Nvidia believes that in future computing performance will matter much more than graphics performance, which seems to make sense as forthcoming video games will demand a lot of purely computing power to process not only visuals, but also physics and artificial experience. Nevertheless, Nvidia seems to put a lot of hopes onto its proprietary technologies, such as CUDA, Stereo 3D Vision, PhysX and others. This is understandable as the aforementioned technologies allow Nvidia to differentiate itself. However, as all proprietary standards (3dfx Glide is one example), they may not continue to be on the leading edge in the longer term.
“Graphics industry, I think, is on the point that microprocessor industry was several years ago, when AMD made the public confession that frequency does not matter anymore and it is more about performance per watt. I think we are the same crossroad with the graphics world: framerate and resolution are nice, but today they are very high and going from 120fps to 125fps is not going to fundamentally change end-user experience. But I think the things that we are doing with Stereo 3D Vision, PhysX, about making the games more immersive, more playable is beyond framerates and resolutions. Nvidia will show with the next-generation GPUs that the compute side is now becoming more important that the graphics side,” concluded Mr. Hara.
