Nvidia has unveiled a new graphics-chip design for computer gamers, aiming to bolster demand amid concerns that growth may be slowing.
The company’s new Turing design will appear initially in three new GeForce cards, to be available on 20 September starting at US$499, CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday at the Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany. Nvidia shares rose on the news after three straight declines.
Huang is working to focus investor attention back on Nvidia’s technology after an earnings report last week sent the company’s shares tumbling. The GeForce line of chips for gamers, which generates more than half of Nvidia’s sales, has kept growing even in a PC market that has declined for six straight years.
At Gamescom, Huang is targeting Nvidia’s existing fan base of mostly young men who are willing to shell out more money for a single component that most people pay for an entire PC. Wearing a black leather jacket, his frequent choice of attire, the CEO gave a long and detailed presentation that started with the basic physics of visual computing and culminated in a product announcement that elicited wild cheers from his audience.
Turing was first unveiled last week in cards for computers used in industrial design and visual effects for the movie industry. The design introduces something called real-time ray tracing. The technology creates realistic video and images by calculating the path of individual rays of light in order to produce physically accurate shadows and reflections. Such intense calculation has previously not been possible in real time in games where images have to be updated instantly in response to fast-moving action.
Nvidia’s stock has closed lower for the past three trading days, and had been down as much as 2.5% on Monday before the new chips were unveiled. Shares plunged last week after the company on Thursday gave a weaker-than-expected sales forecast, citing the disappearance of demand from miners of cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, a market that had contributed more than $250-million to sales earlier this year. The stock climbed 2.8% to $251.55 at 2.37pm in New York.
Sales from gaming products rose 52% to $1.8-billion in the recent quarter, Nvidia said last week. — Reported by Ian King, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP
