Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said today that the company had made an existential business decision in 2018 that few realized would redefine its future, and help redefine an evolving industry. It’s paid off enormously, of course, but Huang said this is only the beginning of an AI-powered near future — a future powered primarily by Nvidia hardware. Was this successful gambit lucky or smart? The answer, it seems, is “yes.”
He made these remarks and reflections during a keynote at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. That watershed moment five years ago, Huang said, was the choice to embrace AI-powered image processing in the form of ray tracing and intelligent upscaling: RTX and DLSS respectively. (Quotes are from my notes and may not be verbatim, some minor corrections may take place after checking the transcript.)
“We realized rasterization was reaching its limits,” he said, referring to the traditional, widely u...
