EVGA Terminates NVIDIA Partnership

[Saracen999]

100% this - Nvidia have done everything they can to not only milk the market dry (can't blame them - they are a company) but also to prevent competitors getting a look in (CUDA, PhysX etc). Its exactly the same problem you had with Intel CPU's until Ryzen came along. Nvidia need a competitive AMD/Intel GPU to stop some of this behavior and make the GPU market work again. I don't blame EVGA for giving up on it.

I had hoped Arc might be competitive but, it seems not.

AMD cards do, however, look to be getting pretty close to being serious competition. My main personal reservation is wanting a long-term (as I don't plan on upgrading it) viable video encoding support and, right now, that still seems to be nVidia. I'm going to rather have to hold my nose while buying one (if I do) for much the reasons you mentioned, though.

[Saracen999]

I wonder when Nvidia would be able to 'do an Apple' and drop the AiBs entirely, surely that's at least another generation away (?)
If any more AiBs go then that's potentially 'good' for other AiBs in the short term, bad for Nvidia (short term) but good for them long term as it might push their agenda of keeping it all in-house.

Just thinking how this could go in the next few years.

I'm not sure that'll be the case any time soon, though I suspect nVidia may think they can. They don't, as I understand it, have much experience in tweaking board designs, manufacturing, VRM and cooling, etc, for max performance, or in retail marketing let alone channel management.

I suspect it'd be a disaster for many users if they did, because if it's vanilla vVidia cards (FE) or nothing, it significantly reduces choice. Personally, I'd probably go FE for choice, not least because I don't value the marginal performance uplift enough to rather the rather non-nominal price uplift of most AiB versions. But lots of people don't see it that way, and would lose out.

[DanceswithUnix]

I had hoped Arc might be competitive but, it seems not.

AMD cards do, however, look to be getting pretty close to being serious competition. My main personal reservation is wanting a long-term (as I don't plan on upgrading it) viable video encoding support and, right now, that still seems to be nVidia. I'm going to rather have to hold my nose while buying one (if I do) for much the reasons you mentioned, though.

I always took it as standard Raja Koduri bluster. Remember when the RX480 was supposed to upend the world of graphics? They are still good cards, but the world had moved on by the time they came out so they were never a performance leadership challenge. The same thing seem to have happened now Raja is at Intel.

I suspect Raja would be the worst person ever at clay pigeon shooting. "No Raja, aim in front of the target where it is going to be, not behind where it was"

I'm not sure that'll be the case any time soon, though I suspect nVidia may think they can. They don't, as I understand it, have much experience in tweaking board designs, manufacturing, VRM and cooling, etc, for max performance, or in retail marketing let alone channel management.

I suspect it'd be a disaster for many users if they did, because if it's vanilla vVidia cards (FE) or nothing, it significantly reduces choice. Personally, I'd probably go FE for choice, not least because I don't value the marginal performance uplift enough to rather the rather non-nominal price uplift of most AiB versions. But lots of people don't see it that way, and would lose out.

My irritation with many AIB designs is the factory overclock. I want the big heatsink that such cards come with to make the system quiet, but not extra heat from an overclock that takes that cooling advantage away again.

[Saracen999]

...

My irritation with many AIB designs is the factory overclock. I want the big heatsink that such cards come with to make the system quiet, but not extra heat from an overclock that takes that cooling advantage away again.

Good point. It's a different slant on it but, yeah. Good point. High power is all very well but if it makes your PC sound like a space shuttle on lift-off ....