LAS VEGAS – Gaming is poised to get a lot bigger if gaming chipmaker Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has his way. He said Thursday there are a billion more PCs on the planet which don’t have the ability play games will but soon will with GeForce Now, a cloud service that runs high end games on any PC/Mac with no downloads or patches.
PC game revenue hit $31 billion in 2016, so it’s no small market.
Take 1 billion PC and Mac users and multiply that by $25 for 20 hours of gaming for the GeForce service and you can see why Nvidia is pushing so hard to tap into this market and go well beyond providing laptop and PC users with just games. It’s just the start of how gaming technologies may fulfill the promise to finally make a smart/connected home and even self-driving cars a reality.
Huang’s presentation was powered by Canvas software from Montreal-based Immersive Design Studios and the Epic Games Unreal Engine 4 game engine, the display was nearly 30,000 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels tall. It used a bank of 10 Nvidia Quadro GPUs that can produce 2 billion pixels a second.
“Because of artificial intelligence we’re now able to realize the dreams that we’ve been dreaming about for so many years,” Jen-Hsun said. “What used to be science fiction is going to be reality in a few years.” Huang gave the opening keynote for CES where he shared his company’s vision for reinventing gaming, TV and transportation.
In addition to GeForce he also introduced an updated $199 Shield TV Android set-top box that supports 4K HDR and has integrated support for Google Assistant. With the addition of Amazon Video in 4K HDR, Nvidia says Shield now offers the largest catalog of media in 4K – and also supports Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies and VUDU (Wal-Mart’s OTT platform, only available in the States).
With Shield, Nvidia will be the first company to untether Google Assistant (similar to the Amazon Echo Dot) so it will respond to commands hands free. The untethering is made possible through Spot, a Shield accessory and AI mic that extends intelligent control throughout the house via WiFi. Huang claimed that Spot's microphone is able to process audio from a distance of 20 feet and has echo cancellation.
“The combination of a smart TV and an AI assistant in your home that is completely ambient completely changes how we interact with our house, said Huang to more than 3,000 press, analysts and technology enthusiasts.
“I think in the future our AI; our house is going to become an AI. And increasingly the vision of Jarvis is going to be realized. Whereas Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has incredible programming skills and he could take his year to build Jarvis for his home, I've decided that we should build it for all of you.”
Nvidia wants to expand AI beyond just the home to the road and Scott Keogh, president of Audi of America, joined Huang to announce a partnership to put advanced AI cars on the road by 2020. Huang also said Nvidia is partnering with mapping companies Here and Zenrin and two of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, ZF and Bosch. Together they are bringing deep learning-based AI to cars to make driving safer, more personalized and more enjoyable which promises to reinvent the $10 trillion transportation industry.
The first phase of the new collaboration with Audi will focus on NVidia Drive PX, an AI platform for self-driving cars, which uses trained AI neural networks to understand the surrounding environment, and determine a safe path forward. "NVIDIA is pioneering the use of deep learning AI to revolutionize transportation," said Huang. "Audi's adoption of our Drive computing platform for AI cars will accelerate the introduction of next-generation autonomous vehicles, moving us closer to a future of higher driving safety and new mobility services."
Drive PX won’t just monitor the environment around a car but will also use AI to understand what's going on in the interior. For example with AI Co-Pilot it’s cameras can watch which direction the driver's head is turned, where their eyes are gazing and read their lips so the car's AI can understand instructions even if there's loud music playing. Huang said the car's AI will even be able to determine if the driver is angry and tell them to pull over if it doesn't look like they're prepared to drive.
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