Nvidia Totally Blew The 50 Series GPU Launch

You were supposed to save PC gaming, not destroy it!

The green in “team green” must represent all the AI money Nvidia keeps making. Photo taken by the author.

The last several weeks have been a strange, slow-rolling nightmare for Nvidia’s once-great gaming division. Their new 50 series graphics cards started at the very top of the hype cycle with a splashy CES showing before falling into a terrible void of defects, under-shipments, and nightmarish price hikes. I went from excited about how their new tech will no doubt change and influence gaming visuals in the future to holding my head in my hands in disbelief at every new failure.

This should have been yet another landmark moment for the company that has more or less controlled PC graphics hardware for the last decade, but instead they’ve orchestrated a truly embarrassing failure of logistics and marketing. It’s all proof that no matter how much sweet AI tech money you have to throw at a problem, you can still make tons of mistakes.

Suddenly, the recent AMD strategy of “announce almost nothing and delay shipping new cards for as long as possible” looks pretty good.

Nvidia has such a dominant hold on the gaming graphics market that it can’t help but move in the whatever direction the company wants to go next. The 50 Series brings in a ton of cool new rendering features, including a “transformer” machine learning…