NVIDIA Vs. The Media ft. GamersNexus

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2:15Wells Fargo, the bank of doing. Learn more at wellsfargo.com slash saydo. Support includes contributions from Wells Fargo & Company and the Wells Fargo Foundation. Call Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron, and this week we're joined again by the wonderful Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus.

2:45Better Offline. How are you doing, Steve? Doing well. How about you? Doing great. So you were just at Computex, right? Yes. Yeah, we were over there for a couple weeks. So for the listeners who don't know, because there's a fair amount who don't know every conference, so what is Computex and what makes it so important? Computex is the, I think it's the largest computer hardware and computer technology trade show. So that's hosted in Taipei every year. And it's like a much better CES. People may know CES. And is it more focused on enterprise stuff or consumer stuff? This year, weirdly, AI commandeered the entire main hall.

3:30So there were actually a lot of pissed off consumer hardware manufacturers who were sort of evicted and driven out of the main hall and put into the lesser one with consumer hardware. What were they even showing with the AI stuff as well? I mean, one company had an AI computer case. Oh, how did that? What's the AI doing there? Absolutely no idea. Sick. It's so cool that this is absorbed. It's also kind of brutal that that's literally absorbing space. Yes. Did you see anything cool there, though? Anything you're excited about? Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff. there was some immersion cooling which is always nice to see where they actually literally immerse the system in fluid for cooling there was a thermosiphon from Noctua which is just a really cool use of it's another cooling technology lots of computer case and cooling solution development and then on the GPU side I mean Nvidia sort of buried its 50-60 launch and then And AMD more formally announced the information for its 96DXT.

4:40And both of those are sort of the slightly more affordable consumer class GPUs. Yeah. So NVIDIA also was doing some funny business with you recently. You did that wonderful video. So walk us through what happened there. Because they tried to big dog you, so to speak. Yeah. So the problem we had with them and we talked about was for several months, there had been this, I felt sort of pressure from NVIDIA with where... So NVIDIA, for context for people, NVIDIA sends out GP review samples. We and other reviewers are not entitled to them. That's fine. We can buy them ourselves as well. But they send out samples for product reviews.

5:21And in the past, NVIDIA has been in hot water for asking another outlet called Hard Run Box to, I believe the quote was, or the paraphrase was, change your editorial direction. Yeah, and so that was several years ago. And what did they ask them to do back then? Back then, it was seeking more coverage of real-time ray tracing in video games, which at the time was more or less only found in any kind of meaningful performance on NVIDIA hardware. but also and the reason um at least we weren't ready to fully do testing for real-time ray tracing yet was because it just it wasn't ready yet i mean there weren't that many games with it you couldn't really test it because you couldn't use it yeah i mean they launched and if i remember correctly there were actually zero games that supported this technology and the only thing available were sort of tech demos and so anyway that that was what they wanted then right they kind of went away didn't that's at least as far as we know publicly didn't try to push reviewers in a particular direction with their narrative or their editorial style uh and then over the last several months we were getting this pressure of of uh basically so we do a bunch of interviews with engineers and technical people at nvidia and i felt they were starting to use that as a lever to be like, oh, it sure seems like you like talking to the thermal engineers.

6:53It'd be a shame if something happened. And you did that very long one over with NVIDIA, right? You went and kind of looked at how the thermal stuff worked. Yeah, we did. I mean, they're great educational content. The engineers are awesome. And I've spent years working with mostly people who are in different departments or don't work there anymore to get NVIDIA on the same page. I'm like, look, we're not looking for a marketing puff piece. We're looking for actual engineers who just want to talk about the stuff they make and people can learn about it. But it's not like, obviously, yes, it can support the product by nature of if it's good and the engineers explain it well, then people will like it.

7:31But the objective is not just like, come on our show and use us as a platform to sell things. We want engineers, not marketers. Yeah. And so that was great. And the, like I said, lever that it became was they wanted more, NVIDIA wanted more coverage of this thing called MFG, which is multi-frame generation, which is something that Jensen Juan, the CEO, talks about on stage as being part of their technology suite that is, big surprise, AI accelerated, that effectively multiplies the frame rate. um to be used as a smoothing technology so it's this different is this different to like dlss and things like that or is that it is part of the dlss or the deep learn super sampling uh technology suite so it's sort of uh it's it's almost like um a subset of dlss right and so it basically just looks better at higher resolution it fills in the frames i'm guessing just trying to simplify yeah so yes the simplest version of it is mfg sort of interpolates frames so it's able to add in or insert additional effectively artificial or generated frames if you're trying to be charitable with it that are not literally built by the game engine and so the the gpu is working with its own software to construct these frames and construct pixels based on what it thinks is going to happen next and we've actually tested it and there's situations where it's not bad there's situations where it's awful like with any technology but what it does is it on a chart if you just look at the number that comes out the so-called frame rate or the amount of frames in a given period of time that looks higher with this technology but it's not measuring the same thing as something without this technology so it's effectively you know you're comparing apples and oranges uh if you try to put real frames that are rendered in the traditional way up against these generated ai frames that are effectively guessing at what they should look like and do they look bad as well like they can they can look really bad i mean we've done some testing where in some of the games, it's just like text, for example, will get completely garbled text on screen.

10:02Yeah, interface issues. It'll draw the interface in the wrong area. You could have a really bad blurring. It seems insanely bad for like any RPG of any kind or any kind of like Twitch. I don't know. It feels like anything you'd be doing ever would be ruined by that. Yeah, so there's scenarios where it works okay, but the RPG example you brought up so Final Fantasy was one of the games we tested where there's just areas I mean, I personally would turn it off it looks worse and I'd rather have a lower quote-unquote frame rate than have this sort of potential blurry mess every now and then. So strange.

10:41Low quality as well just a very strange thing to push out the door. Yeah, and the I think sort of finish the yes editorial narrative thing no i mean it's fine but i'll finish that first i'll come back to your comment you just made because that's also interesting but on the editorial side they wanted more coverage of mfg and we disagreed from a an objective standpoint you know i kind of made the case to them several times over several calls over several months of why we think it it just doesn't belong on the same charts as normal benchmarking normal objective testing and so there was yeah there's just a disagreement which is fine the problem came in when i felt repeatedly on various calls with the nvidia people that they were almost sort of holding hostage the idea of working with uh engineers again where it's well the way we're able to make this happen is by you covering things like mfg you know sort of that type of conversation yeah that's so and they mentioned something about like budgets in in the video i remember yeah i mean there was like discussion of um one of the times specifically the statement was that uh this is how we can secure budget for these types of things um and and like to be clear for listeners we don't take money for interviews yeah yeah and in fact i've paid now over five figures to visit nvidia on numerous occasions for said interviews personally like i know and i can say this from the pr side and not working not work with nvidia or anyone associated got firewall that it's like no one talks about budgets no one is like oh i can't visit a journalist due to budget and certainly not nvidia a company that had 39 billion dollars i believe in revenue just in the data center portion last quarter i mean kind of farcical multi-trillion dollar market cap i think if i try to take devil's advocate uh maybe there's some internal budgeting whatever like the marketing department needs to budget time from the engineering department or something but and we're talking like a couple hours of time max normally you know uh yeah especially when i'm traveling to them so it just seemed like i don't know it i didn't buy it and also that was only one of the the numerous uh calls you know like that the the defensible reason for them changed it felt like each time where it's like oh let's try this angle let's try this angle so did they end up blocking you are they just how did that situation resolve itself i have not spoken with anyone there since we posted our video talking about it.

13:34And part of the challenge with posting that video is, you know, it's like the first couple times this came up, I assumed that it was just sort of, okay, maybe the guy phrased it wrong. You know, I've worked with these people for a while, and maybe it just came out wrong. After a couple times, I did call one of my reps after the meeting where they kind of push this, you know, you testing this technology that you think is not appropriate to share on charts with competitors. That's how we get you these interviews. I called a rep and said, you know, hey, if you guys say this to people, this is going to be taken the wrong way.

14:15And, like, I'm still assuming it's not meant this way. Right. To really try and be honest there. But if I hear this again, right, like, I'm going to have to start assuming it's the way it sounds. and it did come up again. And part of the challenge with making the video we made was, we want to blow the whistle on it in case other people are facing that pressure, and also in case consumers are watching or reading content, which may be influenced without their knowledge. The problem is, I think NVIDIA may now be in a situation where, let's just assume everybody makes up and it's fine at some point.

14:53um i don't know that they will ever be able to put an engineer on camera anytime in the near future with anybody without the audience questioning it and for good reason because that was what we felt was being used as the lever against us and so it's just kind of i don't know we we tried to you know i i explained to them several times why this is a problem and why the phrasing is a problem and the more you hear it the more it's like okay i mean at some point like i think you're saying what it sounds like you're saying and i'm gonna stop yeah it's good that you did it though because it's well gn's got well over a million subscribers so who knows what they're doing to much smaller outlets as well yeah i mean and that's what i'm really concerned about is i've had conversations with nvidia in the past that we'll probably get into in a future video but about their strategy for newer creators and i i don't like what i've heard i mean it It sounds very much like we're going to sort of try and shape these newer creators.

15:57And, you know, I think the problem is as especially old guard media, as in people like OGs before us, retire or move to other industries, there's openings to change how media interfaces with these companies in general because you've got newer people who don't have the historical background with these companies to know what to expect. and so it's easier to kind of slowly creep that goalpost where it's less independence and it's more marketing arm of the companies and that's what I'm really worried about is if they get in any of these companies with newer creators early and are able to change the expectancy of the relationship so change it from independent reviewer analyzing large companies device into more of a hey we're all friends we're all working together to try and benefit the consumer when if you're talking about a multi-trillion dollar company that their motives are far different from like the guy in his bedroom who's trying to do hardware reviews

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19:24I can't recommend them enough. I've heard great things from businesses using them. And as a customer, never upset to see them in a store. Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash better offline. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. It's just so weird as well because they're already so successful. It sounds like historically NVIDIA has been a bit draconian like this, though not necessarily pressuring in this way.

20:10I mean, I certainly think NVIDIA is one of the most vindictive companies in the space. The stories we've heard and told in some instances of their partners, not reviewers, but actual business partners like board vendors, people who make the video cards that the NVIDIA GPUs go on. those stories would seem to indicate a sort of vindictiveness uh can you give an example yeah um allocation so gpu allocation is the the concept of how many of a high demand gpu can you as a partner get to then attach to a product to then sell to a consumer and there's a limited amount of these because they're going to sell 100 of them and uh allocation is typically measured by percent so company a might get 25 company b might get five percent of the gpu supply whatever that is and that allocation we've been told in the past has been used also as sort of a lever and so an example would be back in the evga days which evga uh sort of famously um when that It was a graphics card company.

21:24Correct. Yeah, they were NVIDIA's number one partner. And they were so NVIDIA favored that they only made NVIDIA video cards. They did not work with any competitors. Right. And they famously cut that relationship publicly. And we ran a story about that. But one of the things that they were unhappy about was NVIDIA slowly tightening the screws, which is a direct quote from an NVIDIA PM I spoke to once. Jesus. Slowly tightening the screws is the quote but on what the partners were allowed to do with their products and slowly over time they're losing some of this creative freedom. When you say they lose creative freedom what are they being constrained to do?

22:13One that's public is we did an interview with a famous overclocker who used to work for EVGA. Kingpin is his username, and his name is on video cards that are world famous. We did a video with him, and he talked about how he wanted to add two power connectors to a card to basically make it more fun to overclock with for consumers. And so it'd be able to pull more power, and it would also be able to do so safer because the current power connector has this issue of burning and catching on fire sometimes. And so he wanted the two of them to kind of resolve some of that. And in the public discussion we had with Kingpin in the video, he said, paraphrasing, but the conversation was, he said they wouldn't allow it or they restricted it or something like that.

23:07And I said, who is they? And he said, they. There was only one they there could be. who could it be yeah um but there's plenty of examples like that where the another one would be uh a couple generations ago the cheaper cards like the 200 300 models they were those models were difficult for the partners to actually make and still make any money and so there were times where we were told about how this msrp level video card meaning the number that nvidia says is the msrp that would only exist for a fixed period of time uh because it was simply impossible to afford to make it but nvidia really wanted them to exist at this certain msrp it allows them to advertise a lower price and so they're pushed to make these cards that allows them to potentially get things like more access to allocation or you know whatever privilege they may get.

24:08So on a much larger level, what do you think is going on with NVIDIA as a company right now? I'm not asking for stock analysis, like that totally not that, but just as a company that both makes consumer graphics cards and underpins whatever the AI thing is. Like, what do you think is going on there right now? I think there's definitely a focus on AI to try and get money. I mean, there's a Jensen Juan was in an interview, I don't know, last year sometime, I think, or early this year, and made a comment about how they use AI to write their own driver software now or their own software or something like that.

24:54And, you know, this is their number one focus. It's what they're making the most, I guess, investor money on. so they're focused on it the concern i have is it's one thing to sort of let the consumer hardware side uh dwindle or get less competitive effort it's another thing to in my opinion sort of drag the entire industry down with it uh as they shift focus to the higher revenue ai side right when you say drag them down how do you mean i mean things like trying to uh in my opinion control the media narrative and shape it like that that to me goes beyond okay we don't care much about consumer we're going to focus on making money with ai that gets into we are going to actively damage the credibility of independent media and also potentially harm consumers who are influenced by that media, which has been shaped with a certain corporate narrative to push.

26:02And that's my concern. So that's where I draw the distinction between, as we said in our video, if you want to just focus on AI and if they want to just sell all the GPUs to big enterprise companies, go for it. But don't screw all the rest of us over at the same time. And do you think that they're abandoning consumer? or is it just they are focusing on the shiny object of the day? I don't know Jensen Juan personally. My read on him, though, I feel like it's unlikely he would want to abandon something he already has. Right. Even if it's only out of maybe sort of pride. And so I don't think they'll abandon it.

26:49I do think they're focusing on AI. it's just that I mean they have like 92 % market share in consumer GPUs now according to John Petty research so it's just like they can, it's a monopoly I mean that's just like this is what monopolies look like I would say there was an opportunity for someone to come in but based on everything you've shown with AMD recently even on the low end it just, it doesn't feel, it almost feels like consumer graphics are being not treated with the respect they deserve, despite PC gaming being a huge industry and so on and so forth. Yeah, it's a massive industry. And prosumer, too.

27:30I mean, even just non-AI use cases include people who edit videos or make movies or do 3D animations. Yeah, I think Intel's a good barometer here because Intel decided to get into consumer GPU and they're new to it. And they've had a hell of a time. They're doing much better now with this current generation. But one of the quotes from an Intel person I spoke with previously to us was, for their last generation, was, we should be wrapping these with money when we sell them. Because they were basically subsidizing the build-out of this new division, this GPU division, by undercutting prices from competitors to just try and get their foot in the door with what at the time was a lesser product.

28:16and so yeah i think they're a good barometer because if you want to be i mean first of all to have a fab a fabrication facility costs these days potentially tens of billions of dollars and years to build so a new vendor would have to be fabulous like uh nvidia and like amd unlike intel and to be fabulous and make a sorry about this this is just for the listeners what is a fab in this case yeah so a fab a fabrication plant is basically a factory for silicon it's a highly controlled clean room environment and that means that there's basically absolutely no dust ingress the small pieces of skin or whatever you know just working in an environment that's all either captured or controlled and that's because a single particle of dust on a wafer can can destroy at least part of that silicon supply cool sorry yeah and so a new vendor would have to be probably fabulous unless they're already huge like intel and that means they need to go get supply from most likely tsmc possibly from intel maybe i mean the past samson has been used there's really not a lot of options here and everybody wants their silicon so to even get allocation of these silicon wafers would be difficult uh it's just all of the chips are stacked against someone who wants to do this and they would i think the only way you get in is if you're an existing multi-billion dollar company or have yeah obscene amounts of investment well that fucking sucks yeah it's actually that's a good question though so this is for the old timers listening i remember having a 3dfx it was a voodoo 5500 picture of a halo on the on the box actually don't know what happened there uh what happened to all the smaller manufacturers did they just get kind of absorbed or did they just fall apart yeah they they got bought or yeah i think 3dfx if remember correctly was bought by nvidia um and and i just checked that but um some of the others i mean there's like via uh cyrix and some of these cpu companies yeah 3dfx bought by nvidia sgi was another so they they yeah i forgot about sgi yeah so sgi is interesting because they sort of pursued heavily i guess the at the time what enterprise would have been or at least workstation hardware and um they're really invested in workstation the story i got from someone i wasn't covering things back then but was that um sgi was less interested in consumer and didn't really think consumers could afford video cards which at the time was sort of true and that's when And NVIDIA came in and started really kicking ass in the early days.

31:20But a lot of them just, they either got bought or they sort of exited that space. So changing tack slightly, how do you feel about AI in general? I know that I'm not expecting like an industry in that. I'm just, from your perspective, at least from what you've told me in watching your videos, it feels like AI is something now being stapled onto the side of literally everything within your world. Do you think there's, like, do you use it? Do you have any thoughts on it? There's uses. I mean, one thing I am actually worried about long-term with AI use cases, and the biggest thing I'm worried about is on the media side, we obviously get a lot of comments.

32:06I probably read or at least skim tens of thousands of comments a year. And I'm seeing more and more AI comments and not just the really obvious YouTube spam bots, but some where you kind of you read it and you're like, ah, that could be real, you know, and I don't want to like, yeah, I don't want to like remove it if it's a valid real comment. But then a few comments down the thread, there'll be this discussion amongst what are obvious sort of bots about, say, some new crypto BS or whatever. And so I'm actually worried about sort of like that internet theory, I guess, the concept of you're the only human in the room and you might not even know it.

32:52That's concerning to me. There's a loneliness factor there I'm worried about. but the big one is just how easily people are manipulated by comments that sort of appear to have the prevailing opinion just in general even from real comments you then take that and you apply it to potential ai that becomes very convincing uh in the future and And you then think one step further of who owns these LLMs and the companies that sell so-called AI products. And all of them are these multi-billion dollar companies that if they want to, could tune it to filter the responses in ways that are beneficial to them.

33:40And that to me is sort of the dystopian old man yells at clouds, you know, like concern I have.

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