• AMD's CEO has said that it's a "data center first company"
• Lisa Su observed that: "I see AI and super intelligence becoming more and more essential to every aspect of our lives"
• The CEO predicted a double-digit fall in PC sales next year, and gamers aren't happy at all with what they see as an abandonment by Team Red

AMD's chief executive hasn't been making many friends in the PC gaming community this week, having offered up a telling admission, alongside an ominous sales prediction, all off the back of the firm's latest financial results.

In an interview with Brian Sozzi, who is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, Lisa Su made it clear that AMD is a company with a lot of resources to expand its supply and the "ability to help our customers", but sadly the customers in this case are data centers, not consumers.

Su then delivered a frank admission: "We are a data center first company."

AMD's CEO also again underlined that AI is very much the future, and that "over the horizon I see AI and super intelligence becoming more and more essential to every aspect of our lives."

On top of this, as OC3D spotted, during AMD's earnings call for Q3 2026 (which was all about bumper profits), Su said that "PC sell-through slowed late in the quarter as higher memory and component costs weighed on demand," while forecasting that next year wouldn't be a good one for desktop computers and laptops.

The CEO observed: "In 2027, we are planning for PC market unit shipments to decline by a double-digit percentage."

In other words, an over 10% slump. The chief exec added this caveat: "In this environment, we expect to outperform the market as we deliver our Ryzen roadmap and grow our commercial footprint."

That presumably refers to the launch of Zen 6 processors for consumers (and businesses), the next-gen Ryzen family, which is expected to arrive early in 2027 and should obviously stoke some interest.

Analysis: dark times for the PC

It's no surprise that AMD has 'followed the money', as the old saying goes, because this is how businesses work, and profits reign supreme. Data center GPUs are way more profitable than consumer models.

If we look at the amount of revenue that AMD raked in from its data center business in this latest quarter, it very nearly doubled year-on-year and was up 97% to $8.5 billion. That dwarfed client and gaming (Ryzen and Radeon, mostly consumer) revenue, which was $3.7 billion (down 8%).

Looking at the balance sheet, it's clear enough AMD is a data center-first company — but actually saying this out loud, in no uncertain terms, sends out further signals about where Team Red wants to be, along with all the messaging that AI is the future.

Is it any wonder that gamers feel bitter about this? Hardly. Back at the start of 2024, AMD's consumer revenue was actually more than data center, albeit only marginally, but still — that picture has shifted massively over the past couple of years.

And with the prices of consumer GPUs shooting up as graphics chip production is increasingly prioritizing AI accelerators for data centers, there's a lot of bad feeling for obvious reasons. Nvidia's graphics card business is the same story too, of course, and GPU price hikes have been getting out of hand in the past few months for GeForce and Radeon cards alike.

Given clear negative predictions about the PC market next year — with AMD joining in on that — and the company's equally clear unwillingness to do anything about that with its plentiful resources, consumers are looking at a dismal future. One in which I fear that GPU price hikes are going to follow in the footsteps of steep RAM and SSD inflation, which has become beyond painful at this stage. Many forecasts point to the RAM crisis getting worse in 2027, of course.

All of which means it's hardly surprising that there's a profound sense of disappointment in AMD on social media, given this fresh data center comment from Lisa Su.

One Redditor declared: "AMD was a lot of people's last hope, but looks like PC gaming is over."

Dramatic? Well, yes, it is, but nonetheless, every single metric, forecast, and piece of analysis is strongly suggesting 2027 will be a desperately bleak time for the PC, and I have a hard time disbelieving that this is the truth. I've recently written about GPU pricing and how Black Friday could be your last chance to get an upgrade at a relatively reasonable price, if you need one.

• Nvidia has a new interactive demo out on Steam
• It offers a virtual unboxing of a GeForce 8800 GTX… 
• …but you need an RTX 4070 to run it, and the recommended GPU is an RTX 5080
• Some gamers feel that it's a 'slap in the face' for several reasons

Can't afford a new GPU thanks to the ever-worsening RAM crisis? Well, Nvidia wants to take you back to the days when a graphics card didn't destroy your bank balance, courtesy of a new demo on Steam where you get to unbox and install a GeForce GPU from 2006.

The Verge spotted the interactive demo entitled 'GeForce 8800 GTX — 20 Years of a Legend' which can be grabbed for free on Steam.

It was developed by Dylan Browne, an Unreal Engine artist who was commissioned by Nvidia, and the demo is rendered in Unreal Engine (unsurprisingly). The idea is that you can: "Step into a 2006-era PC gaming room, unbox the GeForce 8800 GTX, inspect it up close, and install it in an era-accurate PC tower."

On the face of it, that's a rather fun idea — and it's smartly implemented to be fair, including revisiting Windows Vista on a CRT monitor — but if you start to think about it more deeply, this exercise seems more than a little tone deaf in the current PC components climate.

Have a watch of Nvidia's illustrative clip below first off, before we move on to discuss this one.

Analysis: ragebait, greed, and a lot of other accusations from gamers

One of the most obvious sticking points here is the requirements to run this demo. What Nvidia GPU will you need to take part in a virtual unboxing? Here's a clue: it certainly won't run on a GeForce 8800 GTX. In fact you'll need an RTX 4070 at the minimum, and the recommended GPU as per the Steam specs is a… wait for it… RTX 5080. (You must have 32GB of RAM, as well, at minimum).

And this comes at a time when the RAM crisis has made that RTX 5080 soar in price to over double its MSRP in the US, and with hefty inflation evident in all countries (over 50% in the UK for example). Don't even start with the RTX 5090, and as we've seen, even lower-end graphics cards are being hit hard with price hikes.

As one Redditor put it neatly (with the swearing removed): "A 5080 for an unboxing simulator. They are just laughing in our faces."

Another in that thread replies to say: "Ragebait? You are not able to afford a real graphics card — here, take this virtual one?"

Speaking of rage, there's quite an outpouring of it in the comments for Nvidia's YouTube video (the one embedded above), such as: "Great job, today consumers have no chance to be able to afford new high end gaming video cards in favor of greed and AI money. A 5090 is $10-15k, and a 5080 is $2k or more — it's a slap in the face to post this tbh."

Nvidia has a clear priority for AI, data centers and profits over consumers and gaming GPUs – and it's a business, that's where the money lies, we get that. Shareholders for-the-win and so forth, but given that, the thoughtlessness of this little PR nugget is pretty staggering really.

What sort of reaction did Nvidia expect it would get? Okay, there are some Redditors reminiscing about the good old days of 2006, and the 8800 GTX that they owned. However, many more are simply bitter (or indeed incandescent) that Nvidia appears to be reminding us of better times, having done a good deal to cause the GPU pricing pain which is now prevalent thanks to chasing AI profits. While asking for a high-end, now ridiculously expensive, Blackwell GPU to run the demo (at the recommended level).

The GeForce 8800 GTX was $599 as a top-end monster GPU when it arrived, and if you want an RTX 5090 these days, you'll pay over 15x that amount. I would think that Nvidia would want to do anything but take a nostalgic trip back to the days of relatively affordable high-end graphics cards at this point in time.

Maybe Team Green should have saved this one for the card's 25th anniversary. Will the RAM crisis be over by then?

• A gamer took the GTA 6 'extended look' trailer and fudged it to work with DLSS 5 and Frame Generation
• The results posted on YouTube look impressive, albeit with some notable glitches
• It'll actually be possible to run the game on console, piped through a PC with an Nvidia GPU to add DLSS 5 and other visual trickery, at the cost of some input lag
• …and some believe that trade-off might be worth it

Will the best way to play GTA 6 at launch be to pipe it from your PS5 to your PC with an Nvidia GPU and then back out to your TV?

No, it absolutely won't, but a convoluted setup along these lines could be the optimal way to experience the game visually (with some major caveats) — before the PC version arrives — given that you can fudge the addition of DLSS 5 this way.

How does this work? Wccftech picked up the story of the Redditor who proposed this experiment, and actually applied DLSS 5 to the GTA 6 'extended look' trailer that Rockstar brought out a couple of months ago.

To be specific, this gamer gave the trailer a DLSS 5 makeover with 3x Frame Generation tripling the frame rate from 30 fps to 90 fps, via an app called Veyra, which is a GPU video enhancement tool for Windows on GitHub.

The Redditor explains: "I used Veyra 2.1.1, a tool that can take a video source (video files, capture cards, Remote Play) and apply Neural Rendering [DLSS 5], upscaling, and Frame Generation in real time. I also integrated MFG Unlocker into it so I can unlock Multi Frame Generation on my RTX 4080 and experiment with 3x/4x FG on 40-series cards."

MFG Unlocker is an experimental tool (again on GitHub) which the Redditor is using for getting Multi Frame Generation on their RTX 4080, in case you were wondering. (As ever, download any third-party software entirely at your own risk).

As you can see in the YouTube clip below, the results of this polishing of the official trailer are very impressive in some ways. That said, there are clear issues with artifacts and glitching in terms of the characters and lighting, with the best results seen in the background environment details.

It's pretty remarkable given that this is a fairly aggressive implementation of DLSS 5 by all accounts, fudged on top of a video with no relevant game data (the likes of vector and geometry data) to guide the neural rendering.

The Redditor's plan is to use a console-to-PC pipeline to play GTA 6 on the PS5, with the PC effectively sitting between the console and final output on the TV, adding DLSS 5 and jazzing up the visuals.

This means taking the PS5 and hooking it up to a 4K HDR capture card in the PC, running it through Veyra with the RTX 4080, then outputting to the 4K TV. It's a roundabout way of using the Nvidia GPU as an external graphics card for the console, except all the GeForce GPU is doing is applying DLSS and/or MFG to the image the PS5 has rendered — although there is a price to pay in terms of input lag, of course.

Analysis: capture capers

The Redditor doesn't actually have their PS5 yet (although they've ordered it) to try out this setup fully, but others on Reddit have run such a setup, and in fact it's not that uncommon (albeit still far from a mainstream concept).

One gamer says that they've played GTA 5 using an Elgato capture card with NitLink software, and "the gameplay was 100 times better", and while "there is a noticeable input lag" they claim that "it's completely acceptable — around 1-2 milliseconds."

That little input lag seems a stretch (to say the least), and overall, there's some dispute on whether this way of gaming is viable. Some gamers say that such a setup is just too laggy, while others claim it provides a decently playable experience. Of course, it will depend on what type of game you're playing — a fast-reaction shooter, for example, isn't going to do well with any extra lag being introduced, and you're certainly going to get some.

Really, the success of this kind of console to PC capture card to TV setup is going to heavily depend on a number of factors. The quality of the capture card (a PCIe board would be best, rather than one connected via USB) and the related software are the primary factors, and by all accounts, a higher-end Elgato with NitLink gives you a good chance of enjoying your PS5 games with an Nvidia GPU souping them up using DLSS 5 and Frame Generation.

I'm betting there will also be an element of subjectivity here, too, with some people likely to feel any latency more keenly than others.

Some gamers use this setup to play PS5 games on their PC monitor (in other words, without piping the image back out of the PC to the living room TV, which would cut down on some of the input lag), and there are guides to running this kind of setup on YouTube, like this one. Others recommend Zanit's tutorials on YouTube, but those videos are in Portuguese, so you'll need to translate them if you're not a native speaker. It's pretty cool stuff, if rather convoluted — and a good capture card doesn't come cheap (neither does a high-end RTX 5000 GPU).

Meanwhile, as far as GTA 6 on the PC goes, we may see this happen a lot sooner than expected, due to the way the emulation scene is going right now (in turbo mode thanks to AI). In other words, Rockstar may want to get the PC port on sale before PC gamers start playing it via emulation.