Saturday, February 1st 2025
Edward Snowden Lashes Out at NVIDIA Over GeForce RTX 50 Pricing And Value
It's not every day that we witness a famous NSA whistleblower voice their disappointment over modern gaming hardware. Edward Snowden, who likely needs no introduction, did not bother to hold back his disapproval of NVIDIA's recently launched RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 gaming GPUs. The reviews for the RTX 5090 have been mostly positive, although the same cannot be said for its affordable sibling, the RTX 5080. Snowden, voicing his thoughts on Twitter, claimed that NVIDIA is selling "F-tier value for S-tier prices".
Needless to say, there is no doubt that the RTX 5090's pricing is quite exorbitant, regardless of how anyone puts it. Snowden was particularly displeased with the amount of VRAM on offer, which is also hard to argue against. The RTX 5080 ships with "only" 16 GB of VRAM, whereas Snowden believes that it should have shipped with at least 24, or even 32 GB. He further adds that the RTX 5090, which ships with a whopping 32 GB of VRAM, should have been available with a 48 GB variant. As for the RTX 5070, the security consultant expressed desire for at least 16 GB of VRAM (instead of 12 GB).
But that is not all that Snowden had to say. He equated selling $1000+ GPUs with 16 GB VRAM to a "monopolistic crime against consumers," further accusing NVIDIA of "endless next-quarter" thinking. This is debatable, considering that NVIDIA is a publicly traded company, and whether they stay afloat does boil down to their quarterly results, whether we like it or not. There is no denying that NVIDIA is in desperate need of some true competition in the high-end segment, which appears to be the only way to get the Green Camp to price their hardware appropriately. AMD's UDNA GPUs are likely set to do just that in a year or two. The rest, of course, remains to be seen.
Source:
@Snowden
Needless to say, there is no doubt that the RTX 5090's pricing is quite exorbitant, regardless of how anyone puts it. Snowden was particularly displeased with the amount of VRAM on offer, which is also hard to argue against. The RTX 5080 ships with "only" 16 GB of VRAM, whereas Snowden believes that it should have shipped with at least 24, or even 32 GB. He further adds that the RTX 5090, which ships with a whopping 32 GB of VRAM, should have been available with a 48 GB variant. As for the RTX 5070, the security consultant expressed desire for at least 16 GB of VRAM (instead of 12 GB).
243 Comments on Edward Snowden Lashes Out at NVIDIA Over GeForce RTX 50 Pricing And Value
With local LLM AI self-hosting/inferencing, we need at least 4GB VRAM modules and at least 48GB VRAM (possible with 192-bit, 256-bit and 384-bit chips) per cheap consumer GPU.
The recent DeepSeek R1 release has also made a lot of new people interested in running LLMs locally beyond strictly professional uses.
It does make for an interesting study on human behaviour though. :roll:
For those who weren't aware, /r/LocalLlama is probably the largest single local LLM user community on the Internet. Some professionals and individuals from the industry write there, but it's mostly amateurs, definitely not mostly professionals. Calling LLMs in general a "professional workload" is laughable, considering that their size ranges from small enough to be run on a smartphone to large enough you need a GPU farm to use them.
Funny thing is, it seems like 9070XT and 50 series ramped at the same time, that part is pretty clear. One decided to launch a few hundred cards worldwide for jokes and one decided to make an absolute mess of this situation.
All AMD had to do is to not do this this whole back and forth mess and say 'we're not going to do a terribly shitty launch with a few hundred cards worldwide and have an proper launch when enough cards are available'. Based on the current launch, it would be 100% plausible.
I saw in another thread how the 5090 is larger than a full 104-key keyboard. Yeah, like, that's effing gigantic, but there sure is a lot of transistors there!
I still remember fondly my first GPU with 1 billion (the HD 4850). That is but a fraction of the madness now! Also, Snowden can suck a beet. One with a red head.
A 4090 is larger than an Xbox
The DF interview with the PS5 Cerny interview, a game dev boss was also there. As in an above post the PS5 pro is basically prototyping stuff for PS6, they also confirmed as in an above post that the new features are in partnership with AMD, meaning it probably is a UDNA early chip. On your own points though regarding spare GPU performance, the dev in the interview confirmed that instead of using the extra ms available on each frame for performance, they improved visuals to fill the budget.
Also of interest, in a stream I watched a few weeks back in a game, there was a bug and the person fell partially through the floor, under the floor was some rocks and stuff being rendered. Think back to the days when tessellation was new and it hit the press that there was tessellation being rendered out of view making games slow down.
lmmfao below .....
PS:
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