this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2026
1030 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
89776 readers
2714 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay, say I agreed to build a GPU company from the ground up, with a Gamer's first corporate policy - guaranteed by the fact that I'm a 55 year old disabled gamer who's been playing almost since the very beginning of gaming (yeah, I played the fuck out of pong and the Atari 2600 as a kid and still game almost daily.) My only downside is my health, which isn't great, but before I was forced to drop out due to health reasons, I almost finished my bachelor's in video game development online. I lack exactly 3 classes to finish my degree. I also have 2 sons in high school who could eventually take over and would absolutely be in the Gamer's first mindset. This is all hypothetical, but, would Gamers support a company like that, or raise hell everytime I made a decision gamers couldn't all agree with, which would be all if them?
Video game development is probably the wrong skill for GPU design - you might be the best racing car driver in the world but that doesn't mean you know how to design an engine.
If you've a few spare billions and a chip design, I'm sure a semiconductor fabricator will start running off the chips for you. The design is tough:
lots of memory cache, which is the same simple thing repeated billions of times
a shader core, which is essentially a simple cpu specialised in floating point, which you will then repeat thousands of times. Needs to be efficient, though, and the smaller you can make it the more you can repeat it
some extremely complicated interconnects and management circuitry, such that all your shader cores can read and write memory fast enough so that they can run at full speed
you'll also need driver code to enable your new chip, implementing all of the DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan specs, and tested against decades of games
There was a time when chip design was a one-man job. Alas, that time was the late 70s. And your goal wouldn't be to reproduce one of the early graphics cards from the late 90s either, much as I did love my Rage Pro 128 at the time. If you want to make something competitive with modern GPUs that can run modern games, you're going to need a very large team of specialists and a lot of funding cash. Intel have been trying to do this for a decade, and they're just catching up with NVIDIA and AMD now.
... do you know literally anything about chip fabrication at a mass scale?
Photolithography?
Thermal oxidation?
Vapor deposition?
Megasonics?
Plasma ashing?
Or are these gonna be artisinal, bespoke, lovingly handcrafted GPUs?
Pointless hypothetical unless you have a couple billion left over.
But the answer is there will always be fanboys who will approve of everything and haters who will hate everything you do. And some folks who don't give much of a shit either way unless you make really good or bad decisions