This is long winded but I firmly believe this explains a lot about the industries frenzied push into all these odd directions… All of it. Here seems as good as any place to dump this mess I’ve been stewing on:

I really think it’s important that raytracing, while novel, wasn’t created to improve visuals. It wasnt created to make a programmers life easier. It was created because it was computationally difficult and could be optimized for. It was a fantastic play by nvidia. They created a feature that functionally did very little but they could get an entire cycle ahead of the competition in that optimization. Differentiation of products, in a duopoly, is a big deal. Amd dove right into it - knowing full well that this would leave them brutally behind… But this was a fortuitous event: despite the disadvantage.

Why? Simple. GPUs have been struggling against Moore’s law. Framerates were exceeding ranges even monitors can refresh at. And worse yet there was another hard limit: our eyes. How do you sell cards that have no perceivable value?

Reality is we may well be reaching a point where additional resolutions and framerates dont matter. Badly optimized games only buy so much time.

These companies aren’t stupid. Crypto? They loved it. Computationally expensive. Always need faster… Until we didnt. What now? Demand was plummeting for overpriced high end cards.

Go back and look at when AI and nvidia got in bed. The earnings call was due to be a bloodbath after all these cards were rotting on shelves, unpurchased, and depreciating daily. It was coming ro light that they had been selling cards to miners under the table and that was going to get ugly fast. I have never, in my life, heard a company talk so much about a product on a earnings call – that wasn’t theirs. Not a word breathed about unsold cards barely any numbers discussed. ChatGPT referenced so many times that there was confusion as to whether nvidia actually owned it. The Q/A at the end was comedy gold. People were so confused.

AI was the perfect save. AI is a power virus. Want to fix the black box? Train a black box to mangage that black box. Its a computational sinkhole. They’ve extracted value from gamers to dimishing returns. Meanwhile they can sell the ultimate snake oil to investors: virtual slave labor. Unpaid workers. In floods private equity. Gamers stopped mattering immediately. All of these advances are software. From a GPU design company. Why? It shuts up the peasants while they continue rebranding the “snake oil” to get whoever is buying. Weve nearly achieved the panacea. Just a bit longer!

Behold: we have dressed our industry in the finest of the emperors newest clothes. You can either start selling them or be the only one who doesn’t.

🫧