HWSW Q&A with Alain Tiquet of NVIDIA
NVIDIA is certainly one of the most dynamically progressing company in the computer market. For some time now, they have determined to launch a new product in every sixth month - forcing their competitors into a furious competition for the market leader title. With the coming of Comdex 2000, we thought that it would be a good idea to ask the company a few questions. This time it was Alain Tiquet, European Marketing Manager of NVIDIA Corporation who talked to us about hot rumors, the companys future plans and some personal matters. Read on if you are interested in what we managed to find out:
Q1: NVIDIA, a company created out of almost nothing about five years ago, has emerged as a giant company with more and more ambitious aims. Your leading position in the 3D chip market as well as your expansion into the gaming console and integrated chipset market are all proof of this. However, as far as I can see, people - especially in this part of Europe - look by nature at giant companies with some suspicion and are rather inclined to support the seconds, thirds etc. - or if you wish, the losers. The aversion towards, say, Intel or Microsoft often seen to manifest itself in various forms does provide some examples of this phenomenon. I am almost sure that some witty journalists have already been working on some nickname for your company spiced with Attic salt. Are you prepared to handle this situation? Or is my conception but a false alarm?
Alain: NVIDIA is having one of the fastest business progression in the industry, our revenue 2 years ago was at about 158M$, 374M$ last year and this year we are shooting for 700M$ with about 700 employees, we are far from being a giant company like Intel or Microsoft. (I wish our revenue reach a significant percentage of their profit...)
We concentrate on designing chips and driver software, then we work with foundry (TSMC) to manufacture the chips and board manufacturers to manufacture the boards. Our products are available on the market thru about 16 different suppliers, each of them bringing their expertise to our technology. I do not feel we can come to the state you mention, our business model does not allow it.
Q2: But your plans to enter the gaming console market with actively participating in the making of Microsoft's XBox seem to be rather ambitious. As not only will you ship the video processor for the new console, but you will be the provider of its core chipset (i.e. the MCPX) also. However, if I am not mistaken, your MCP chip can be seen as the harbinger of future NVIDIA integrated motherboard chipsets. When can we expect, if at all, to see these chips on PC motherboards?
Alain: Microsoft has chosen NVIDIA as a supplier of high end technology and because of an outstanding record in terms of timely execution. The overall project is ambitious, the project contributors (Intel, NVIDIA and Microsoft) are ambitious and are willing to demonstrate they can execute it.
The MCPX design is dedicated to the Xbox project, and you are right we work on a version for PC architecture of this chip to address the entry level PC market.
Q3: Also, I cannot help asking this question: Rumor has it that you plan to acquire 3dfx, one of your greatest competitors. Given the patent infringement cases between the two companies as well as 3dfx's "bargain prize" at the moment, this would definitely be a rather advantageous step on your part. Can Brian Burke's joining your team be seen as a harbinger of this transaction? Or is it mere speculation?
Alain: This is speculation and rumors.
Q4: Graphics board prices have been drastically rising for some years now. If you couple this with the six-month product cycle that you dictate and meet from time to time, you might have a bad feeling that people trying to keep up with the latest innovations will be doomed to poverty sooner or later. I have just seen at some site that a certain NV20 chip based card (I must admit that I do not know what sort of a creature it could be:) can be expected to cost as much as $800. I know it quite well that development and innovation consumes a great deal of money; still I think that this trend should be made an end of sometime. What do you think?
Alain: Graphics chips are increasingly complex (a GeForce2 GTS counts 23M transistors, a Pentium III 9M). However, the price of the chip is not increasing at the same pace. A big part of the additional cost comes from the frame buffer memory moving from 16 to 32MB to 64MB, from SDR to DDR technology.
Talking about cost of products to come is just pure and useless speculation.
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Q5: Implementing new 3D features takes a great deal of time for software developers. Thus it often comes about that cards having these new features become obsolete before the technology appears in games and applications. Furthermore, new chips and cards bring only some more extra fpss in older games while there is but a little increase in visual quality. Will it ever be possible for a consumer to buy a new card along with a great number of games supporting all the new technologies implemented in the product?Alain: Unlike some say, developers do not new software features on hardware that does not exist. NVIDIA introduced the first T&L GPU a year ago and since then game developers have been working on games with the new feature. They are about 40 games available using T&L technology. The significant performance increase comes from using the new feature, however, the GPU have higher clock rate and increase the performance of existing games as well.
The value of NVIDIA offering comes from our Unified Driver Architecture, you may have different cards, different PC's and still using a single driver regardless of the NVIDIA chip you are using. You can upgrade your card when you want/can and keep the same driver. No one provides such a product portfolio from entry level to WS and keep only one driver.
Q6: Also NVIDIA's Shading Rasterizer sounds and looks rather attractive. However, if I am not mistaken, the only game supporting it at the moment is Evolva along with some technology demos. We were promised to have dozens of titles out on retailers' shelves supporting your GPUs' features by last Christmas. Now I was told that there would be hundreds of them by the end of this year. Well, again I cannot help asking this: is everything going well with your Developer Relations department?
Alain: Implementing NSR feature on a game is easy and does not need reworking the core of the engine, it's approximately a week's work to implement it on any game. Please find attached a list of games with T&L, this list is growing on daily basis, the direction is obvious.
It takes some time to rework a game with T&L and/or NSR and now they are here.
Q7: Well-nigh a year ago, Riva3D posted a cry for fixing the NVIDIA-Irongate incompatibility issue. I know that AMD's Irongate chipset has already become obsolete and has been substituted by more advanced solutions; but there are still quite a lot of people using Irongate-based motherboard (e.g. me). And despite the two companies' very good relationship, nothing has changed so far. Has this annoying problem been pushed into oblivion? And is it a hardware or software issue?
Alain: The HW issue of the chipset is not under our control, if the chipset manufacturer does not want to fix it, then it's up to their customers to decide to keep this kind of product or move to a better solution. NVIDIA did its best to overcome the issue from pure SW standpoint since nothing on HW is under our control.
Q8: Your Quadro and Quadro2 can be seen as real innovations in the professional 3D market. However it seems to me that games will need different techniques in the future (dynamic geometry handling, acceleration of character animation) than professional 3D applications. Will NVIDIA still provide chips for the professional market? And do you plan on designing basically different graphic chips for this product group?
Alain: The professional WS market requires the best graphic engines available with as much features as possible. What they need too is the certification of major ISV software suites to guarantee quality and stability. We do that within NVIDIA now.
As soon as we ship our latest GPU, the WS market asks for it just like hard core gamers do. The developers using NVIDIA technology based WS have the advantage of working in native mode when they write and test code to be used on PC and/or game consoles.
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Q9: Some experts say that the future will bring micropolygon technique into consumer 3D. That is, there will be no need for textures as every little surface element will be a single polygon with a unique color. How does NVIDIA see the future of 3D graphics: micropolygons or large textures compressed with advanced algorithms?Alain: NVIDIA investigate daily what are the best features that can be integrated on single piece of silicon to be produced in millions of units at profitable values and bring major step function for visual quality and real time animation.
Q10: Also, not long ago, John Carmack said the following to PlanetQuake: "64 bit pixels. It is The Right Thing to do. Hardware vendors: don't you be the company that is the last to make the transition." Do you plan on making this transition? Is 64 bit rendering the future?
Alain: Same answer as above.
Q11: Again rumor has it that your next product will bring a very "efficient" solution for the memory bottleneck issue. I know that you cannot disclose many details, still I would be more than interested in whether your new chip will use the technology Michael Abrash described?
Alain: I tell you everything when the product is ready to go. For the time being let us doing the job.
Q12: 3dfx's solution for FSAA implemented in the Voodoo5 line of products is definitely more advanced than NVIDIA's present solution. Can we expect this situation to change this year?
Alain: Complexity of chip and feature priorities are key to success, the NVIDIA Hardware FSAA brings the quality users expect to enjoy all other features available on the NVIDIA chip. We will keep doubling the performance of our products every 6 months...
Q13: Comdex/Fall 2000 can be a great opportunity for the announcement of a new product. 3D-oriented webzines have been talking about a certain chip codenamed NV20 (again I have to emphasize that I do not have a ghost of an idea what it can be:). Do you plan to make some product announcements at the expo?
Alain: We plan to release mobile computing chip on Sunday night at the Harley Davidson café. Nothing else.
[hehe... Just to make sure, we'll be there. Especially if they have some fine draught beer]
Q14: Do you play computer games often? Which is your favorite and why?
Alain: I am a driver, Colin McRae and speed are my favorites.
Q14.33: Well, as far as I know, the most recent racing simulation programs need a great deal of graphics horsepower. Somehow I have a feeling that you have had to change your S3 Trio64+ to be able to play them. Am I mistaken? That is, did you manage to obtain a better card than that? And what brand is it?
Alain: I've been a proud owner of the latest Millenium, but with long time ago in the previous millenium. Actually the graphic chip I use most is a NeoMagic 256, damn! when a laptop manufacturer is going to use our GeForce2Go? At home my son drive a GeForce2MX, and with my GeForce DDR I hardly manage to win 1 race out of 3...
Thank you, Alain. And have a great time at Comdex 2000!