Sorry if I’m not the first to bring this up. It seems like a simple enough solution.
Why would datacenters be buying consumer grade cards? Nvidia has the A series cards for enterprise that are basically identical to consumer ones but with features useful for enterprise unlocked.
I think you mean their Tesla line of cards? The A (e.g. A100) stands for the generation name (e.g. Ada or Ampere, don’t remember which one got the A), and that same name applies to both the consumer line (GeForce and Quadro) and the data’s centre cards.
The hardware isn’t identical either. I don’t know all the differences, but I know at least that the data centre cards have SXM connectors that greatly increase data throughput.
There are also games that don’t render a square mile of a city in photorealistic quality.
Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.
Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.
I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.
Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.
Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1
I think you may have rose tinted glasses on this point, the level of detail in environments and accuracy of shading, especially of dynamic objects, has increased greatly. Material shading has also gotten insanely good compared to what we had then. Just peep the PBR materials on guns in modern FPS games, it’s incredible, Crysis just had normals and specular maps all black or grey guns that are kinda shiny and normal mapped. If you went inside of a small building or whatever there was hardly any shading or shadows to make it look right either.
Crysis is a very clever use of what was available to make it look good, but we can do a hell of a lot better now (without raytracing) At the time shaders were getting really computationally cheap to implement so those still look relatively good, but geometry and framebuffer size just did not keep pace at all, tesselation was the next hotness after that because it was supposed to help fix the limited geometry horsepower contemporary cards had by utilizing their extremely powerful shader cores to do some of the heavy lifting. Just look at the rocks in Crysis compared to the foliage and it’s really obvious this was the case. Bad Company 2 is another good example of good shaders with really crushingly limited geometry though there are clever workarounds there to make it look pretty good still.
I could see the argument that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to you, but graphics have very noticeably advanced in that time.
The problem is, the ML people will continue to buy Nvidia. They don’t have a choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ☹️
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.
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
Yeah, but cuda tho
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
