NVIDIA’s vice president and general manager of GPU products, Kaustubh Sanghani, talks with Yahoo Finance about the major revelations of the company’s CES 2021 and the impact of the pandemic on games.
Video transcription
DANIEL HAWLEY: We are here with Kaustubh Sanghani. He is the general manager and vice president of GeForce at NVIDIA. Kaustubh, thank you so much for joining us. NVIDIA obviously made big announcements at CES 2021, virtually, obviously. And I kind of want to review it. So, what can you tell us about the new chips we have? I know there is the new G-Force 3060, as well as some ads for laptops.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yes, thank you, Dan. It’s great to be here virtually. And we had some really exciting announcements today. First, we announce that NVIDIA Ampere architecture is coming to laptops. Therefore, we announce a record of more than 70 laptops from all major OEMs with the new GeForce RTX 30 series laptop GPUs based on NVIDIA’s ampere architecture.
This includes our second generation of RTX and third generation of Max-Q technologies to provide 2X D efficiency from previous generations. So we have really exciting news about laptops, starting at $ 999.
We also announced a new desktop GPU, the GeForce RTX 3060. Class 60 products are really one of our most popular products. And the GeForce GTX 1060 four years ago, and based on the Pascal architecture, was one of our most popular products of all time.
And the 3060 is a major upgrade for all players who play with GTX products, offering 2X the scanning performance and 10x the rate racing performance. And, as we all know, the rush of fees is the future of gaming.
In addition to these two big ads, we also had a series of ads really highlighting that RTX is the future. We announce that seven more games will support RTX with rate-running and RDLSS functionality.
And also a lot of momentum for our NVIDIA reflex technology, with two more games that support reflex, making it seven of the top 10 competitive shooting games that support reflex. And also five new G-sync monitors and seven new mice that support our reflex latency analyzer functionality. In short, many interesting ads for players. And really looking forward to all these products.
DANIEL HAWLEY: And one of those games is called DD War Zone, right? Just throwing it out, making sure I’m getting my dose of War Zone in the best possible way.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yes, you have to be a lot more competitive in the War Zone, Dan. Because with DLSS, you’ll see some big frame-rate improvements.
DANIEL HAWLEY: God, I hope so. You cannot improve. I think you can get worse. So, you know, it will be something. I want to talk about the type of COVID environment and how it affected games. Obviously I, like people who have played, are playing more.
But then there are people who, perhaps, stopped playing, or did not play as often as they would like, who jumped back. Because there are no cinemas. There are no sporting events to go to. What does this mean for NVIDIA, especially on the chip side, when it comes to the type of demand from gamers who are looking for the devices they really want to take their games as far as possible.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yes, so it’s pretty clear that with COVID and everything, we’re spending a lot more time at home. People are starting to play, and you know, high-performance PCs, including desktops and laptops, have become more important than ever to people.
People are starting to play not just to play, but also as a way to connect with their friends and family and as a way to create and transmit what they are doing. You can see this in virtually all metrics for 2020. If you compare 2020 with just two years earlier, 2018, the number of simultaneous players on Steam has increased by 2x.
The number of monthly active users on Discord increased 3x. The number of game hours seen on YouTube has increased 2x, reaching an incredible $ 100 billion hours of watched games on YouTube last year. And the number of viewers watching electronic sports has increased to almost half a billion users.
So, if you look at all these numbers, it is natural that the demand for our gaming GPUs is also very strong. And as a result, I think, we saw incredible demand out there.
It is true that it is very difficult to find a GPU out there. And we really appreciate the patience of all our players, as we are trying our best to get as many GPUs as possible. Our Ampere launch was actually our fastest ramp ever. 2x faster than our previous ramp. So, obviously, we were planning a lot of demand, but there is still a lot more out there.
DANIEL HAWLEY: Yes, I was saying before, I was lucky to have the previous generation of chips, the 2070 on my own PC, and I managed to get it a little bit before people actually started to go around and buy. So I got lucky. And I will continue to play.
Kaustubh, thank you so much for joining us. Kaustubh Sanghani, he is the vice president and general manager of NVIDIA’s GeForce product. Thank you very much.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Thank you, Dan.