Does Nvidia have a future?

The Future

It’s fair to say that Nvidia has had a fairly torrid time over the past 18 months but despite the loss of focus in its core businesses there are things that the company has done over the years which bode well for the future.

Tegra is the shining example of this – it has the promise to sell in massive volumes and generate a lot of revenue for Nvidia. The time and money that the company put into GPU computing will likely pay off in the long run too, but it’s very early days for GPU computing – we’re not going to understand the full impact of the investments Nvidia made in its CUDA architecture for a number of years.

We’re at the start of a new phase of computing and we believe that, as long as Nvidia can execute on the foundations that it has laid with technologies such as Tegra and its efforts in the GPU Computing arena, the company has an interesting future ahead of it.

The investments Nvidia has made in the PC gaming market through the The Way It’s Meant To Be Played developer relations program shouldn’t go without a mention here, either. When Nvidia first introduced TWIMTPB, it was an investment in the future – we feel that’s still very much the case even today.

Another area that we haven’t really touched upon here is the subject of real-time ray tracing – we’ve got plans for a much bigger article on the current state of ray tracing in the industry, so watch out for that.

However, Nvidia has said that ray tracing is very much a part of its future – it has acquired a number of ray tracing start ups over the years and we feel it is well positioned in that regard as it has already shown demos of rasterised/ray traced hybrid engines. It’s very much another tool in the developers’ toolkit, but it’s not the only answer – I think most of the industry agrees on that at least in the short term.

To understand exactly how well-positioned Nvidia is, consider that it owns mental images, the company behind mental ray, a hugely popular ray tracer used by many of the world’s leading movie studios.

Conclusion

The past 18 months or so aren’t the first time Nvidia has been in some degree of trouble – and they won’t be the last, either. What’s interesting though is that every time the company has looked in a spot of bother – no matter how big or small – it has always managed to innovate its way out of a corner.

Its partnership with ARM in particular, is an interesting one because ARM is also looking to broaden its horizons. It’s a massive player in the mobile phone market and the company is a sleeping giant. As mobile phones and personal computers converge, there’s an interesting battle brewing between Intel and ARM – and I think there’s more to it than meets the eye.