244
Edward Snowden slams Nvidia's RTX 50-series 'F-tier value,' whistleblows on lackluster VRAM capacity
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
244 points (80.2% liked)
Technology
61362 readers
4508 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The video card monopoly (but also other manufacturers) have been limiting functionality for a long time. It started with them restricting vGPU to enterprise garbage products, which allows Linux users to virtualize their GPU for things like playing games with near-native speeds using Windows on Linux. This is one of the big reasons Windows still has such a large marketshare as the main desktop OS.
Now they want to restrict people running AI locally so that they get stuck with crap like Copilot-enabled PCs or whatever dumb names they want to come up. These actions are intentional. It is anti-consumer & anti-trust, but don't expect our government to care or do anything about it.
But that’s assuming there is actual high demand for running big models locally, so far I’ve only seen hobbyists do it.
I agree with you in theory that they just want more money but idk if they actually think locally run AI is that big of a threat (I hope it is).
So to put the likelihood of this in perspective, let me just repeat it to see if I understand the claim.
You're saying that one of the big reasons of Windows' market share is how artificially inefficient it is to install Linux, spin up a Virtual Machine, run Windows inside THAT and then run a game?
That's the mainstream use case that is propping up Windows adoption in this scenario?
The main thing propping up Windows as the main OS (meaning it is running at the root layer) is exclusive hardware GPU support which is used for gaming & many apps. Otherwise, automating running Windows apps & Windows on Linux would have become much more mainstream.
This is demonstrably wrong on a scale where it loops around to becoming hard to explain, so that's a neat trick.
There are enough people who have never heard of or don't understand the concept of virtual machines to keep Windows as the biggest mainstream OS several times over. There isn't a "root layer" in computers as far as normal humans are concerned. They're computers and then a Windows pops up and that's how that works.
At the very most, they understand conversion layers on the basis of having gone from an old Macbook to a new Macbook, and even that is like a tenth of the market (still several times bigger than Linux adoption, though).
The idea that a mass of people are waiting on the sidelines, chomping at the bit for direct GPU access through an extra layer of software fine tuning to be able to run some brand name Windows app with no Linux version is absurd. Even games are not the problem, as evidenced by that being mostly solved via Proton and not changing much.
I don't mind either way, but man, consider what other assumptions you may be making that are wildly off, particularly if they're on something more important than your hopes for relative OS market share on home computers.