"An NVIDIA GPU is just a pile of *!" A 6000-word article by a blogger strongly criticizes.

Chenxi, from Ao Fei Temple
Quantum Bit | Public Account QbitAI

NVIDIA has been having multiple issues, causing widespread anger.

A blogger published an article accusing NVIDIA of numerous "crimes," including quality defects in its graphics cards and difficulties in purchasing.

The blogger's language was also very harsh, directly calling NVIDIA a pile of *.

In this nearly 6000-word blog post, the blogger criticized NVIDIA from product to sales strategy, specifically accusing them of:

Product quality issues, such as burned interfaces and missing ROPs units;
Unreasonable sales strategies, including inventory shortages, bundled sales, and scalpers hoarding;
Locking in technology with a moat, breaking backward compatibility;
Monopolizing the market and manipulating media and review agencies.

One stone caused a thousand ripples, and the blogger's article also sparked extensive discussions on Hacker News.

Some netizens stated that high-end GPUs have gradually become luxury items.

However, others believe that Huang (NVIDIA's founder) has seized every market opportunity with GPU and software-hardware technologies, and this will continue, and NVIDIA will remain dominant for a long time.

So, what exactly did the blogger's article say?

Note: The views in this article are solely those of the original blogger and commenters.

Frequent Faults, Questionable Product Quality

Taking the newly released 50-series graphics cards as an example, one of the most well-known faults is the burned interface on the 5090.

Moreover, this fault wasn't new to the 50-series; it had already appeared in the 4090.

Even more dramatic was that before the release of the 50-series, NVIDIA had promised that the issue of burned interfaces had been completely resolved.

But soon, Reddit users posted about burning smells while playing games with the 5090 Founder's Edition, only to find that the card's interface had burned out.

And this user used the same 12VHPWR interface as the 4090 at the time.

Similarly, another YouTuber encountered the same problem of burned interfaces.

The second major incident was the missing ROPs (rasterization processing units), affecting models such as the 5090, 5090D, and 5070 Ti.

The famous hardware community and GPU-Z developer TechPowerUp found that the performance of ZOTAC's 5090 Solid was significantly lower than that of the Founder's Edition when testing the card.

They checked various factors like clock speed, cooling, and power, but they couldn't figure out the cause of the performance drop until they saw a post on the forum.

A user named Wuxi-gamer posted that when using GPU-Z to check his card, he discovered that instead of 176 ROPs, there were only 168, which was 8 fewer or 4.54% less.

He tried reinstalling the driver, reinstalling the operating system, and switching the VBIOS, but none of these worked.

After seeing the post, TechPowerUp immediately checked their own card and found that it also lacked 8 ROPs.

Further tests by TechPowerUp showed that the absence of ROPs actually affected game performance, depending on the degree of reliance on ROPs.

For example, in Elden Ring (4K UHD, without DLSS), the ZOTAC card lacking ROPs was 5.6% slower than the Founder's Edition and 8.4% slower than the ASUS ROG version.

If Sebin's claim is correct, this defect would push the 5070 Ti back to the level of the 4070 Ti Super.

Later discoveries also indicated that these problems weren't exclusive to ZOTAC, as MSI, Gigabyte, Palit, and Inno3D's 5090s also experienced similar issues, while some users reported that their ZOTAC cards were normal.

In other words, the problem lies within NVIDIA itself.

Aside from the hardware, the driver program for NVIDIA graphics cards also has issues.

At the initial release of the 50-series, many users found that updating the driver rendered their graphics cards "bricked," with lights on but not detected in the system, and not recognized in the BIOS. This issue affected the 5090/90D/80, and all versions from different suppliers experienced this problem.

Similar issues had occurred with the 40 and 30 series before, but downgrading the driver usually fixed it. However, the newly released 50 series had no available downgrade version at the time.

When the 5070 Ti was released and a new driver was issued, the issue remained unresolved, and complaints about "bricking" increased on the NV forums.

NVIDIA acknowledged the problem at the time but said they could not provide specific solutions or timelines for fixing it.

Despite the numerous issues, NVIDIA graphics cards remain highly sought after, and their sales strategy became another reason for the blogger's dissatisfaction.

Low Inventory and Scalpers, High Prices for N-Cards

The blogger cited statements from NVIDIA retailers indicating that the inventory available during the launch was extremely limited, with only single digits of 5090s available.

The already scarce inventory was further depleted by scalper robots, causing people to be unable to purchase before the stock ran out.

This led to rumors that NVIDIA intentionally kept low inventory to create a sense of urgency and inflate prices.

Of course, some netizens believe this is not true, as manufacturers and consumers both hate scalpers.

However, on the secondary market, the prices of graphics cards far exceeded the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

For example, the ASUS version of the 5090, which has a suggested retail price of $1999, sold for $3359.99 on the well-known e-commerce site NewEgg, and there was no stock. Third-party sellers had the lowest price at $5100 (about 36,000 RMB), more than double the suggested price.

The blogger also found that even the 40 series was still overpriced. For instance, the starting price of the mid-range 4070 was $800, which is a third more than the manufacturer's suggested retail price of $599, while the same price could buy the second-highest performing 7900 XT from AMD in the same generation.

Additionally, some retailers bundled graphics cards with other inventory (such as power supplies, monitors, keyboards, and mice) to further increase prices and clear out warehouse items that people would not normally buy.

In the blogger's view, NVIDIA turns a blind eye to this phenomenon because revenue from data centers has approached 80%, compared to just 17% from consumer-grade graphics cards, making individual users unimportant to NVIDIA.

Although the blogger considers NVIDIA graphics cards "low-quality and overpriced," it does not affect its dominance in the consumer-grade graphics card market.

The blogger, who is deeply dissatisfied with NVIDIA, openly admits this reality, believing that it is due to NVIDIA's technological moat.

Over the years, NVIDIA has introduced a series of proprietary technologies exclusively for its hardware, such as DLSS, CUDA, NVENC, and G-Sync. These technologies are closely integrated with NVIDIA hardware to ensure compatibility and performance.

Pressuring Reviewers, Attempting to Control Public Opinion

Aside from dissatisfaction with products and sales, the blogger also mentioned that NVIDIA's dominant position in the consumer-grade graphics card market has led it to threaten media and review agencies and manipulate public opinion.

The blogger cited the Hardware Unboxed incident in December 2020 as evidence.

At that time, Bryan Del Rizzo, NVIDIA's senior PR manager, sent an email to Hardware Unboxed, stating that their review "did not meet expectations," as they focused only on rasterization performance and "greatly discounted" other technologies provided by NVIDIA (such as DLSS and Reflex).

The email clearly stated that NVIDIA's Founders Edition cards and other products would be prioritized for media that "recognized the change in the gaming landscape and the importance of player features," and that if Hardware Unboxed changed its editorial direction, future collaboration could be reconsidered.

This led to Hardware Unboxed being temporarily banned from receiving NVIDIA's Founders Edition review samples.

This year, NVIDIA again tried the same tactics, pressuring Gamers Nexus to include Multi-Frame Generation (multi-frame generation) metrics in their reviews, otherwise limiting their access to interviews with NVIDIA engineers and the production of special programs.

Steve Burke, editor-in-chief of Gamers Nexus, stated that NVIDIA's actions tarnished the legitimacy of all past and current NVIDIA graphics card reviews, creating an atmosphere of distrust.

At the time of the release of the "sweet spot" 5060, NVIDIA once again demonstrated a trick.

During the release of the 5060, NVIDIA did not provide the necessary drivers to reviewers, releasing the graphics card and driver simultaneously, while most reviewers were at the Taipei Computer Show.

Only carefully selected media received "preview" information about the card, but there were no independent reviews.

The blogger believes this may have been to avoid exposing the 8GB memory shortage, as this memory capacity would make the "sweet spot" card's lifespan very short and quickly insufficient for demand.

One More Thing

After listing all of NVIDIA's offenses, the author directly stated, "NVIDIA won, we all lost."

More than 90% of the PC market uses NVIDIA's technology. They are undoubtedly the winner in the GPU competition, while we are the losers.

Moreover, the title used on Hacker News was this sentence, not the blogger's original title "NVIDIA is full of sh*t," leading netizens to suspect that HN might also have been pressured.

So, will you still pay for Huang's graphics cards?

References:

[1]https://blog.sebin-nyshkim.net/posts/nvidia-is-full-of-shit/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44468175

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Quantum Bit QbitAI

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7524192144203039259/

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