Re: Alienating their core?
But look at what is happening in their traditional markets - gamers are moving to consoles, the midrange gamers that used to cover the costs of the next generation of cards don’t as the majority have a GPU and one or more HD screens and don’t have the resources or justification to spend more. In the meantime, the low end is being killed off by Intels builtin GPUs.
Crypto may have given them a few more unexpected years of boom times, but custom hardware and low crypto prices has killed that while cloud providers moving to their own ML hardware makes that a market that’s getting tougher too, particularly when cloud providers appear to be waiting for real cpu improvements before renewing hardware.
I suspect the 2080 was a risk at a biggest/best type product, hoping the crypto market hadn’t peaked and introducing a new feature to drive another generation of card sales to gamers. Instead it missed the end of the crypto boom and showed they should have waited 9 months for 7nm for a real upgrade.
Easy to say in hindsight, but I’m sure nVidia knew the performance wasn’t where it needed to be to justify a new card launch with 7nm so close and raytracing wasn’t going to win them next gen console designs.
The next 12 months will be interesting - if the Win10 upgrade cycle doesn’t help nVidia and Navi is ok but proves to be very cost competitive, we may see a new, much smaller nVidia, a longer upgrade cycle to justify the design costs and the real beginning of the end of PC gaming.