Jen Hsun Huang and the resurgence of Nvidia

[srmojuze]

I thought I'd express some non-technical thoughts, regarding a company no doubt near and dear to our hearts.

In fact, after watching the CES 2013 Nvidia keynote and one or two other Nvidia keynotes, I knew my next gaming choice ~had~ to be Kepler.

Perhaps it is brainwashing and I merely am looking to fill the void that Apple once occupied. But Jen Hsun, Elon Musk and so on are what I call "post-Steve-Jobs" business leaders that I admire. Not that they're perfect, but also in my everyday work I encounter mediocrity, simply because it is a choice. I see that I'm not fantastic (yet? ha ha) but I do have choices in front of me to be both happy and high-achieving.

I really thought Nvidia was toast after the Tegra 2 rough start and the incredibly hot and heavy Fermi that was so diffcult to put into laptops (1st gen Fermi, anyway). Not to mention Intel locking Nvidia out of the chipset business, that was a blow no doubt.

But they stuck at it, and now we have Kepler which is IMO the best GPU ever designed... To go across Cuda, gaming, GRID cloud gaming, etc. And at the other end Tegra 4, which will no doubt be kicking butt and taking names in 2013-2014. Almost by chance I got two Tegra 3 devices, the Nexus 7 and HTC One X which have been (are) good Android devices.

PhysX is interesting, at first it seemed like a dud because it consumed to much GPU power. But playing Hawken and seeing PhysX in action for the first time, it really does take a game to a different level even if it is just "rocks exploding".

So perhaps I am a fanboy (as I was back in the 8600GT SLI days) but something is happening here with Nvidia resurgent.

I went for a while to AMD CPU and GPU (4830) and the driver issues just drove me mad, for better or worse with Intel-Nvidia you know you are most likely to ~not~ encounter driver issues and get excellent performance right off the bat. Of course, some people choose AMD and that's fine, but I don't have time to tweak too much so Intel-Nvidia is a bit of a no-brainer.

Certainly the AMD 7980 and 7970 are very capable cards but out-of-the-box a 680 and 690 is impressive too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to start a Red-vs-Green debate.

I'm more interested in your thoughts on Nvidia and Silicon Valley leadership. There's a lot of hype in the USA and around the world of this "next wave" of startups and so on but I mean, if you look at Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and SpaceX, the companies I admire, it's hard, hard work constantly infused with moments of genius for 5, 10, 15 years. All this startup stuff I find to me mostly nonsense with stupid "Web 2.0" companies that think they're all this or that, regardless of if they get bought by Google or Facebook or what not.

[dstrakele]

I was immediately impressed with the level of interaction NVIDIA has with their customers on the Official Feedback threads for the various driver versions on the NVIDIA forum - before it was shut down after being hacked, anyway.... Looking at the frequency of their driver releases and ability to resolve problems and increase performance, I remain impressed - particularly if you compare them to VIA Technologies.
;>{) >

[KiwiG75]

I don't know why, but I like AMD cpus but nVidia GPUs. I've always been this way, I tried an ATi card once, was too big and slow. I never used to like intel cpus very much, they always seemed slow until I got the g75 with the i7.

[srmojuze]

dstrakele wrote:
I was immediately impressed with the level of interaction NVIDIA has with their customers on the Official Feedback threads for the various driver versions on the NVIDIA forum - before it was shut down after being hacked, anyway.... Looking at the frequency of their driver releases and ability to resolve problems and increase performance, I remain impressed - particularly if you compare them to VIA Technologies.
;>{) >

What impressed me was Tegra 3, actually. The additional improvements you get only with a Tegra 3 and not Snapdragon or even iPhone 5 (eg Zen Pinball HD) shows that Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" was not just pure hype, there was at least some substance there. And yeah, once you talk PC games, eg. PhysX support for Borderlands 2, Hawken... There is as you say impressive efforts on Nvidia's side to keep PC gaming thriving.

KiwiG75 wrote:
I don't know why, but I like AMD cpus but nVidia GPUs. I've always been this way, I tried an ATi card once, was too big and slow. I never used to like intel cpus very much, they always seemed slow until I got the g75 with the i7.

I think up to Core 2 you could say AMD had very good alternatives. But once the 2nd generation Core i5 and i7s started coming out, that little extra to pay for Intel became quite worth it. And once Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge came out, it's hard to argue for an AMD CPU.

But I digress...

[Tomislav]

as for processors I agree with srmojuze...and I've been an using AMD back in the days (thunderbird, sempron and so on) now intel is simply better,especially when it comes to notebooks. to cut the digression, seems to me that nVidia is going to have a good run with this new stuff...i'm looking forward to Tegra 4 and new generations of MS Surface...also Shield could just be the new revolution in gaming, and in 3D tech. they kick AMD/ATI's ass. Also there is that issue with stolen documents from AMD. Though nVida's involvment is just speculation-if true I consider them to be giant assholes. Techwise (is that a word?) it should give them some advantage over AMD. So as far as it goes (except that "possible stealing" part ) : good work nVidia!

[xeromist]

Well, I guess maybe I go to a lot of events featuring Nvidia being here in California but I didn't really see too much of a problem for them. I think everyone took a bit of a hit with the economy a few years back so they definitely scaled back their marketing budget, but so did everyone else.

Fermi was certainly a bit of a disappointment when I walked by an early demo rig and it sounded like a jet powering up. However I was able to water cool a 470 and that issue just went away. I'm certainly glad to see that they took those those faults to heart in improvements with Kepler though.