Nvidia (NVDA) might be making big news at CES 2018 thanks to its artificial intelligence and self-driving car technologies, but the company originally started out by building PC graphics cards. And despite all of its recent success, it’s not leaving those roots behind.
In fact, it’s pushing them forward with a number of new products ranging from cloud gaming to enormous PC displays and super-thin laptops. It’s an impressive display of gaming power, and likely to drain players’ wallets in the year ahead.
Cloud streaming
Nvidia has been working on cloud gaming technology, the ability to stream and play games at their highest settings from high-powered servers to anything from the best laptop to a 5-year-old hunk of junk, for some time now. The company already offers a cloud streaming service for Apple’s Mac, called GeForce Now as a free beta for some time. And now, it’s bringing the platform to PCs.
Cloud gaming is the holy grail of PC gaming, but it’s never taken off due to the fact that companies need to allocate an enormous amount of resources to run games for thousands of players trying to run different titles at the exact same time.
To deal with that, Nvidia, and others like it, have to build out data centers that can not only handle the load of all of those gamers playing at once, but locate those data centers in areas across the country to ensure players don’t experience any noticeable latency while they game.
It’s a lot of work, and Nvidia doesn’t quite know when the service will be available to the general public, or how much it will cost, but if the company can keep it affordable and easy to use, it could have a huge impact on the gaming industry.
A bigger screen for games
You want a giant gaming display? Well, Nvidia is bringing it to you. The company showed off three of its upcoming BFG-D screens or Big Format Gaming Displays and they are absolutely stunning. BFG, by the way, stands for Big F-ing Gun in the game “Doom,” which is why when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the screens during the company’s keynote, he made sure to emphasize the initials.
The screens, which can’t be called televisions because they don’t include TV tuners, run 4K resolutions at 120Hz, offer HDR color with a brightness of 1,000 nits. Nvidia showed off the screens by displaying a non-HDR image followed by an HDR version of the same shot, and the results were stunning. Colors popped and looked far more natural in the HDR version than the standard image.
What’s more, Nvidia has equipped the screens with its G-Sync technology, which ensures that the display and content you’re playing or watching are running at the same refresh rate. That’s important, because it means you won’t see the kind of tearing that occurs during games when your content is moving faster than the display can refresh.