NVIDIA’s vice president and general manager of GPU products, Kaustubh Sanghani, talks to Yahoo Finance about the major revelation of the company CES 2021 and the impact of the pandemic on gaming.
Video transcription
DANIEL HAWLEY: We are here with Kaustubh Sanghani. He is the general manager and VP of GeForce at NVIDIA. Kaustubh, thank you very much for joining us. NVIDIA has obviously made some big announcements at CES 2021, of course. And I just want to do it. So, what can you tell us about the new chips we have? I know there’s the new G-Force 3060, as well as some announcements about laptops.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yes, thank you, Dan. It’s great to be virtually here. And we had a lot of exciting announcements today. First, we announced that the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is coming to laptops. So we announced a record of over 70 laptops from every major OEM with the new GeForce RTX 30 Series laptops, based on the NVIDIA amp architecture.
These include our second generation RTX and third generation Max-Q technologies to deliver 2X D efficiency from previous generations. So we have a lot of exciting news on the front of the laptop, starting at $ 999.
We also announced a new desktop GPU, the GeForce RTX 3060. The 60-class 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 ever.
And the 3060 is an excellent refreshment for all gamers, who play with GTX products, which deliver twice the raster performance and 10x the faster performance. And as we all know, speed racing is the future of games.
In addition to both the big announcements, we also had a series of announcements that really emphasize that RTX is the future. We have announced that seven more games will support RTX functionality with speed racing and RDLSS.
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 shooters that support reflex. And also five new G-sync monitors and seven new mice that support our reflex latency analyzer function. All in all lots of exciting announcements for gamers. And really looking forward to all these products.
DANIEL HAWLEY: And one of those games is called DD War Zone, right? Just throw it out there to make sure I get my War Zone solution in the best possible way.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yes, you need to be much more competitive in War Zone, Dan. Because with DLSS you are going to see some good improvements in the frame rate.
DANIEL HAWLEY: God, I hope so. You can not improve. I think you can improve from worse. So, you know, it’s gonna be something. I want to talk about the kind of COVID environment and how it affects the game. Clearly, I, as well as people who have played before, play more.
But then there are people who may have stopped playing or not played as often as they wanted to, who jumped in again. Because there are no movie theaters. There are no sporting events to check out. What does this mean for NVIDIA, especially on the other hand, when it comes to the question of gamers looking for the devices they really want to get to push their games as far as possible?
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yes, so it is clear that we are spending a lot more time at home with COVID and more. People are starting to play games, and you know, high-performance computers, including desktops and laptops, have become more important to humans than ever before.
People are playing, not only playing games, but it is also a way to connect with their friends and family, and as a way to create and broadcast what they are doing. You can see that in almost all the statistics for 2020. If you compare 2020 with just two years before, 2018, the number of simultaneous gamers on Steam has increased 2x.
The number of monthly active users on Discord has tripled. The number of hours played on YouTube has increased 2x, to a whopping $ 100 billion an hour of games watched on YouTube last year. And the number of viewers watching eSports has increased to almost half a billion users.
So if you look at all these numbers, it goes without saying that the demand for our gaming GPUs is also very strong. And as a result, I think we’ve seen an incredible demand out there.
It’s true that it’s pretty hard to find a GPU out there. And we appreciate the patience of all our gamers as we try our best to get as many GPUs there as possible. Our Ampere launch was actually our fastest ramp ever. 2x faster than our previous ramp. So it was clear that we asked a lot, but there is much more.
DANIEL HAWLEY: Yes, I said earlier, I was lucky to have the previous generation of chips, the 2070, on my own computer, and got it right just before people really started buying there. So I managed to be happy. And I’m going to keep playing.
Kaustubh, thank you very much for joining us. Kaustubh Sanghani, he is the VP and GM of GeForce product at NVIDIA. Thank you very much.
KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Thanks, Dan.