> Why would I or anyone else care what the tech review community has to say about anything?
like, are you asking why thought leaders matter?
> What kind of idiot wants technological advances held back so they don’t get disappointed and the market doesn’t get disrupted?
Lots of people, have you never posted in an nvidia thread before?
tons of people would much rather RTX, DLSS, and AI never existed at all, because it means they have to upgrade their GTX 1080 Ti or RX 480 or whatever. A lot of people bought their first GPU since that launch and have never lived through a hard upgrade cycle.
recently it’s turned into this insane “if you can’t make cards like 3050 for $110 or get at least double the perf over 2 generations then don’t make a new generation at all” Neo-Luddism but it’s been brewing for a long time among the gaming public.
It's obviously dumb and regressive, literal modern luddism, but it's crazy to pretend that it's not an extremely visible and popular modern trend, either. People are mad the low end is stagnating and the high end is continuing to progress, and the natural human response is “if I don’t get to have a good time I don’t see why anyone else should either”. “Don’t launch a 5090 until there’s a good card for $110” is a very mainstream phenomenon nowadays.
Literally the drum the 2 biggest and most popular tech channels have been beating for a year now.
I don’t think a vocal minority under the sway of what it sounds like you’re describing as ill-intentioned propaganda (I mean, that’s a serious word but the shoe seems to fit) is a particularly good proxy for the overall preferences and welfare of everyone in the ecosystem.
To the extent that legitimate enthusiasts and early adopters and people trying to get the most out of their gear under resource constraints have a clear consensus, yeah, you want to be listening carefully. But that doesn’t really sound like what you’re describing. I hang out more on the “accelerated compute” parts of the “GPU Internet” than the “gaming” parts, but certainly over here in LocalLLaMA land, we want working, documented firmware, and cards that aren’t overkill on some things and weak AF on others (4090). That’s an effort to manipulate nosebleed margins by making the ostensible “prosumer/enthusiast” offering just kind of bad at everything (Quattro) except maybe CAD or Blender.
In gaming it seems like a cost-constrained public would be best served by credible offerings ranging from “the minimum to play modern stuff at a very attractive price” (I remember the 1060 being very well-received here), up to “Crysis at a million FPS” at Veblen, elaborate bespoke case, over clock with active cooling, and a sensible set of options along the way.
I don’t do enough gaming these days to have strong views, so please educate me if you’re an avid gamer and I’m full of shit, but both major gaming vendors seem to have good options for most budgets on mainstream platforms.
That’s just nothing to do with the 2T cap and 55.58% Net Profit Margins us llama.cpp folks are up in arms about.
What kind of idiot wants technological advances held back so they don’t get disappointed and the market doesn’t get disrupted?