Don't do this to us! AMD was our last hope!
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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AMD, You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the cryptominers, not join them! Bring balance to the video card market, not leave it in darkness!
On the upside, the evaporation of availability for high-end consumer hardware might lead to a renaissance in more reasonable hardware requirements for software. There's a lot of stuff we managed to do 20 or 30 years ago without anywhere near as much overhead. The indie gaming market already shows there's plenty of room for companies to work with more modest overhead.
That's a fair point. I feel that PC gaming was in a peak of consumerism with ridiculous prices and never ending "upgrades" so it'll be interesting to see if anything changes. I hope it does and some of that knowledge/skill and enthusiasm for optimisation comes back.
A certain amount of this seems to be happening anyway just because the culture at AAA studios is so inimical to gaming in general. Looking at a game like Peak, I don't see any indication that the devs went out of their way to reduce hardware requirements, but it's less intensive than major releases anyway. Companies not having the resources to spend years working on super detailed massive environments may end up working in their favor.
Honestly, I think something like Peak ends up feeling more intentional and well executed than something like Cyberpunk 2077. Peak's jank feels like it's just part of how the game is supposed to be, whereas Cyberpunk they put so much effort into some aspects that it's weird and jarring when you run into those things that break verisimilitude. But if Cyberpunk looked like it was designed by an indie dev with good enough but not state of the art graphics? I probably wouldn't notice some of the issues as much. Also I feel like there wouldn't be as much corporate involvement leading to the kind of hand-holding that shows up in Phantom Liberty.
This is headed toward devolving into me complaining about feeling like I'm not in half the scenes that revolve around Idris Elba rather than V, but you get the point!
Very related, you should check out Cairn.
I love your comment not only because it makes a lot of sense, but also because it taught me the words "inimical" and "verisimilitude." Thank you.
If I keep learning new words I'm going to start to forgor older ones!
Isn’t Microsoft stabbing itself in the foot? 11 is so bad it’s bogging down regular machines available before this nonsense
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Whales are always the most dangerous customer for a company to have. Because once a customer becomes a whale, they can dictate terms under threat of leaving. Or they can create massive secondary damage by their own failing.
Which is why I strongly suspect that many companies will become bankrupt once this AI bubble bursts - and not small ones, either. No, I fully expect nVidia to go into full Chapter 11 and lose 90+% of its value, requiring trillions in bailout in order to “save”.
Anyone who knows anything about boom-bust cycles will be escaping this bubble like rats from a ship.
There’s really no way to escape the bubble pop. Not for us normal people anyway.
Normal people can somewhat cushion themselves from any severe crash.
Debt itself is not the problem. Lots of debt is actually fine - inflationary effects can and will whittle that debt away, assuming you are still servicing it.
No, the real issue comes down to single-family homes on arable land. If your home is debt-free and completely paid off, there is no legal way to take that away from you, and the land it sits on can allow you to grow food for yourself and even sell a little on the side. While a severe economic crash will be painful for most anyone not of the Parasite Class, those who have debt-free arable land have a chance to ride out that crash better than most.
Granted, the devil is in the details, but in broad strokes this is a truism. The difference is between virtual or physical assets that depend on appreciation, and those who can work for you.
there is no legal way to take that away from you
Hate to burst your bubble here, but there are two major ways to take people's paid-off homes that I can think of just off the top of my head.
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Unpaid property taxes can force a foreclosure
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In all US states except Florida your home can be forced to be sold in order to satisfy a debt (like medical debt for example)
There are other ways you can lose your paid-off home as well:
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It is destroyed in a natural disaster in a place where it is difficult or impossible to get insurnace (Florida/California etc) and you can't afford to rebuild
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You need expensive end-of-life care and you have to sell your home to pay for that
I'm sure there are a few others
Nvidia will likely lose a huge chunk of their share price, but I don't see them going bankrupt because selling GPUs is still so profitable. If they can't sell to AI companies there are plenty of other people lining up to buy them.
Imagine if the bubble pops and simply all these companies go bankrupt (because the shares are all tied by these mega deals), will there be ANY computing means available?
If shares drop enough, another company with cash on hand buys them.
Shares aren't revenue. The bubble pops, investors lose money, companies go back to selling PC components.
Most of its going to AI chips, it wont be useful for anything but AI.
The problem is that the current production is for stuff that can't really be used as consumer equipment.
If enough of the world's component production capacity is dedicated to AI specific components, then when the bubble pops there won't be anything to sell to consumers for months which could cause the manufacturers to go under.
Yeah, but the odds of them just being allowed to fail like that are basically nil.
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Except by the time they do that there are already new Chinese competitors selling those components to their old customers.
Chinese RAM is already out and being tested. How long before they have viable products in the marketplace? Especially considering that they aren't really competing with anyone at the moment. Do you think people are going to suddenly switch back to spending 4x as much for American RAM once they are already happy with using this new shit?
How long before its processors and video cards?
You don't get customers back after you exit an industry unless you are offering a competitive price or something that no one else is offering.
That's a definite possibility. But the op proposed that PC component vendors stock price would drop and therefore no one would build PC parts.
Chinese companies could fill the void if Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are slow to switch back. But there is no situation where companies simply stop taking money. However I believe that after the bubble pops, ram prices will not go back to the same price they were last year. Everyone will have to pay more and Chinese companies will be happy to take that extra money too.
I want you to think about these two statements that you made:
But there is no situation where companies simply stop taking money.
But the op proposed that PC component vendors stock would drop and therefore no one would build PC parts.
These cannot both be true. PC Component vendors will NOT stop selling parts and customers will NOT stop building PCs because that is leaving money on the table. They will source components from whoever will sell them at whatever price they can get. That is what WILL happen.
If my statements are in conflict then explain a situation where all companies, Chinese or otherwise, refuse to make consumer ram after the AI bubble pops?
PC Component vendors will NOT stop selling parts and customers will NOT stop building PCs because that is leaving money on the table.
???? I am baffled by your rebuttal because that was exactly my claim.
It was the OP who claimed that a stock price drop would cause companies to stop making all ram of any type.
Start your next comment with three question marks if I am correct about everything I said and you consent to have your body experimented on for potential use as the skin of a new line of sex robots.
Cope
??? What exactly did I change? I'm always going back and fixing typos and adding clarification because people always nitpick if you don't write a paragraph explaining the definition of every word.
I certainly didn't change the meaning.
I agreed with your claim that Chinese could take over but reiterated my original claim that the OP's idea that no one anywhere would make ram was wrong.
If I remember correctly what I added was a statement that agreed with your claim about the Chinese so my reply wouldn't appear to be combative. But even without that addition, there was no way to read my statement into whatever you imagined.
That's the fun thing about editing shit after people replied to you. No one has any idea what you changed.
You quoted me! Nothing in your quote shows what you claim.
Open-source tech co-ops buy up the production capacity and flood the consumer market with cheap GPUs and RAM?
We can dream, at least...
Come on, you know damn well that if the bubble pops, the global taxpayers will be bailing them and the rest of the affected companies out with direct payments just like the last global crash caused by corporations.
Executive bonuses and buy backs for corporations and austerity for the working man who just wants to play a video game is always the plan.
"To big to fail" just like US automakers and banks.
The US government is bullshit.
"Too big to fail" translates to "we can't have this fail" so we will bail them out when it starts to.
I will be glad it's just the US taxpayers that will pay for this mess this time if that is the case. You make this mess, you pay for it. Maybe you could have voted for someone that would regulate the markets a bit better.
Gonna be a rough few years for PC gaming. Or any gaming, for that matter.
But hey, at least we'll keep killing jobs and the AI cat videos will continue to flow
Most of the games I play are old enough to drink.
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AMD, you were the chosen one!
Come on, they never were. They're just another company with no ethics other "make all the money, consumers be damned" and always have been.
Saving me the legwork to not have to figure out which company is dead to me for treating its regular consumers like trash. I hope every one of these companies crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Never forget
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Oh no baby what is you doing
They don't want us to own our own hardware. We already don't own (most) of our software or operating systems, even.
This is lemmy, most of us use Linux or TempleOS.
I have tried TempleOS, its a wild interface that's for sure. One guy building a brand new OS is amazing. Imagine if he'd had good medicine or treatment that kept him sane, probably could have done a ton of amazing things
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