GREEN AID MONSTER

Jensen Huang says Al's essential for graphics. What does that mean for gamers?

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Yes, you're sick of seeing those two particular characters in print. Everyone is, at this point. Nevertheless, Nvidia's increasing focus on artificial intelligence bears some scrutiny. Because when the company that's previously held an historic stranglehold on the computer graphics market suddenly sees all its profits coming from elsewhere, there are going to be consequences.

Asked which use case of Al excited him the most at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told the audience it was computer graphics.

"We can't do computer graphics any more without artificial intelligence," he said. "We compute one pixel, we infer the other 32. I mean, it's incredible... And so we hallucinate, if you will, the other 32, and it looks temporally stable, it looks photorealistic, and the image quality is incredible, the performance is incredible."

Of course, he would say that. Despite record profits from hardware sales used to build Al data centres accounting for the majority of Nvidia's business this financial year, it is still a company whose foundations are in computer graphics. It's a bit like asking an optician why he's excited about Al and being surprised when he tells you it's making glasses.

But Huang's words are all the more meaningful, because they're backed up by years of action on Nvidia's part. The most exciting developments to come out of the company over the last decade have all either been powered by neural network Al, or require it to render at an acceptable performance level. Huang's words ring true.

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