Nvidia's main business has been CUDA and data centers for about a decade, so nothing new there.

In the context of investors asking why Titan/x090s are being sold for less than $2000 when they could be $8000 Teslas, one might even wonder why they keep bothering with gaming GPUs... of course, though, if the gaming market was simply left to AMD and Intel, their GPU divisions would eventually have the R&D and expertise to develop more capable accelerators and strongly challenge Nvidia at the higher end.

(Like AMD saved enough pennies just from consoles to come up with Zen and challenge Intel's almighty cashcow Xenon with Epyc.)

Then why hasn't Nvidia bailed on gamers already if it's such a waste of their time?

That's why a shift from GeForce to Radeon wouldn't really be the answer. For a short while yes, but as you say, then AMD probably put's that money to good company use, which will be used for higher margin tier cards, beyond gaming. Then you've gotta switch to Intel, and then who after that?

Everybody boycotting gaming cards would be a huge signal to AMD and Intel that there's a perfect opportunity to flip the gaming GPU market, which would give them way more incentive to offer something much better for the consumer. It would also let Nvidia know they need to smarten up a lot or else. If Nvidia were to just bail on gamers at that point, then that's a pretty clear sign to gamers they shouldn't have been giving Nvidia their hard earned money.

Gaming market has always been an important market for Nvidia because it provides them a good safety net to fall back to and they do rake in a ton of profits and revenue from that sector. Especially in the laptop and OEM markets more so than DIY. If it wasn't important for them, they wouldn't be continuously bringing in new features like DLSS 3, VSR, Ray Tracing, Reflex, etc that AMD and Intel will eventually attempt to copy. Not to mention driver updates for GPUs as old as the GTX 900 series.

So while Nvidias big bucks does come from Datacenter and server, make no mistake, gaming is still a big focus and will likely always be. Especially now that Radeon is a follower and not a competitor.

I think ray-tracing has been an incidental side-effect of Nvidia finding out the ray-tracing algorithm ran well in their tensor cores. Imagination and a few other startups did it years before but they were no threat to Nvidia or RTG at that point.

When you think about it, except for DLSS, Nvidia has been quite barebones in terms of graphics middleware as of late. Once statistical/neural rendering becomes a feature of game engines, I imagine it will fade to the background just like it happened with PhysX extra features.

While I do agree that Ray Tracing, DLSS along with other features that Nvidia has come out will eventually be something that will fade into the background, it doesn't really matter because by that time, something new will come out that Nvidia cards will be great at and the cycle will restart. Just like how it doesn't matter that PhysX or Tessellation is something no one cares about these days since all cards can essentially do them but the fact that Nvidia cards could do them better than AMD cards for so long allowed Nvidia to be in such a dominating position in the GPU market share.

Like no one who is buying a GPU today cares if Radeon can do Ray Tracing/etc as fast as Nvidia in 2028. Cause in 2028, Nvidia will move the hype to God Tracing or whatever.

Misinterpret my point.  I don't believe Nvidia going to ever leave the gaming market or stop putting RD&T.  What I am saying is that they will focus on features that can be used in more none gaming GPU also and if that mean they price out a lot of people they not that concerned.  They more interested in selling the most powerful GPU to enthusiast then designing a GPU for the masses.

This always been the case but starting with Kepler they was very focus on the mobile market as you see with all the shield devices they launched which meant a focus on energy efficiently and the GPU architectures they released show that.  This happen to work out well for gamers and pricing.

By the time the 20 series release there focus shifted too AI and therefore there gaming GPU also reflected that.  I actually agree ray-traying was more of a well we spent all this RD&T on AI focus stuff how can we also make use of it for gamers.  The fact that packing all this AI stuff into the GPU was going to increase cost of there GPU was not something they concerned with. 

You can also see this with the 30/40 series in that they know the most units they sell is usually the xx60 lines and in previous generation they release that 2-4 months within the flagship.  In 30 series it was a entire year and 40 series we still waiting on.

I just don't believe Nvidia cares if people not willing to pay $600+ for a GPU stop buying there discrete GPU if the architecture requirements for there AI GPU is expensive that going to reflect in there gaming GPU prices.

They not going to make 2 completely different architectures so the data center and gaming one going to share a lot of stuff and the focus always going to be on what make the most money.

I do think Nvidia cares if people stop buying their discrete GPUs but it largely depends on the % of people and the competition. We saw this during the RTX 3000 launch when they could have easily priced the 3080 higher than it's $700 MSRP but they didn't. I don't think Nvidia liked the fact that their $500 3070 could perform similarly to their last gen $1200 2080 Ti or that a $400 3060 Ti could beat their $700 2080 Super but they had to do it because otherwise, Radeon would have killed their market share.

Imo they will continue to price gouge people only if the competition allows it. If Radeon or Intel follows their trends or if customers don't buy Radeon or Intel even if Nvidia is charging a high barrier to entry, then Nvidia will continue to do what they are doing. If only a small number of people switch to Radeon or Intel because of their prices, then Nvidia doesn't care. But if a large number do, they absolutely will care because it's a big source of revenue for them and we have seen them respond in the past many times to competition in pricing and performance.

And the most important thing is that for Radeon or Intel to make a GPU that can do all the things that Nvidia GPUs can, they will need to price their GPUs similarly otherwise they will either be behind in performance or feature set or they simply won't have the R&D budget to keep up and Nvidia knows this.

AMD has typically relied on the open source community to inject "features" into it's Graphics lineup... It's cheap, easy to make industry standard.
Intel then has followed suit with it's integrated graphics.

But even features that AMD has a decade+ worth of experience over nVidia with, like Tessellation, when nVidia implements it, it is happy to dedicate more silicon to the problem and provide a better solution overall... So it always seems like nVidia has the advantage, because it does.

...And honestly, AMD banked it *big* during COVID and the Crypto boom, they were making GPU's at a record pace and cashing in big, that should be enough of a cash injection to boost their R&D for several years.

Either way, I have been buying AMD for years, they provide better price/performance for my needs and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

^This.

AMD hasn't had the same opportunity to take on Nvidia like they have with Intel. Nvidia has always been making some level of progress, even if some of that progress is due to (past) strong superb marketing, where Intel basically stalled for half a decade or more and has had terrible boring marketing for quite some time.

If gamers want things to change at any of the GPU companies, continuing to buy GPU's like they have been won't lead to any solution. Not unless you eventually get some all new secret tech that saves the day.

Welcome to the Monday news!

SALES /PLAYER COUNT & DEALS

GOG has launched its Spring Sale, with over 4000 titles on sale, as well as new Deals of the Day, a Giveaway and some bundles. The sale will last until April 3rd, and here are today's deals:

• Let's start with the important pice: the GIVEAWAY is Lorelai, available during the next 70 hours: https://www.gog.com/en/game/lorelai
• These are the 9 Deals of the Day, that will last 46 hours:
  • IMMORTALITY is 25% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/immortality
  • Hellish Quart, still in development, gets a 30% discount: https://www.gog.com/en/game/hellish_quart
  • Fabled Lands is 44% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/fabled_lands
  • The Falcon Collection (4 games) gets its price cut in half: https://www.gog.com/en/game/falcon_collection
  • Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases gets a 60% discount: https://www.gog.com/en/game/agatha_christie_hercule_poirot_the_first_cases
  • The always present in every new sale GOG Kinky Bundle is 66% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/gog_kinky_bundle
  • Port Royale 4 - Extended Edition sports a 70% discount: https://www.gog.com/en/game/port_royale_4_extended_edition
  • The Metro Franchise Bundle (3 games + 2 DLCs) is going to be 77% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/metro_franchise_bundle
  • And another usual, the GOG Adventure&Puzzle Bundle, gets a 92% discount: https://www.gog.com/en/game/gog_adventurepuzzle_bundle
• There is a Serious Sam BYOB where, if you buy or own 5 games, you'll get a bigger discount: https://www.gog.com/en/promo/2023_spring_sale_serious_sam_byob
• If you want to learn more about the sale, check this: https://www.gog.com/en/news/spring_sale_is_here_with_over_4000_deals_up_to_90_giveaway_curated_collections_byob_gog_bundles_new_releases_and_more

The Humble Store has two sales to mention:

• The VR Sale will bring up to 90% discounts during the next 4 days. All the keys are for Steam, except for one that's also available for GOG: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/promo/virtual-reality-sale/
• The Ubisoft Publisher Sale (that I'm not sure if it's new or not), features up to 85% discounts during 11 days. While the majority of the keys are for UbiConnect, there are also 3 for Steam and another 3 for GOG: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/promo/ubisoft-publisher-sale/

And Fanatical's Spring Sale has entered the Encore stage, which means that it will end soon. Meanwhile, there are four new 24 hour Flash Deals:

• The first one is Hi-Fi RUSH, 23% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/hi-fi-rush
• The second one is RimWorld, with a 30% discount: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/rimworld
• God of War is the third one, with a 50% discount: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/god-of-war
• And the last one is Hard West 2, 57% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/hard-west-2

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

Epic Games adds new PSO precaching mechanism to Unreal Engine 5.1 to reduce shader compilation stutters
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-adds-new-pso-precaching-mechanism-to-unreal-engine-5-1-to-reduce-shader-compilation-stutters/
Epic Games has added a new PSO precaching mechanism to Unreal Engine 5.1 to improve PSO hitching in DX12 titles. This new mechanism will attempt to reduce the shader compilation stutters in future DX12 games (provided these games support this new mechanism).
Going into more details, the new PSO precaching mechanism now skips drawing objects if their PSOs aren’t ready yet. The system aims to have the PSO ready in time for drawing, but it will never be able to guarantee this. When it’s late, it is now possible to skip drawing the object instead of waiting for the compilation to finish. This will ultimately reduce shader compilation stutters.
>> Let's hope it works!

Steam may get a system to let players take 'game notes'
https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-may-get-a-system-to-let-players-take-game-notes/
"Valve is working on a 'game notes' system," says SteamDB creator and noted Steam dataminer Pavel Djundik, "which will be available in the Steam library, and on the web." While "game notes" is vague enough to mean plenty of different things, the consensus expectation is a way of attaching private notes to games to keep track of things while you're playing, without having to alt-tab away or write them down on paper.

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project Ultra Quality Version Released
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/cyberpunk-2077-hd-reworked-project-ultra-quality-version-released/
Earlier this week, we informed you about the release of the Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project. And a couple of days ago, modder ‘Halk Hogan’ released an Ultra Quality version of it.
Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project aims to improve the game’s graphics by reworking game assets to better quality preserving original art style. This is a must-have mod as it comes from the man behind the amazing The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project. Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project Ultra Quality contains the highest quality textures and gives the best visual experience. The modder recommends this version for 2K/4K displays. However, this version can increase VRAM usage. Halk Hogan states that the game can use up to 800MB more VRAM.

Battlefield 1942 gets an 11GB HD Graphics Overhaul Remaster Mod
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/battlefield-1942-gets-a-11gb-hd-graphics-overhaul-remaster-mod/
Modder ‘ScureHD’ has released a brand new version of the Graphics Overhaul Remaster Mod for Battlefield 1942. This new version is around 11GB in size, and will significantly improve the graphics of this classic BF game.
Going into more details, this graphics overhaul mod contains texture updates (including terrain, skybox, environment, vegetation, vehicle and weapon textures) up to 4096×4096 resolution. There are also other tweaks like increased in-engine specular lights and environmental reflections. Not only that, but the mod increases the game’s render distance and LOD quality.
>> There's a short before and after comparison video.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Mod adds support for DLSS Ultra Quality & DLAA
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/red-dead-redemption-2-mod-adds-support-for-dlss-ultra-quality-dlaa/
Modder ‘stoker25’ has released a version of DLSSTweaks for Red Dead Redemption 2 that adds support for DLSS 2 Ultra Quality and DLAA.
For those unaware, DLSSTweaks is a wrapper DLL that can force DLAA onto DLSS-supported titles. For Red Dead Redemption 2, you can use an updated DLSS DLL by setting the OverrideDlssDll setting to the path of an nvngx_dlss.dll outside of the game folder, so that RGL won’t be able to overwrite the DLSS you’ve chosen.
>> There's no video nor screenshots.

Resident Evil 4 Remake Mods remove yellow paint & aiming zoom
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/resident-evil-4-remake-mods-remove-yellow-crate-paint-aiming-zoom/
A lot of cool mods for Resident Evil 4 Remake have already surfaced online. And instead of sharing numerous character swap mods, we’ve decided to share two mods that can significantly improve RE4Remake’s gameplay.
The first mod removes the yellow paint from the game’s destructible objects. We know that some gamers complained about the yellow paint. So, if you were one of them, this mod is for you. By using it, you can make the game’s world a little bit more believable.
The second mod removes the aiming zoom-in that Capcom has implemented. By using this mod, the camera will remain the same whenever you aim. Again, this is something that some players complained about (as the zoom-in can disorientate you).
>> The article has one video, but it's from a character swap mod that turns Leon into John Wick, also included in the article.

Dark Souls 3 gets an unofficial Easy Mode
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/dark-souls-3-gets-an-unofficial-easy-mode/
Modder ‘Zethras’ has released a new mod for Dark Souls 3 that brings to it an unofficial Easy Mode. Now what’s cool about this mod is that it’s not a trainer that makes you an invincible God. Instead, it cleverly makes some adjustments in order to make the whole experience a bit easier.
Going into more details, Easy Souls III features three custom difficulties. These are: Easy, VeryEasy and UltraEasy.
Easy Mode basically increases the amount of souls you gain by 25%. It also lowers the damage you take by 25%, and increases the damage you make to enemies by 25%. In VeryEasy Mode, the percentages are at 50%, and in UltraEasy, the percentages are at 75%.
>> There's a video in the article, but it has nothing to do with this mod.

Classic Deus Ex will get an HD Remaster treatment in Unreal Engine 5
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/classic-deus-ex-will-get-an-hd-remaster-treatment-in-unreal-engine-5/
The creator of the DXU24 project, a project that aims to bring the classic Deus Ex game to Unreal Engine 5, has shared a new dev video. This development video showcases some of the improvements that its latest WIP version features. It also offers a few comparison scenes between the original Unreal Engine 1 and the remastered Unreal Engine 5 versions.
DXU24 is an on-going project, aiming to bring the classic version of Deus Ex to the latest version of Unreal Engine. Furthermore, it will support VR, letting you experience this classic FPS in VR.
>> There's an almost 5 minutes video of the mod.

This fixed-camera survival horror mod is like a Half-Life and Resident Evil teleporter accident
https://www.pcgamer.com/this-fixed-camera-survival-horror-mod-is-like-a-half-life-and-resident-evil-teleporter-accident/
On March 9, modder SellFace released Lost and Damned, a single-player mod for Half-Life 2's venerable Source engine. It's a cheeky, fun homage to Resident Evil that jumbles the two games up in a way that gave me whiplash (in a good way), and maybe the most surprising thing here is SellFace's pitch-perfect fixed camera gameplay.
>> There's a 2 minutes long release trailer of the mod.

GAMING NEWS

The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition Update 1.1 released, aims to improve performance, full patch notes
https://www.dsogaming.com/patches/the-outer-worlds-spacers-choice-edition-update-1-1-released-aims-to-improve-performance-full-patch-notes/
Private Division has released the first update for The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition which aims to improve its performance. Furthermore, this patch will reduce the shader compilation stutters that PC gamers have been experiencing.

Diablo 4 Open Beta suffers from long login queues that can go up to two hours
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/diablo-4-open-beta-suffers-from-long-login-queues-that-can-go-up-to-two-hours/
A few hours ago, Blizzard launched the Early Access phase of Diablo 4’s Open Beta. In this Eary Access phase, those that have pre-ordered the game can play its Open Beta. However, most of you won’t be able to do so as there are currently loooooooong login queues.
>> And no one was surprised.

First gameplay trailer for the fantasy action RPG, Atlas Fallen
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/first-gameplay-trailer-for-the-fantasy-action-rpg-atlas-fallen/
Focus Entertainment has released the first gameplay trailer for its upcoming fantasy action RPG, Atlas Fallen. This trailer is relatively short, so don’t expect much from it. Still, it does pack some combat sequences, giving us a glimpse at its combat mechanics and enemies.

Arkane’s Redfall will support Ray Tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 3
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/arkanes-redfall-will-support-ray-tracing-and-nvidia-dlss-3/
NVIDIA has revealed that Arkane’s open-world, single-player and co-op FPS, Redfall, will support Ray Tracing and DLSS 3. However, these Ray Tracing effects won’t be available on launch day. Instead, Arkane will add them via a post-launch update.

Valheim Patch 0.214.300 released and here are all of its changes & fixes
https://www.dsogaming.com/patches/valheim-patch-0-214-300-released-and-here-are-all-of-its-changes-fixes/
Iron Gate has released a brand new update for Valheim. According to the release notes, Patch 0.214.300 comes with performance and various bug fixes. Furthermore, it adds Swap Triggers controller option.

Resident Evil 4 Remake gets an anime commercial from Nippon Animation
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/resident-evil-4-remake-gets-an-anime-commercial-from-nippon-animation/
Nippon Animation and Capcom have released a new, short but sweet, anime commercial for Resident Evil 4 Remake. And, since I’m a big fan of anime, I had to share it with you.