.
On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.
I ran my 1060 just fine for a few year. Nvidia has an official, but proprietary driver that might not run well on some distro’s. Personally I haven’t had any issues, though it would be better to stick with xorg and not wayland. Wayland support on nvidia I’ve heard isn’t great, but it does work
Nvidia on Linux is better than ever before, even over the past couple of months there were tremendous improvements. As long as you use X11 you will have a pretty good gaming experience across the board, but Nvidia driver updates are often a headache. With AMD, you don’t even have to think about it, unless Davinci Resolve forces you to, but even then it’s a better situation.
Anyway, comments like “you’ll be 100% fine” are not really based on reality, occasionally Nvidia will break things. However if you use the BTRFS filesystem with Timeshift (or even that wretched Snapper) set up, then this is merely a minor inconvenience. (for example before I moved to Arch, Ubuntu pushed an Nvidia update that broke my system, happened in June…)
