So what if other companies would similarly abuse their position? If it doesn't excuse Nvidia's behavior in some way then it hardly seems relevant to point out. We still need more competition in this space, or Nvidia parts will become increasingly bad deals (as we've seen for consumer GPUs).
I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm simply pointing out it's more-or-less universal standard behavior for people and corporations to abuse positions of power unless checked externally - anti-trust action, checks and balances within government, other regulation, etc. As noted the recurring tendency on HN and elsewhere to paint Nvidia as some kind of unique diabolical actor is very strange.
How are Nvidia consumer GPUs a bad deal? When comparing top of the line cards (I'm not going to bother looking elsewhere in the product lines) for 60% more cost (yes, significant) with an RTX 4090 you get:
- Performance that walks all over the 7900 XTX[0].
- The ability to use it to self-host, experiment, learn, etc a never-ending range of ML applications that (as discussed) "just work" as a docker pull away.
With an RTX 4090 you could have stunning gaming performance one minute and then seconds later be running a local LLM, etc. That is tremendously more value than the 60% price difference. If all I wanted to do was gaming and I was price sensitive I'd save myself the $600 and be happy with an AMD GPU. But, looking at market share[1] (at least 80% across desktop gaming and GPGPU) either the value of AMD GPUs is a little known secret (it isn't) or consumers, with the ability for choice, overwhelmingly see the value in Nvidia GPUs.
