There’s never been a better time to ditch Nvidia GPUs

I’ve bought an Nvidia GPU for every gaming PC I ever built, but I think I’m done giving Team Green my money for the foreseeable future.

That feels a bit painful to type because Nvidia has been good to me over the years. Shucks, my old 1080 Ti card lasted me damn near a decade before I felt the need to upgrade. Nowadays I’m a bit attached to the performance boosts you can get with DLSS.

But between the anti-competitive mess with the GeForce Partner Program, the way the company cloaked how much money it was making off the crypto bubble (which got so bad shareholders filed a lawsuit), and now the incredible shortage of high-end GeForce GPUs due to the AI boom, I just don’t feel good about giving Nvidia money anymore.

And hey, the company doesn’t need my money anyway. These days Nvidia is raking it in selling high-end hardware for AI data centers and so the widespread complaints about the company “manufacturing” its own shortage of high-end graphics cards don’t really hold water with me.

Not because it’s not true—good luck finding an RTX 5090 for less than the price of a used car these days—but because Nvidia is a public company motivated to make money for itself and its shareholders, so of course it’s going to focus on serving the customers who are most willing to pay for its high-end hardware: AI companies.

I know I’ve written about Nvidia’s declining interest in PC gaming before, but I enjoyed some fresh perspective on the topic courtesy of this week’s episode of The Full Nerd. The crew ended up spending a fair bit of time discussing allegations that the company is stuffing bundles of high-end hardware into AI data centers before the centers are operational, potentially leaving piles of unused graphics cards gathering dust.

I encourage you to listen to the full episode for their thoughts, but for my part I’m sure it’s more complicated than that because it seems highly unlikely the hardware Nvidia sells for AI server racks can be easily repurposed and slotted into your next gaming PC build. If there’s anything to be upset about, it’s that Nvidia has likely been putting more and more of its resources into its data center business for years now—and less and less into producing PC gaming hardware.

That doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon unless the AI boom busts so badly that Nvidia’s data center business craters, which is why I think there’s never been a better time to stop trying to buy Nvidia GPUs. I’m trying to scrounge up the parts to build a new mini-ITX gaming rig early next year and, despite my DLSS addiction, I think the next graphics card I buy is going to be from AMD—before it too leans so hard into serving AI companies and data centers that desktop GPUs become an afterthought.

It’s a practical stance more than a political one: AMD cards seem to deliver better performance for your dollar when you’re comparing mid-range cards and with high-end Nvidia GPUs hard to find at a decent price, mid-range is where I’ll be stuck for the foreseeable future.

In this week’s episode of The Full Nerd

This week your regular hosts Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee were joined by PCWorld’s Brad Chacos to chat about their experiences testing local AI systems, as well as the implications of what some folks have called the “manufactured” shortage of Nvidia graphics cards. Also, Adam dressed up as a clown. Happy Halloween, y’all!

Of course, the crew also took some time to answer your questions from the chat and the Discord about everything from how to get the best bang for your buck to your favorite schlocky movies to watch on Halloween. Hope you all enjoy some spooky good fun this weekend!

Nerd news of the week

This week I couldn’t help fixating on the Nvidia GPU crisis and what might be causing it. But there’s also some good news out there as well for folks using AMD hardware or considering making the switch. Go Team Red!

• Nvidia may not have discontinued the RTX 5090, but one partner says it can’t get hold of parts required to make the card: Nvidia representatives have disputed allegations that the company has stopped selling its flagship GeForce RTX 5090 GPU, but it’s not on sale at most retailers—and now a manufacturer claims they can’t buy the parts from Nvidia that are required to make an RTX 5090.
• AMD Zen 6c beats Zen 5 by up to 26 percent in early testing: Sounds like AMD’s upcoming Zen 6c CPUs are already showing meaningful performance improvements over their predecessors in early testing, which is good news from anyone hoping to build an AMD-powered gaming PC in the next year or so. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to check ’em out at CES in January!
• Leaked video exposes how industrial-scale Chinese factories are dismantling RTX 5090s by the thousands to fuel AI servers: This video shows a potential explanation for the shortage of RTX 5090s, which appear to be being brought into China (where the cards are not officially sold) and carefully repurposed for use in massive server racks, presumably for AI-focused companies. Thanks, AI!
• AMD says its working on FSR’s frame pacing issues, but there’s still conspicuously no mention of Multi Frame Generation: Here’s more good news for those of you running on Team AMD, as the company rolled out FSR 4.1 early to RX 6000-series cards and is promising to improve the frame pacing when using the upscaling tech. With Nvidia cards getting harder and harder to find at MSRP, AMD’s GPUs are starting to look more and more appealing to those of us who can’t spend the price of a used car to build a new gaming rig.

That’s it for your Full Nerd newsletter this week! I’ll catch up with you again next week, but in the meantime be sure to bookmark PCWorld and keep an eye on the YouTube channel for our latest videos from myself and the rest of the PCWorld team. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Simply sign up on our website!

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.