So Nvidia posted their quarterly earnings on Wednesday and the number that keeps getting repeated everywhere is $30 billion. Thirty billion dollars in revenue for one quarter, up something like 122% from a year ago. Data center chips, the stuff powering everyone's AI models, made up the overwhelming majority of that, something like $26 billion of it. They also announced another $50 billion stock buyback, which is a number so big it stops meaning anything to me. And even with all that, the stock dipped after hours because apparently Wall Street wanted more, plus there's been chatter about the next-gen Blackwell chips getting delayed over some kind of design flaw.
Fine. Good for them, genuinely. But I want to talk about something dumber and smaller, which is that I spent Tuesday night trying to run Black Myth: Wukong on my GPU and watching my frame counter dip into the low 30s with ray tracing off.
If you haven't been following it, Black Myth: Wukong came out last week and it's apparently sold something like ten million copies already, which for a single-player action game with no multiplayer hook is genuinely wild. Its a Chinese studio (Game Science), its based on Journey to the West, and its punishingly gorgeous in a way that makes you understand why people care about ray tracing instead of just nodding along because tech reviewers say so. I bought it on a whim Sunday. I have an RTX 3060, which was a perfectly respectable card when I got it and is now, checks notes, from 2021. Three years old. In GPU years that might as well be the Paleolithic era.
Heres the thing that's been bugging me since Nvidias earnings call, and I dont think its a coincidence these two things happened in the same week. The company that makes the chip in my computer just told investors, in no uncertain terms, that gaming is not where the money is anymore. Gaming revenue was something like $2.9 billion for the quarter — still a real business, still bigger than most companies' entire revenue, but its a rounding error next to the data center number. When 90% of your revenue comes from selling H100s and Blackwell chips to Microsoft and Meta and Amazon so they can train language models, why would you prioritize your gaming lineup? You wouldnt, really. You'd sell gamers whatever's left over from your AI chip production runs and charge more for it because you can.
Which brings me to the actual complaint, which is that a 4090 costs $1,599 and a 4080 Super is still $999, and those prices dont feel like they're going anywhere but up. I bought my first "good" GPU, a GTX 560, back when I was blogging about tech stuff that mattered a lot less, for something like $200. I know, I know, inflation, silicon shortages, the world has changed, everyone's tired of hearing boomer-style "back in my day" pricing complaints from a 30-something dude with a blog. But it does feel different now in a way that's specifically about AI eating the whole supply chain, not just general inflation. Every wafer TSMC produces that could go into a gaming card is instead going into something that trains a chatbot. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just where the margins are, and Nvidia said so themselves on the call.
I'm not going to pretend I have a solution here. I'm also not going to pretend I'm going to hold out on principle — I'll probably buy a 4070 Super in a few months once I've saved up and convinced myself its a reasonable purchase and not a mid-life crisis expressed through frame rates. But there's something almost funny about sitting there Tuesday night, watching a monkey king fight a demon at 32 fps, while somewhere a spreadsheet at Nvidia HQ shows that the exact silicon that would fix my problem is instead sitting in a server rack in Virginia teaching a language model to write cover letters.
Anyway. The game is worth it even at low settings. The combat has this satisfying weight to it that reminds me a little of Sekiro, if Sekiro let you turn into a bug and burrow underground to escape an unfair boss fight, which, incredibly, it does. I died to the second boss eleven times. I'm not proud of that number but I'm also not going to lie to you people after thirteen years of doing this.