Nvidia doesn’t seem to care about gaming much anymore. From its lacklustre Blackwell RTX 50 launch, to its stock price booming as its H100s were used in all manner or AI training, to hyperbolic marketing that suggests we should just take our fake frames and be happy about it. Nvidia’s clearly more of an AI company these days. But I hope that doesn’t last.
This is the company that brought us iconic gaming graphics cards, like the 1080 Ti and the ludicrous 4090. It popularized dynamic upscaling with DLSS, and helped make raytracing kind-of viable. But it’s been very clear for a number of years that gaming is not Nvidia’s major focus, and indeed this past one, makes it feel like an afterthought.
I really hope if and when the AI hype dies down, or the bubble bursts, that Nvidia returns to its roots and makes some great gaming hardware again.
Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Humble pie kills hubris
If gaming became a bigger focus for Nvidia again, it would have take it more seriously. That would mean coming to terms with some of the negative habits it’s cultivated in recent years. Instead of taking the gaming market for granted, it would need to be more aggressive with its pricing, making more of its higher-end graphics cards more affordable.
That might even mean it stopped undercutting its board partners with overbuilt Founders Editions, so they can be more creative with their designs without sky-rocketing the price. Maybe Nvidia could sweet talk EVGA to come back too? How fun would it be see KINGPIN cards make a comeback?
It would have to start putting more than 8GB of VRAM on its most affordable graphics cards, too.
If there’s one thing I wish it would do, though, it’s be more honest about its products. Jensen Huang confidently stating that the RTX 5070 would offer RTX 4090 performance (“with AI”) is as close to an outright lie you can get without actually doing so — it’s not even faster than the 4070 Super all the time. It could stop using misleadingly labelled graphs and show real frames per second against its own cards, and the competition. It could highlight native performance, like AMD did during its recent RX 9070 XT debut.
I still love the stupid halo cards
I am a staunch critic of Nvidia’s predatory, monopolistic practices. Its price increases in recent generations have been laughable, and the RTX 50 launch has been downright insulting. But I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t love the ridiculousness of its Titan-esque halo cards. The RTX 1080 Ti, the RTX 3090 Ti, the RTX 4090. Less so the RTX 5090, but still, it’s bonkers. Look how tiny the actual PCB is. Look at how the power connectors are melting again because these graphics cards are so ridiculous.
They’re the fastest cards there’s even been at the time of their release. The lizard part of my brain that just likes to see the numbers go up loves what the hardware can do, and the jaded tech journalist side of me adores the unique ways they pushed the boundaries of what’s possible.
I’d love it if graphics cards were more competitive, and I’d love to see AMD take a shot at the top spot again even if it doesn’t make much financial sense. But I also want to see Nvidia do crazy Nvidia stuff. Just make a 1,000W GPU that needs its own power supply already. Why not?
Get more gamers onboard
If Nvidia took gaming more seriously, it could make some of its best features more applicable to more people. As it stands, some of its flagship gaming features, like DLSS and raytracing, are effectively paywall locked behind the highest-end graphics cards. Even almost seven years on from the debut of these new features with the RTX 20 series, and no one I know uses raytracing outside of those with the most high-end graphics cards.
And how many people do you know who have an XX90 class card? I work in this industry and I only know a couple.
DLSS at the very least should be just as usable on an XX60 card as it is on an XX90. The whole point of the high-end card is that it has the local rendering power to do what the lower-end cards can’t. Giving it more Tensor cores so that it can DLSS even harder than the cards that actually need the help is backwards.
The same goes for raytracing. The 5090 has all the power it needs to drive high frame rates in most games. Giving it almost four times the RT cores of the 5070 just seems unfair. The 5070 is the card that needs that extra help tracing those paths. Sure, make the future 6090 faster in all senses than every other card, but couldn’t we have it so that turning on raytracing on low-end cards doesn’t mean making major sacrifices?
Come back to the fold
Nvidia really botched the RTX 50 series, and the RTX 40-series wasn’t that impressive either. But its tanking reputation doesn’t have to continue to slide — if it starts treating gamers as more than an afterthought. The AI boom won’t last forever, and though Nvidia’s datacenter business will certainly remain a more profitable part of it than consumer hardware, the gaming market will always be an important component in its system.
If Nvidia wants to see off new competition from AMD and Intel, and the ever-greater-encroachment from ARM, it needs to rethink its approach: Fairer pricing, more competitive mid-range options with democratised features, would be a great start.
That doesn’t mean ditching the crazy designs and over the top GPUs that push the boundaries of what’s possible — I want to see more of that, not less — but that can be folded into a more cohesive strategy that understands what gamers actually want and need: Affordable GPUs that let them enjoy a more customized, performative experience than consoles and handhelds.
If Nvidia wants to keep being the best, it needs to act like it still cares.
Read the full article here
