Nvidia is happy with the RTX range but for the future it ponders a “surprise”

During the Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference 2019, the financial director of Nvidia Colette Kress took stock of the situation and launched some (vague) clues as to what will happen in the future. Nvidia's last quarterly was in chiaroscuro: lower results than last year, but at the same time a great recovery in the second quarter.

In the last year Nvidia has presented the GeForce RTX range, renewing it with the SUPER models and emphasizing the ray tracing. On this last point there is no doubt that much more must be done, games that take advantage of technology are few, but this will help the next consoles.

The impression of many, including us, is that the new cards have not reached full market success, or at least what could have been hypothesized at the launch of the product given the media's bass drum made by the company. However, Nvidia is widely market leader in the world of dedicated video cards and Kress has said it is satisfied with the adoption of RTX solutions by the players.

“Of all the cards we sell on the desktop, two thirds now support ray tracing. So we are really happy with the adoption of the market and certainly there is a large space to grow. We have cards at every price level and for every type of player. You can buy a $ 100 video card up to $ 1000 for ray tracing. “

“In our view, in the future ray tracing will be the basis of gaming and PC games. So I think that we are only in the early stages and the amount of ray tracing that we will see in the future, not only in PC but also consoles, will continue to feed the global video game market “.

Obviously our feelings were wrong: the range of RTX cards is far from a disappointment and indeed can be said to be a good success if we think of what Nvidia said. All keeping in mind that ray tracing is far from having caught on. Kress also stressed that the company, even if it offers really expensive cards, has no intention of focusing only on the high end.

“The average selling price is important, but remember, we also want to have a portfolio of cards for every type of player. It is not an industry that we want to focus only on the high end. We want to be able to bring anyone interested in gaming to this market. What we have seen is that people become players in adolescence and they remain well beyond the age of 40 “.

“This means that there are several types of discretionary revenue in our portfolio that they can choose to get the best out of the best and choose Nvidia. We continue to hold the high end of the market, which is important because it is helping us to design what we believe will be the future of games. “

Colette Kress also spoke of the shortage of Intel CPUs, which could have also influenced the sale of Nvidia GPUs, especially in the mobile sector since there are many OEMs that combine Intel processors with GeForce solutions. In this regard, the financial director explained that since the Nvidia proposals tend to be positioned on high-end systems, the company “did not find any real impact” in the last quarter of the situation.

As for the future, Kress has not provided clear indications, but many are confident that Nvidia will move to the 7-nanometer production process next year, proposing new GPUs based on an architecture called Ampere.

The financial director explained that Nvidia is always committed to creating new architectures that adapt to the various markets in which it operates. “Our innovations and our process technology have been exceptional in recent years. So stay tuned. We will always have something for you in the future, but we like to surprise everyone with the roadmaps and when things come out“.

“The focus is on what is most important, on the process and development of the overall software. We see a lot of people focused on PowerPoint trying to compete with our overall performance that you see in our processors. Our chips are not only top notch, no matter what industry they operate in, but there is a continuous improvement that we can do, either with the current process or in terms of the near future“.

Although the answer is entirely interlocutory, at least one detail is interesting: the Kress does not exclude that Nvidia can offer something better by exploiting the current 12 nanometer production process (12FFN) behind the Turing GPUs. It is therefore not certain that Nvidia totally embraces the 7 nanometers. However, this could only be a statement to throw some confusion among the opponents and in the press, thus leading to generate the “surprise effect” invoked by the manager.