This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What does this mean?
They want to be able to charge enterprises and server operators massively more than ordinary consumers, even for very similar silicon, because they can afford it, and the product is more valuable to enterprises doing work on GPUs than to consumers playing Hogwarts Legacy or dicking around with open source AI models.
The goal is to charge each customer as close to their maximum price as possible. That's much higher for enterprises, so the graphics companies load features that are especially valuable to them on specialty cards that cost much, much more than consumer cards without them. Much of this strategy has collapsed lately, with features like GPU vm passthrough coming to consumer cards, so they've reoriented this strategy to promoting using clusters of cards to get max VRAM for enterprises, which consumer platforms cannot accommodate.
CPU manufacturers do it too, which is why it's very hard to use ECC RAM on a computer unless you shell out for a workstation/server grade platform.
Somewhere in here is an idea to prompt AAA game studios to develop games that require huge amounts of VRAM so that GPU manufacturers are elbowed into offering consumer cards that can do this. But that will take time, and for all I know looks like some sort of time-persistent AI shading model ("game rendered in the style of Van Gogh").
It has to be in a console first; developers don't just lead with PC-first, console-second, because of the sales figures (and nVidia still has some levers to pull, since they can always say "you can buy our chips under cost if you agree not to put more than X GB of unified RAM on your console" and defend their margins that way). And texture memory ultimately has diminishing returns past 1080p; even the biggest texture packs for modern games aren't using even half of the 24GB the largest cards have.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is in nVidia’s interest that cheap GPUs don’t get very much VRAM, because the limiting factor for how smart and performant an LLM/image generation model can be is how fast it can access the matrices. If you could get 80GB of VRAM, which is eminently reasonable, on a card for 2000 dollars then no business would buy the overpriced purpose-built cards.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link