I was feeling a little needy so I sought reassurance from Jen-Hsun Huang and he told me it's all okay: 'I love PC gamers'
You know how it is, sometimes you can just end up feeling a little insecure, like maybe you're suddenly not so important to someone as you once were. And after the Computex 2024 Nvidia keynote from CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, which markedly carried not a whiff of gaming, bar one off-hand reference to a gamer GPU, I was feeling like an insecure PC gamer.
Normally that keynote wouldn't have bothered me; Computex isn't specifically a gaming show, and it's focus this year—as is the focus everywhere right now—is specifically on AI. So, I could have understood why the keynote solely focusing on AI if it didn't have any announcements to make, because it's not like we regularly get gaming stuff out of Nvidia's GTC events after all.
But Nvidia did have some really interesting AI-based gaming announcements to make. Things we were briefed on ahead of the show and that were timed to release during the keynote. Naturally we assumed references to open-sourcing RTX Remix, releasing the SDK, and unveiling Project G-Assist, would be in there somewhere.
Sadly not, which had me worried about whether Jen-Hsun really loved us PC gamers anymore. So, I asked him straight. Do you still love us PC gamers?
As an old school PC Gamer reader—"One of my earliest magazines, back in the old days!"—Jen-Hsun jokingly explains that his "keynote was already two hours, I didn't want to torture you guys any longer."
He then goes on to note more seriously that those features are being covered elsewhere at the show and he was looking for his team to get that information out during demo sessions this week. Which kinda went some way to easing my worries, and then he said the words we all wanted to hear:
"But I love PC gamers, without PC gamers how could we have created this foundation for everything else."
And it's true. Whatever Nvidia is right now—an AI company, a creator of AI factories, or whatever it is—it got where it is today by making great graphics cards for gaming, coming up with interesting new features, like DLSS and G-Sync, all while taking a huge punt on the parallel processing capabilities of that silicon it was creating outside of gaming and taking it into another world of accelerated computing.
And we bought a ton of GPUs for our gaming PCs, putting a huge amount of cash into the coffers of Nvidia, giving it a dominant ~80% share of the gaming market, and giving it the freedom to explore new opportunities and create whole new markets elsewhere.
So you could say, in a way, that the AI world we live in and are going to live in, is all down to us. Yay, PC gamers. Or, y'know, it's all our fault if things go wrong and the AIs take over and turn us into batteries. One or the other.