A lengthy essay published today by developer Sebin Nyshkim, titled ‘NVIDIA is full of shit,’ has become the dominant discussion topic on Hacker News heading into the July 4th weekend, racking up 995 points and 571 comments on the eve of a holiday normally reserved for cookouts and fireworks.

The post systematically attacks Nvidia’s consumer GPU business on multiple fronts: the RTX 50 series’ 12VHPWR power connectors, which can still melt due to a design flaw in the GPU board’s shunt resistor layout; the company’s reliance on DLSS and frame generation to claim performance gains that the author calls ‘deceitful bullshit’; and the CUDA ecosystem that locks creators into Nvidia hardware. The essay points out that even the $1,999 RTX 5090 can only run Cyberpunk 2077 with full ray tracing at about 27 frames per second in native 4K, forcing users to rely on upscaling.

The Hacker News thread quickly turned into a broader lament about the state of PC gaming. Commenters debated whether the industry is undergoing a ‘manufactured collapse’ driven by Microsoft’s acquisitions and Nvidia’s pivot to AI datacenter sales, which leaves gamers as an afterthought. Others pointed to Valve as a potential counterweight, though some noted the company’s efforts orbit around its store rather than hardware. The conversation also touched on the death of RTS games, Blizzard’s neglect of StarCraft 2, and the precarious future of a hobby that now feels like an afterthought to trillion-dollar corporations.