Nvidia might not have any new gaming GPUs in 2026 — and could be 'slashing production' of existing GeForce models
8 months ago by FirmDistribution to c/technology
Retroarch disagrees. I don’t need your newfangled enshittified slop. I have megaman X and wine.
Any sub 500 dollar gpu can play any game that’s not ray traced unreal engine 5 slop. Lots of games to choose from the last 40+ years. The only limiting factor is ram prices sadly.
Shhh! Don't give them any ideas!
They’ve already been pushing this for like a decade now. GeForce now has been a thing since like 2015.
This is true. And services like Xbox Game Pass, ugh. I mean, it sounds nice in theory being able to play anything that's on the subscription. But at the same time, you don't own anything! Seems any and all companies are driving consumers in that direction...
Way too late. This has been a talking point for a while. The AI bubble will burst but that doesn‘t mean they‘ll just return to their roots. Those new data centers need a use case and they need a good reason to keep building more.
I guess the silver lining is that this plan B won‘t work out either so we‘ll have to see. But until then we better take good care of our current hardware. It will probably have to last a good while longer.
Cloud computing is the real endgame. The big tech bros want to price consumers out of the PC hardware market (GPUs, RAM, NVMe, etc.) so they can offer a cloud solution via subscription model.
Just stop playing games, and they will have no hold over you.
Or code your own, it's simple to code a simple game.
Damn, I was hoping people would be happy with 2006 style flash coding.
Or code your own, it’s simple to code a simple game.
This might be enough for anyone that only enjoys tic-tac-toe or maybe checkers.
Unless you lose your income, then all your subscription computer, games and data vanish in a puff of profit. But not to worry, you can buy a backup for... no sorry, you don't have enough money because storage is unaffordable. So say goodbye to it all.
Definitely a shrinking audience for AAA games, but I don’t think it will be too bad gamers overall. Consoles will keep marching forward, as will Valve with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
I think the highest of the high end graphics stuff has long since hit diminishing returns. You can do a hell of a lot with yesterday’s hardware and less-than-bleeding-edge process nodes for newer hardware. Consoles have never used bleeding edge GPUs and they’ve always done fine with sales (across the whole market, if not always individually). I think we’re highly unlikely to see a repeat of the 1983 gaming crash.
They do fine in sales because the consoles sold at loss and they make money on game sales.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would love to stop producing consoles and start selling you monthly service via a thin client. They just need a ready to go platform for it to gain enough mass first.
Nintendo has never sold their consoles at a loss. They sell them at a small profit which then grows to a larger profit as the cost of making them decreases.
Home video game sales peaked at $3.2 billion then fell to $100 million, a drop of nearly 97%. This collapse, largely blamed on Atari shoving out low quality games, lasted for 2 years until Nintendo released the NES in North America.
No not really. AMD is still producing cards. Most people play on older or used cards anyways. Maybe like don't make Crysis level Graphics but other than that one year of less GPU releases won't kill gaming. Once the AI bubble bursts NVDIA might have lost a lot of edge over AMD in the gaming market and they'll scramble to get back
AMD hasn't stopped making consumer GPUs yet.
OpenAI owns a good chunk of AMD and AMD definitely also want their share of the AI pie.
I wouldn't look at AMD as some savior that wouldn't ditch consumers for big AI.
I thought AMD also said they were cutting production?
“dont you have phones?”
Yes, but think about the money in mobile and console gaming.... PC gaming was niche even before that and we represent very small percentage of the overall gaming industry. Nobody gives a fuck about us since some time already. Now they just show it to us in daylight.
It’s not as niche as it used to be. In the last 10 years it’s grown quite a bit compared to what it was 20 years ago when bad pc ports were the norm. Due to AI, I guess console gaming will go back to being the main way people game again.
I agree with you that niche is not the correct word here, but comparing the market share to console and mobile we are like 20-25% of the gamers. That is relatively small in my opinion.
That's a fact. PC gaming vs consoles is to gaming as Linux vs Winblows is to Computers. It has grown over the years, as has Linux desktop, but not enough to make or break an industry.
It's a weird world we're living in.
I think it'll have the opposite effect. Knowing the hardware won't change in the next year, they don't have to worry about making it compatible with the new cards. They can focus on building upon what they already have.
And as someone that helped pick out a fantastic PC for my little cousin in dec last year, she paid ~500$ for pretty decent hardware, and so far, she hasn't found a game in my library her PC can't handle. Including "wh40k Space Marine 2"
There's plenty of hardware for younger people that want to get into the hobby. You don't always need the absolute latest.
I hear it's nice
Most people are willing to sell their morals. When nvidia comes crawling back it will be like nothing ever happened.
As a Linux gamer, nvidia was already on thin ice.
Also I had past them up on recentish purchases since they only really controlled the highest end of the market which I don't have the budget for. So honestly I have no intention of welcoming them back unless there is literally no other option. You made your bed.
This is still a pain point for me. I have been looking for a laptop with an AMD GPU for years to use with Linux, but System76, Starlabs, framework, etc insist on only having Nvidia as a discreet option. Or is it that AMD does not have laptop GPUs? Could be.
This is not an advertisement, but have you checked laptopwithlinux (dot) com?
They're based in Europe and I'm pretty sure they offer laptops with AMD GPUs, if integrated ones count. Not sure if it's the highest end stuff, might not have VRAM, but there are definitely AMD laptop GPUs
That would be nice. But video cards are a VERY niche piece of engineering. The knowledge of HOW to make them is locked in a handful of people, and the ability to make them locked behind a very niche set of equipment that will ALSO be exploding in cost.
One does not simply start a graphics card company.
The problem with that is Intel is subject to the same bullshit economic assessments as AMD and Nvidia... They'll just as soon retool for ai as well.
Intel is arguably worse. They‘re in a bad spot right now so they can‘t do crazy things like Nvidia but they totally would and will go down the same path. I don‘t think US designed hardware will ever truly come back to end consumer products.
Nothing will. They're moving us onto techno feudalism. We won't earn anything and we'll be wage slaves if they're merciful to us, otherwise most people will be in camps and dead, unless we stand up real damn soon .
They're actively moving away from the bottom 90% of consumers, it's just not worth it anymore and maybe once it was worth advertising to us, but no longer. The top 10% owns 93% of stocks and control at least 55% of the market revenue as of early 2025, probably closer to 60-65% now, after tariffs, layoffs, and the nonexistent recession We're all imagining and definitely isn't real. /s
Isn't China already building their own consumer GPUs?
Intel is partly owned by the US government now. You think they want tech going to the people when they themselves want them for skynet.
I hope they don't have the production of non-ai chips then.
I get the disdain for GenAI, but are AI chips really the problem? Maybe they're more expensive and price people out, but it's not like they're built on plagiarism like most generative AI models.
As far as I'm aware, they're just capable of running highly complex multivariable calculi in parallel, making them more efficient for AI applications, but wouldn't the same features make them better for more realistic physics and other game mechanics like procedural generation, NPC pathfinding and behaviors, etc.?
I guess it would suck for anyone who doesn't have the hardware to play a game, but there could always be options to configure in the settings to make it playable, like "don't use tensor calculus in game physics" or whatever
Far as i know, GPUs are more specialized on vector calculations. Some upscaling/frame generation techniques use AI hardware but that's it.
Vectors, tensors, and matrices. Not all AI chips are GPUs though, there are currently NPUs in development and the next generation of consumer chips might have them integrated in the CPU.
They're not good for deterministic equations, like gravity, collisions, or pathfinding, but they could advance other aspects of games like procedural generations, fluid dynamics, NPC dynamic personalities and emergent behaviors.
Some things are still better left to the CPU or GPU, but offloading some tasks to the NPU might allow for more complexity like simulating full weather systems with Parametric Partial Differential Equations
I'm speculating, of course. But playing a game inside a fully-simulated physics engine seems like it could be cool (despite being resource-intensive in current hardware)
Easy enough when they're not selling
I wish there were more laptops using AMD gpus here in Brazil. You basically can't find any laptop with an AMD gpu if you search for "gamer laptop" in Brazilian stores.
Gaming laptops are a not really worth it imo. They're underpowered, overheat easily, and tend to break quickly. That doesn't even touch on their battery life, even when not under load.I'd recommend getting a steam deck if you really need the portability, but it doesn't look like they're available in Brazil :/
Steam deck and a gaming laptop don't have the same niche. Laptop is great when you don't have a permanent spot to setup a gaming computer, or traveling a lot for example, but still want to enjoy full experience. Deck is more for playing "on the go" so to speak.
Buying gaming laptop was the best decision for me
You can buy a USB dock and plug every peripheral into the Deck.
You can use desktop mode, too.
There is nothing the Deck can't do. It has weaker hardware, but you can game on it just fine.
I have mine plugged into a projector, for watching movies or playing games.
I’d recommend getting a steam deck
Nah. I want the 15.6 inch screen screen and the keyboard and touch pad that comes with it. The steam deck is too small and I think it's a little expensive here (Valve is not officially selling in Brazil as far as I know).
EDIT: didn't see you already mentioned them not being sold here. I think no third world country has the deck being officially sold for them.
I will when someone makes a GPU that can surpass a 4090. Not even Nvidia themselves can pull that off, so I'm not getting my hopes up.
I'm going to be stuck with this GPU for the next decade the way things are going...not that I'm complaining. It's a beast of a card, especially for someone like me who could only ever afford bargain bin parts until one day I came into a windfall. (That was a fun 4 years.) I don't have to worry about games being unoptimized because I can simply brute force them with pure GPU processing power. I was getting 90 FPS in Last of Us on launch. Even Cities Skylines 2 runs smoothly.
My 4070ti isn't as beefy but there's still not a non-nvidia upgrade. And I am able to play most of my games at 4k / 120. I'd like to upgrade mine so I can give my card to my daughter and give her 3060ti to her brother who is currently running a 1060.
Youre not actively buying from them by using what you have. nobody buys a downgrade.
The time to prevent Nvidia from practically gaining a total monopoly on the entire market by stopping buying Nvidia, was 10 years ago, not now.
Now, I'll consider buying a GPU from you instead if you can make a GPU that satisfies technical needs like Nvidia could, but you cannot.
i think the latest is that china has managed to create a GPU that’s ~7 years behind. i’m not sure that’s “a GPU from 7 years ago” or “it will take them 7 years, acknowledging that there’s a known path so will take less time”
AFAIK they’ll have to figure out EUV or some other method of lithography at that scale, which they’re trying really hard at but it’s one heck of a difficult thing to do which is why only TSMC currently actually has it working
Their current GPU is roughly equal to a 4060 which isn't that bad when you consider how far behind they are in terms of time.
iirc that was the claim but it did significantly worse in actual tests, I wish em luck though as we can always use more competition on the market/
Here's hoping
Oh I wasn't wishing for anything, just pointing out the possibility. There are some Chinese companies gearing up to fill the gap in the memory market. GPUs would be much harder, but maybe very profitable.
If consumers can't get new gpus, devs aren't going to bother spec'ing for them. This'll probably just result in a stalling of tech you'll see at home for a few years. Honestly that seems to be happening already. The leaps we'd seen in previous generations seem to be slowing anyway. Maybe this is just a plateau of tech for a while. Good for consumers when they accept that they don't have to always be on the bleeding edge.
I want devs to write games for £400 Steam Decks. I don't want them to write games for £3000 GPUs.
There's realistically no games that won't run on PS5 level hardware. Every effect that can be done with raytracing can be done a little worse without it.
There are already games that lies on the fringe of photorealism like bodycam. As the other guy said, we need more games with better story than better graphics. It'll be good for the industry if not every AAA game requires a RTX 69000.
I have gone all AMD graphics since converting to Linux. My 9060XT 16GB and 6600 8GB both are going strong.
Fuck NVidia.
I went with Intel ARC since I don’t actually need GPU processing power so much as a decent media engine and VRAM for future projects and Intel has that ready to go under Linux. In the CPU side AMD is the only option that makes sense and for gaming AMDs GPUs have already been the practical option for years but their media engines are trash.
But we don’t need NVIDIA and we don’t even need high end GPUs as much as we think we do.
i really hope nvidia collapses when the AI bubble pops. They've been more harm than good for consumers for too long.
It won't collapse. It'll lose a huge chunk of its stock price, but it both has other business to fall back on and its chips will still likely be used in whatever the next tech trend is - probably neural network AI or something.
I am not sure. They have other businesses but not sure those other businesses are able to sustain the obligations that nVidia has committed to in this round. They are juggling more money than their pre-AI boom market cap by a wide margin, so if the bubble pops, unclear how big a bag nVidia will be left holding and if the rest of their business can survive it. Guess they might go bankrupt and come out of it eventually to continue business as usual after having financial obligations wiped away..
Also, they have somewhat tarnished their reputation with going all in on the dataenter equipment to, seemingly here, abandoning the consumer market to make more capacity for the datacenters. So if AMD ever had an opportunity to maybe cash in, well, here it might be.... Except they also dream of being a big datacenter player, but weaker demand may leave them with leftover capacity..
Never underestimate AMD's ability to miss good opportunities.
never underestimate AMDs ability to shoot itself in the foot when its not under immediate threat of collapse/bankruptcy.
juggling more money than their pre-AI boom market cap by a wide margin
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Nvidia carries a vanishingly small amount of debt for its size. It has way more liquidity than debt.
Like how nVidia buys equity in a customer and in part promises expensive real product as part of it. So they may have so many billions worth of equity in a customer and might be able to leverage that to fund that production if needed, but if that equity evaporates, then they still are on the hook for the expensive product committment.
So maybe not yet straightforward debt, but a whole lot of expensive balls in the air that could manifest as a committed expense when there's no actual money to execute..
Just seems like a lot of financial moves that are far from straightforward of a magnitude that could wipe a company out.
Not really. It's world economy times bigger now.
As someone not looking to spend a ton of money on new hardware any time soon: good. The longer it takes to release faster hardware, the longer current hardware stays viable. Games aren't going to get more fun by slightly improving graphics anyway. The tech we have now is good enough.
People don't just use computers for gaming. If this continues people will struggle to do any meaningful work on their personal computes which is definitely not good. And I'm not talking about browsing facebook but about coding, doing research, editing videos and other useful shit.
But wait! They can pay for remote computing time for a fraction of the cost! Each month. Forever.
I fully expect personal computers to be phased out in favor of a remote-access, subscription model. AI popping would leave these big data centers with massive computational power available for use, plus it's the easiest way to track literally everything you do on your system.
easiest way to track literally everything you do on your system.
And ban undesired activities. "We see you're building app to track ICE agents. That's illegal. Your account was banned and all your data removed.".
"Remain in your cube - The Freedom Force is en route to administer freedom reeducation. Please be sure to provide proof of medical insurance prior to forced compliance."
Remote computing is very expensive. It's just the gated (owned by companies) LLMs that are cheap for the final consumer. Training a 2b LLM on remote compute will cost thousands of dollars if you try to.
2B is nothing, even 7B is tiny. Commercial API-based LLMs are like 130-200 billion parameters.
I mean yeah, training a 7B LLM from scratch on consumer-grade hardware could take weeks or months, and run up an enormous electric bill. With a decent GPU and enough VRAM you could probably shorten that to days or weeks, and you might want to power it on solar panels.
But I haven't calculated what it would take to do on rented compute.
I fully expect personal computers to be phased out in favor of a remote-access, subscription model
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Hopefully the AI bubble popping means they have to close data centers and liquidate hardware. Dirt-cheap aftermarket servers would be good for the fediverse.
This is true but at the current computer prices, nowhere near as bad as it sounds. I spend £100/year or thereabouts for GeForce Now, and
- there's no way I could play games on a £500 laptop that I renew every 5 years,
- no way that a £1000 laptop could get me to play AAA games for more than 1-2 years
- and sure, I could play games on a £2000 laptop, but no way that will last me 20 years.
If you have a life and can't play any more than 25 hours a week, the value proposition right now is great - there's no viable alternative that allows you to keep playing AAA games for the equivalent of £100/year.
Fuck, you almost sold me on GeForce Now. Owning is still a better value proposition for me because I get my games at... steep discounts.
Scientific modeling and simulations
You can write code just fine on 20 or even 30 year old hardware. Basically if it runs Linux, chances are it can also run vim and compile code. If you spring for 10-15 year old hardware, you can even get an LSP + coc or helix, for error highlighting and goto definition and code actions. And you definitely don't need a beefy GPU for it (unless you're doing something GPU-specific of course).
Editing 720p videos (which, if you encode with a high enough bitrate, still looks alright) can be done on 10-15 year old hardware.
Research is where it gets complicated. It does indeed often require a lot of computing power to do modern computational research. But for some simpler stuff - especially outside STEM - you can sometimes get away with a LibreOffice spreadsheet on an old Dell or something.
From the looks of it we will have to get used to doing more with less when it comes to computers. And TBH I'm all for it. I just hope that either my job won't require compiling a lot more stuff, or they provide me with a modern machine at their expense.
Dude, I'm coding every day and I know what hardware requirements I have. You can write some code slowly on a potato but a lot of software development requires tons of RAM and powerful CPU. Linus Torvalds is using Threadripper 9960X for a reason.
It's nicer to develop anything on a beefy machine, I was rocking a 7950X until recently. The compile times are a huge boon, and for some modern bloated bullshit (looking at you, Android) you definitely need a beefy machine to build it in a realistic timeframe.
However, we can totally solve a lot of real-world problems with old cheap crappy hardware, we just never wanted to because it was "cheaper" for some poor soul in China to build a new PC every year than for a developer to spend an extra week thinking about efficiency. That appears to be changing now, especially if your code will be running on consumer hardware.
My dad used to "write" software for basic aerodynamic modelling on punchcards, on a mainframe that has about us much computing power as some modern microcontrollers. You wouldn't even consider it a potato by today's standards. I'm sure if we use our wit and combine it with arcane knowledge of efficient algorithms, we can optimize our stacks to compile code on a friggin 3.5GHz 10-core CPU (which are 10 year old now).
I can code my stuff ok on an older model. I’m sure there are some stacks that need more resources, but I’m having a hard time thinking of which.
Admittedly, on a laptop that is 20+ years old, I cannot surf the web AND run docker at the same time
Honestly it's fine. LSPs are nice but you don't need them per se. A combination of vim, tmux, entr, a fast incremental compiler, grep, and proper documentation can get you a long way there.
A lot of critically important code that's running the servers we're using to communicate was written this way. And, if capitalist decline continues long enough, we will all eventually be begging for vim while writing code with ed.
Personally I use helix with an LSP, because it helps speed up development quite a bit. I even have a local LLM for writing repetitive boilerplate bullshit. But I also understand that those are ultimately just tools that speed the process up, they do not fundamentally change what I'm doing.
If this continues people will struggle to do any meaningful work on their personal computes
Excel users devestated.
We're running straight into a future where consumers' only option for computers are a cloud solution like MS 365
The only future, is one where billionaires aren't in it.
Brother, we're up to trillionaires now and they don't seem like they're going anywhere.
Didn't like 1% of them die from accidents recently? That sub accident, that guy who's penis surgery went wrong.
Pushing constantly towards a subscription economy.
That "economy" is already falling apart. Subscriptions are down, services on "the cloud" are becoming less reliable, piracy is way up again, and major nations and companies are moving to alternatives.
Hell, DDR3 is making a comeback. All that is needed is one manufacturer to start making 15 year old tech again and bam, the house of cards falls.
I have at least 80 DIMMS of DDR3. Upgrading an old tower this morning.
If you want to do work with the GPU you're still buying NVIDIA. Particularly 3D animation, video/film editing, and creative tools. Even FOSS tools like GIMP and Krita prefer NVIDIA for GPU accelerated functions.
LOL fat fucking chance
Despite them being perfectly worthy competitors, gamers will literally never buy AMD.
AMD embedded hardware is quite a bit different than dedicated gpu's. They never break 20% in the steam survey for any kind of gpu, they were trending closer to 10-15% for the longest time.
Which is funny, people use to shit on AMD for bad driver support at launch. But now it's Nvidia whose drivers get actively worse which each release.
They didn't have a high end laptop option when I was shopping. If they want my money I expect an 80 series equivalent in my laptop. If not, I'll probably just end up with a 7080 or 7090 if NVIDIA still does it then.
They’re AI only now.
This is gonna suck
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So that kind of means that the high-end AAA PC market will crash in the next years, right? No new GPUs, production stop for existing GPUs and rising prices for GPU & RAM in combination with inflation and a bad economy ensure that many people can't afford a gaming computer. And that a lot of those younger gamers can't afford to start this hobby.
And that means a shrinking audience for games, which need all this GPU power. If you're an AAA publisher, it kind of looks crazy to invest multiple millions into a game that you can't be sure that your audience will be able to afford to play
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