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.
Starting today, you can access several PC Game Pass titles from Nvidia’s cloud gaming service GeForce Now, including Deathloop, No Man’s Sky, Grounded, and more. You can view the whole roster of available games from Nvidia’s website.
Nvidia’s AI lead pushed it to become a $1 trillion company, while its H100 chips are so in demand they can be used as collateral even as the next-gen Nvidia GH200 sits on the horizon.
Now the New York Times describes how it’s established a monstrous lead over other chipmakers, extending a victory tour of editorial recounting Nvidia “hand-delivering processors to Elon Musk and Sam Altman,” how it started in a Denny’s, and CEO Jensen Huang’s SIGGRAPH keynote outlining its decision to focus on AI.
Called Portal: Prelude RTX, it’s free for owners of the original Portal on Steam once it’s released at 3PM ET today.
This is the first title to use Nvidia’s RTX IO, which supports both DirectStorage and Vulkan, using GPU cores to load compressed data directly from storage to the graphics card. The system is also being used in the PC port for Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart.
Portal Prelude is unrelated to the similarly-named side-scroller for graphing calculators.
Tie or Ti in a GeForce 4080 Ti? Jeff Fisher at Nvidia has tried to answer that in the past, and the vice president of Nvidia’s PC business is now appearing via a prerecorded video deposition. Nvidia was against Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition until the Xbox maker struck a deal earlier this year to bring Xbox PC games to Nvidia’s GeForce Now service.
I told you it was going to be a day full of video testimony. Next up we have Phil Eisler, who leads the GeForce Now team at Nvidia. It’s a nine-minute video.
Microsoft had previously kept its own games off GeForce Now to not compete with xCloud, but the Xbox maker signed an important deal with Nvidia earlier this year to bring its Xbox PC games to GeForce Now.
The FTC will call on two Nvidia executives to testify about cloud gaming and how the company has overcome technical limitations and latency. This is a key argument in the FTC v. Microsoft case, as Microsoft argues cloud gaming is simply an additional feature right now. Microsoft signed a deal with Nvidia for Xbox PC games. “What’s notable is Nvidia initially opposed this transaction, they signed one of the side deals… and then they supported,” says the FTC.
Many people (including yours truly) are having problems with Chromium browsers and other apps flickering after installing the 535.98 driver released May 30th.
The problem seems linked to multiple monitor setups and having G-Sync enabled. A post to Nvidia’s forums says they’ve identified a fix, but until it’s rolled out, you can try an earlier driver or disable hardware acceleration in any apps that are having problems.
[Nvidia GeForce Forums]
Nvidia’s researchers say Neuralangelo can be used to speed up creation of textured 3D assets for video games, art, robotics, and more.
It sounds like a more powerful version of Epic’s RealityScan app, or Nvidia’s own work with Instant NeRF, which use photos, rather than video. Here’s a video of it in action:
Nvidia just announced its DGX GH200 at Computex. It’s got 256 of its new “Grace Hopper Superchips” for an exaflop of AI performance — and contains 150 miles of optical fiber and over 2,000 fans. Google, Meta, and Microsoft will be “evaluating” it, though not necessarily purchasing kits: they tend to build their own compute clouds, even if they contain loads of Nvidia GPUs.
Nvidia says it’s 2.2x faster than a last-gen DGX H100 cluster at GPT3 training, as one example.
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.
7
Verge Score
The RTX 4070 is the most affordable RTX 40-series GPU yet, with solid 1440p performance.
