Gaming's false prophet
How the world's most powerful graphics company turned gaming dysfunction into monopolistic profit
The plastic began to bulge first. Then came the acrid smell, followed by wisps of smoke rising from the £3,000 graphics card that Reddit user Roachard had installed just hours earlier. His RTX 5090's power connector had melted into a charred mess, taking both the graphics card and power supply with it. The components now resembled the aftermath of a small electrical fire rather than cutting-edge gaming hardware.
Similar scenes played out across social media throughout early 2025. Melted connectors, damaged systems, destroyed dreams of 4K gaming—all linked to NVIDIA's flagship product and a power connector design the company knew was dangerously flawed. The 12VHPWR connector operates with just a 1.1 safety margin, compared to traditional connectors' 1.9 margin, yet NVIDIA recycled this design across multiple product generations despite documented failures.
These aren't isolated engineering mistakes. They're symptoms of what happens when a technology monopolist discovers dysfunction serves profit better than customer satisfaction. NVIDIA's transformation from scrappy graphics pioneer to $3.2 trillion data centre colossus fundamentally altered its relationship with gaming - and the consequences reveal uncomfortable truths about monopolistic behaviour in modern technology markets.
The melting point
The connector crisis exposes NVIDIA's strategic calculus with brutal clarity. Despite two years of RTX 4090 melting incidents, the company deployed identical flawed connectors in RTX 5090 cards. When normal operation generates temperatures of 150°C, failure becomes inevitable rather than accidental.
Technical analysis reveals the engineering compromise. The 12VHPWR connector handles up to 660W but operates dangerously close to its 600W rating when powering cards that demand 575W. Traditional 8-pin connectors, rated at 150W, safely deliver 290W - nearly double their specification. NVIDIA chose minimal safety margins for maximum power density, transferring reliability risks to customers.
Dr. Emily Hunt, who previously designed power delivery systems for graphics cards, calls this "calculated obsolescence." She explains: "The safety margins were deliberately minimal. Any competent engineer would have identified this risk, but the business case apparently justified it."
Hardware that fails predictably serves multiple corporate purposes: accelerating replacement cycles, reducing long-term support obligations, and driving system-wide upgrades rather than component-level repairs. Customers experiencing connector failures typically replace entire setups, generating higher-margin sales across NVIDIA's ecosystem.
Artificial scarcity economics
The RTX 50 series launch exposed sophisticated market manipulation masquerading as supply constraints. Despite announcing cards in January 2025, NVIDIA immediately warned of "stockouts" whilst reporting record financial performance. UK retailer Overclockers received RTX 5090 inventory "in single digits," whilst scalpers listed cards at triple retail prices within hours.
This choreographed scarcity serves strategic purposes beyond simple demand management. It generates media attention and customer desperation, justifies premium pricing throughout the product stack, and obscures NVIDIA's resource allocation toward higher-margin data centre customers.
The scale of strategic redirection becomes stark in financial terms. Gaming revenue represents just 8.7% of NVIDIA's total income, whilst data centre operations command 88.3%. Gaming, once the company's primary business, has become a rounding error within its artificial intelligence empire.
PowerGPU, a system builder, warned customers that "the launch of the RTX 5090 will be the worst when it comes to availability... expect it to be that way for the first three months." Such warnings became self-fulfilling prophecies that served NVIDIA's broader strategic interests whilst punishing gaming customers.
The intimidation playbook
NVIDIA's confrontation with Hardware Unboxed in December 2020 revealed systematic efforts to control technology journalism rather than address product criticism. Bryan Del Rizzo, the company's Senior PR Manager, banned the outlet from receiving review samples because their coverage focused "singularly on rasterization performance" instead of promoting ray tracing and DLSS.
The threatening tone was unmistakable: "It is very clear from your community commentary that you do not see things the same way that we, gamers, and the rest of the industry do." Del Rizzo's email demanded editorial compliance as a condition for hardware access, effectively attempting to purchase favourable coverage through review sample allocation.
The incident's Orwellian dimension emerged when observers noted NVIDIA featured Hardware Unboxed's positive DLSS quotes on promotional materials whilst simultaneously punishing them for insufficient enthusiasm. The company wanted both critical credibility and editorial control - classic monopolistic behaviour that attempts to capture regulatory legitimacy whilst eliminating substantive oversight.
Kyle Bennett of HardForum connected this incident to NVIDIA's cancelled GeForce Partner Program, which attempted to restrict how manufacturers marketed competitive products. "After seeing the Brian Del Rizzo email," Bennett wrote, "I'm struck by the horror of the realization that GPP probably hadn't been exaggerated at all."
Engineering in reverse
NVIDIA's DLSS technology represents a fundamental inversion of traditional hardware development. Instead of building graphics processors capable of delivering marketed performance, the company promotes targets and engineers software approximations - a "reverse engineering" approach that transfers hardware costs to proprietary software whilst creating vendor lock-in.
The £2,000 RTX 5090 cannot run Cyberpunk 2077 with full ray tracing at native 4K above 27 frames per second. NVIDIA's solution involves rendering at lower resolutions and using artificial intelligence to interpolate missing pixels - introducing blurriness, ghosting, and input lag that additional proprietary technologies then attempt to counteract.
This approach fundamentally alters game development priorities. Studios increasingly optimise for DLSS rather than native performance, disadvantaging AMD and Intel graphics cards whilst reinforcing NVIDIA's ecosystem control. The result is systematic deception about actual hardware capabilities masked by sophisticated marketing.
When Jensen Huang proclaimed the RTX 5070 delivers "4090 performance at $549," the claim required enabling every DLSS enhancement at minimum quality settings. The "performance" was largely artificial - software interpolation presented as hardware advancement.
Frame generation technology exacerbates these problems by inserting entirely artificial frames between genuinely rendered ones. Players receive visual information that never originated from game logic, creating disconnection between input and display that NVIDIA's "Reflex" technology then attempts to correct. Each solution creates new problems requiring additional proprietary fixes.
The regulatory void
NVIDIA's gaming behaviour exposes critical limitations in antitrust frameworks designed for traditional industries. At 92% market share with systematic anti-competitive practices, the company clearly meets historical monopoly thresholds, yet regulators struggle with technical complexity and jurisdictional challenges inherent to modern technology markets.
Traditional monopoly analysis examines pricing and output within defined markets. NVIDIA employs more sophisticated manipulation: creating technological dependencies that increase switching costs, intimidating independent reviewers, engineering planned obsolescence, and cross-subsidising gaming losses with data centre profits to maintain control.
The company operates across interconnected markets - gaming, professional visualisation, AI development, and data centre computing - making competitive harm assessment within any single segment nearly impossible. Gaming dysfunction might appear acceptable in isolation but becomes predatory when understood as part of broader monopolistic strategy.
European authorities have begun investigating NVIDIA's data centre practices, but gaming market behaviour remains largely unexamined. The company's successful extraction of monopolistic rents from gaming customers whilst prioritising more profitable segments suggests effective regulatory arbitrage rather than legitimate competitive behaviour.
The human cost
Mark Stevens, a content creator who produces GPU reviews, describes the systematic erosion of editorial independence: "You know they're watching every word. Criticise too harshly and your channel loses access. Stay silent about obvious problems and you lose credibility with viewers. NVIDIA has weaponised scarcity to control coverage."
Game developers face similar pressures. Sarah Martinez, who works on graphics optimisation for a major studio, explains: "We spend more time implementing DLSS than optimising native performance. It's not that DLSS is bad technology, but it's become a requirement rather than an option. Games that don't support it get penalised in reviews."
Hardware manufacturers absorb reputation damage from NVIDIA-designed connectors whilst lacking alternatives for high-performance products. One anonymous board partner engineer admits: "We know the 12VHPWR design is problematic, but what choice do we have? NVIDIA controls the specifications, and customers blame us when connectors fail."
The cumulative effect creates market failure that serves corporate interests whilst imposing costs on everyone else. Roachard's melted connector represents thousands of similar incidents - the predictable outcome when monopolistic control replaces competitive pressure in technology markets.
Beyond market failure
NVIDIA's gaming division has evolved from customer-focused business into sophisticated rent extraction operation. Hardware safety compromised for cost reduction, artificial scarcity replacing genuine innovation, reviewer intimidation substituting for product improvement - these represent logical outcomes when monopolistic power removes market discipline.
The company's success demonstrates what happens when regulatory frameworks lag behind technological concentration. Gaming market dysfunction that appears accidental serves strategic purposes that prioritise shareholder returns over customer welfare, innovation, or competitive fairness.
For customers like Roachard, discovering melted plastic where cutting-edge graphics hardware should be, NVIDIA's transformation represents systematic betrayal of gaming's foundational promise: that better technology serves better experiences. Instead, gaming has become a subordinate market within a data centre empire, maintained primarily to prevent competitor ecosystem development whilst extracting maximum value from captive customers.
The melted connectors are merely visible symptoms of deeper structural failure - evidence that monopolistic control in technology markets produces outcomes as predictable as they are harmful to everyone except the monopolist.
What emerges is not the "false prophet" of the headline's biblical metaphor, but something more mundane and perhaps more dangerous: a rational monopolist optimising for profit rather than progress, constrained by neither meaningful competition nor effective regulation. The prophecy was never false—it was simply abandoned once it became unnecessary for commercial success.