Nvidia is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its line of graphics processing units or GPUs. Although the firm had its start in the world of consumer gaming, in recent years it’s grown into a true tech titan with diverse investments in self-driving cars, cloud computing, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. The parallel processing power of Nvidia’s GPUs has proven to be particularly good at machine learning tasks, and its chips are in high demand not only from AI researchers but any business with an interest in artificial intelligence. From 2015 onwards, Nvidia’s share price grew sharply, allowing the company to make some key acquisitions, including UK chip designer ARM, which it announced it would purchase in September 2020 for $40 billion. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who is currently the firm’s CEO. Known for his leather jackets and upbeat corporate presentations, Huang is a familiar figure to anyone interested in tech.
Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service got its first Xbox PC game last week with Gears 5 and now three more are arriving today. Grounded, Deathloop, and Pentiment are all now available to GeForce Now subscribers as part on the ongoing 10-year deal between Microsoft and Nvidia. Microsoft Store support is also coming to GeForce Now in the coming months.
It’s not the pandemic highs — but with $2 billion in profit this quarter, record data center revenue and small bumps in almost every other category, it’s looking pretty rosy for the green GPU giant despite the recent slump in demand for PCs. Just a continuation of the story from last quarter, really.
I wish 1440p GPUs were more mainstream after years of 1080p dominance.
OBS Studio 29 just went live today with support for real-time AV1 — letting the latest Nvidia and possibly AMD and Intel graphics cards stream way higher quality video to YouTube using the same amount of data.
The OBS changelog does note that AV1 streaming is currently only a “beta feature” for YouTube, as it has been since March. Discord has supported AV1 since January. Chrome recently improved video calls with AV1 as well.
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The RTX 4070 is the most affordable RTX 40-series GPU yet, with solid 1440p performance.
Nvidia now supports native 4K streaming through GeForce Now on LG 2023 smart TVs like the OLED B3, C3, and G3. Up until now 4K GeForce Now streaming was only available on some Samsung TVs with an Ultimate subscription. LG’s 2021 and 2022 models are limited to 1080p. Bandai Namco is also adding the Little Nightmares games to GeForce Now today if you’re looking for something to play.
It looks like Sultim Tsyrendashiev, whose Half-Life: Ray Traced mod we just covered in February, now has a job at Nvidia!
You don’t have to wait for Nvidia to add RT to games like Portal, Quake, or Minecraft anymore — RTX Remix lets modders do it themselves, and now it’s open-source. You’ll find the runtime, toolkit and instructions at Nvidia’s GitHub. Let there be light.
If you’ve got an Nvidia RTX 30 or 40-series card, you can turn on “RTX Super Resolution” in the Nvidia Control Panel, and VLC 3.0.19 or later will automatically tweak your videos.
Just know the effect was extremely subtle when I could see it at all — it’s nothing like what Topaz Video Enhance AI and co can do.
Or so Nvidia says, promoting DLSS AI scaling technology while AMD touts the hand-coded algorithms behind FSR 2. Watch this video below to see Hardware Unboxed pit man vs. machine learning in 26 games.
Still, if you prefer more AI, check today’s Cyberpunk 2077 update — besides the new Overdrive Mode lighting, it also adds Nvidia DLAA AI-powered anti-aliasing, as well as XeSS AI scaling for Intel GPUs.
I promise I didn’t make up any of those words.
The feature, which adds path tracing for much-improved lighting and shadows, is coming in a new patch tomorrow, and Digital Foundry has already tested it out. How well does it work? Just watch the video:
A new Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive Mode with path racing, otherwise known as full ray tracing, is arriving on April 11th. The film-like ray tracing will include more accurate lighting. Nvidia has posted a before and after video to demo the differences, but even an RTX 4090 can dip as low as 16fps at native 4K. It looks like you’ll need DLSS 3 for this one.
CTO Michael Kagen doesn’t mince words when it comes to crypto. The industry “bought a lot of [Nvidia’s hardware], and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society,” he tells The Guardian, “AI does.”
Big talk considering Nvidia was making millions selling cards to crypto miners not long ago.
An NVIDIA chart with no units on the X axis and no Y axis at all.
Diablo IV and Redfall will both launch with DLSS 3 support. Forza Horizon 5 is also getting DLSS 3 support that will help push past the 120fps milestone at 4K on RTX 40-series GPUs. Nvidia is also bringing DLSS 3 to Unreal Engine 5.2 and making its Frame Generation technology publicly available for developers to integrate into their games and apps at GDC.
Nvidia released drivers with its new RTX Video Super Resolution feature last week, but they have a nasty bug that can use more than 10 percent of your CPU. GeForce owners have noticed that the Nvidia container has been hogging the CPU after logon or closing games, and Nvidia has confirmed it’s aware of the issue. Rolling back to old drivers will fix the problem.
PC Gamers rejoice: you can finally get your hands on laptops that contain Nvidia’s immensely powerful GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 mobile GPUs. Some of the new launches have been specifically designed for creative professionals, identifiable by an Nvidia Studio badge.
Don’t need all that power? No sweat, as RTX 4070, 4060, and 4050 powered Laptops will arrive later on February 22nd.
Nvidia has been rumored to be working on a new RTX Titan or RTX 4090 Ti for months now, and now a mysterious quad-slot GPU has appeared on Twitter. VideoCardz says it could be the rumored 4090 Ti, which some leakers have claimed will have 48GB of memory. Nvidia may have shelved its plans for a giant quad-slot GPU, but we’re probably going to need bigger PC cases soon either way.
For $20 a month, Nvidia will rent you an RTX 4080 gaming PC in the cloud.
