I saw the news that you'd left NVIDIA on a perfectly ordinary night. I had just finished a stretch of work on my own project and closed my editor to go to bed, with work the next morning, when I saw your name on my phone next to the words "resigned" and "effective immediately." Honestly, I didn't feel much in that moment. I don't own any of your stock, and I rarely follow your news. You founded a company worth trillions of dollars. I'm an engineer renting a room in a city far from home. You were always far away from me.
But after I put the phone down, I couldn't sleep. I started counting the things in this room: the 4070 Ti Super in the PC on my desk, the 5060 Ti in my new server, and the retired RTX 2060 in the corner. Somewhere in the counting I realized that the twenty-two years of my life had been laid out one card at a time, and every card was yours.
The first one was a GTX 960.
People called it a sweet-spot card: not expensive, just enough to run most games of that era. But to me it wasn't cheap at all. When I was in first grade, my parents separated. My mom went to Taipei on her own to work, earning money to raise me and pay my tuition, while I grew up with my grandparents. I knew where every dollar she had came from, so growing up, I almost never asked her for anything.
The old family computer got me through elementary school. The summer after fifth grade, so my friends and I could play on the same Minecraft map, I fumbled my way through Hamachi step by step and set up the first server of my life. But by the time I was thirteen, it choked on AVA and Path of Exile. I thought about it for a long, long time, and finally made an exception: I asked my mom to build me a new one. She said yes. My uncle put it together piece by piece, and that afternoon the 960 slotted into my life. I booted it up, opened AVA, and it didn't stutter. I could even tab out to watch YouTube and voice chat with friends while the game kept running, and everything was smooth. I remember sitting in front of the screen thinking: finally, I can lose myself in the world I want to be in.
Later my uncle taught me how to build a PC, how to troubleshoot, how to reinstall Windows. My road to becoming an engineer probably really began inside that case. Years later, my uncle went to work at TSMC, the place that makes your chips, and I joined the company whose name was printed on my first card.
Back then the family computer still ran Windows 7, and my generation grew up alongside your keynotes. One GTX generation followed another. I watched the review videos over and over and knew the benchmark charts better than my textbooks. The Titan at the very top cost tens of thousands of Taiwan dollars, and there was even a gold one. To a middle schooler, that wasn't hardware. It was something out of a myth.
Then came the 1080 Ti. You made a $700 card that beat a Titan selling for over $1,000, with 11 GB of VRAM, an unbelievable amount at the time. People started calling it a legend, because whoever bought one couldn't bring themselves to replace it for five or six years, and some joked, only half kidding, that you'd made it a little too good. I couldn't afford one. I could only look at it through a screen, through a mall display window. Every gamer who grew up in that era probably has a card like that: one you never owned and never forgot.
Then the mining boom hit. Cards were scalped for far more than their price, store shelves sat empty, and students like us could only sigh at the price lists.
In those years we laughed at your 970 for being labeled 4 GB when only 3.5 GB of it was fast, turned your "It just works" into a meme, watched you pull a whole board out of the oven in your own kitchen, and cursed the 4090 for melting its power connectors. But every time a new card launched, we were still there in front of our screens, right on time. That was our golden age.
Back in 2019, you announced the RTX 2060 on stage. It was the cheapest card in the RTX 20 series, and for the first time, an ordinary person's computer could hold light that had actually been calculated. People argued over whether 6 GB of VRAM was enough, but for me back then, 6 GB was plenty for a whole pile of games. Its price was something a high schooler with a part-time job could just barely scrape together.
This time I didn't want to ask my mom. I took a job at a Japanese restaurant, working both the kitchen and the floor. I didn't have a scooter license, so every day I biked fifteen or twenty minutes to get there, and because I procrastinated, I was often late and often yelled at. I couldn't remember the toppings or the menu, and I mumbled when customers ordered. I was afraid of the heat, so whenever I carried dobin mushi or chawanmushi, I was slower than everyone else. Once, when the restaurant was quiet, I was afraid the boss would scold me for standing around, so I found something to do and got yelled at: "Why are you grabbing other people's work?" Another time, when it was too busy to keep up, I got yelled at again: "You're slow. Get out of the way." Everyone there was older than me and I couldn't get along with them. The only person I could talk to was a classmate who'd started working there with me. I lasted three months.
Much later I learned that when you were fifteen, you washed dishes at a Denny's too. And later the three of you sat in a booth at a Denny's and decided to start a company. I don't know whether anyone ever yelled at you for being slow back then, but when I thought about it, for the first time I felt those three months hadn't been wasted.
Those three months bought me a dual-fan 2060. I couldn't afford the triple-fan one, and I didn't even buy a GPU bracket. I just wedged a pair of bamboo chopsticks under the card so it wouldn't sag. After I left for college, it stayed in my hometown as the gaming machine I came back to. Later, when I was doing school projects and building things of my own, it became my one and only server, and it held on until my third year of college. In the last few years it started having problems, so I swapped it out, brought it from my hometown to the place I rent now, and put it in the corner.
I often wonder where I'd be without those cards.
In middle school, my emotions swung wildly, and because of that my classmates shut me out. I slept on my desk at school during the day, went home and played games with online friends late into the night, and quietly got through those days on Minecraft, manga, and one video after another. That computer was the only little world that was mine, and it was there that I first felt the world still held so many beautiful things. I don't regret it, because those days made me who I am now.
Later I started learning to program in middle and high school, competed in programming contests in high school, and got into National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. This year, my mom, who never went to college, came to my graduation. Without those cards I'd probably have taken a completely different path, maybe a military academy, maybe something else, but I wouldn't be the person I am now, writing code to support myself and two cats.
Without them, I couldn't have opened those games on Steam, couldn't have played GTA V, the greatest game there is to me, or Monster Hunter: World. When Breath of the Wild came out, I couldn't afford a Switch, but it looked like so much fun. I found the Cemu emulator and forced it open on your card. The frame rate never went above 60, but I forgot to eat and sleep, and walked across Hyrule for more nights than I can count. Later, it was the 2060 that first showed me what high-end graphics really looked like, that let me turn on shaders in Minecraft for the first time and see sunlight through the leaves and the sky reflected in the water. The blocky world I'd played since I was a kid was suddenly, absurdly beautiful.
Then I grew up. When Monster Hunter Wilds was about to come out, I moved to the 4070 Ti Super I have now. An upperclassman who already worked at the company bought it for me at the employee price before I joined, and it was the first time I got a good card without asking anyone or working three months for it. My mom has always let me do what I want, and she never once said anything about me buying these things. Back then, lots of people around me built PCs for Wilds too, and not long after, graphics cards and memory shot up in price once again. By now, this card is probably impossible to buy. Later I built a new server and put a 5060 Ti in it to run my own things. I used to be someone who played games on your cards. Now I'm someone who writes code on them.
I still remember the first time I saw CUDA and GeForce Experience on my computer. All I did was complain: why do I have to install a pile of extra stuff just to get a driver, why is this such a hassle. That kid had no idea that the thing he was complaining about would go on to hold up the last few years of AI, and hold up the work I do now. If graphics cards and memory have become unaffordable this time, that's partly because of it too. The homepage of my blog has a starfield drawn with WebGPU, and on my computer, every star in it is calculated by your card.
This May, in Taipei, you announced RTX Spark, a chip that puts your CPU and GPU together, and the first time you truly walked into ordinary people's laptops and onto their desks. For the past few weeks, I've been testing machines with it inside at work every day, getting ready to sell the product I've been building. The code I write will run on the chip you announced yourself, get packed into a box, and be shipped to the homes of people I'll never know.
I know these days are hard for you. You admitted the wrong you did to your family yourself, and the rest is still under investigation. I'm not going to defend you, and it isn't my place to judge you either. Over the years, people cursed the way you sliced your lineup down to the last dollar, your leather jacket, your "the more you buy, the more you save," and I cursed them too. But the nights those cards spent with me were real.
These past few days, lots of people on X have been calling for you to be brought back, and someone said this was "Apple-firing-Steve-Jobs-level stupid." It reminded me of how Jobs was pushed out of the company he founded and came back twelve years later. He once said "Stay hungry, stay foolish." I loved that line when I was very young, and later it became one of the mottos on my own website. I've never used a single Apple product, but that line made me feel I'd always been walking a few steps behind people like you.
I don't know whether you'll come back. But if one day you do, I want to be the one in the audience clapping the hardest.
That night, after I'd finished counting every card in the room, I looked at the news again and realized I'd been wrong at the start. You were never far away from me.
At thirteen, I asked my mom for a card you made. In high school, I traded three months of carrying plates and evenings of being yelled at for a card you made, then propped it up with a pair of bamboo chopsticks. This year, at twenty-two, the things I write are finally going into a chip you made, to be carried home by someone else.
Maybe in some city I don't know, there's a thirteen-year-old asking their mom for a new computer right now. Maybe one day, inside the machine they turn on, there will be a line of code I wrote, running on a chip you made. They won't know me, and they won't know about the chopsticks. That's okay.
Thank you for these 33 years.
Now it's our turn.
P.S. The 2060 in the corner of my room barely works anymore. I still haven't put it away.
— Someone who grew up with your graphics cards