Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says 'PC gaming is now 30 years old,' and I'm here to say 'um, actually'

No one likes the 'um, actually' guy. Whatever momentary high an um-actually-arsehole gets from jumping on a technicality in an off-the-cuff remark is either completely drowned out, or worse, strengthened by the resulting collective groan. Unfortunately, today, I'm going to be the 'um, actually' guy. My target? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—this can only end well for me!

During Nvidia's live keynote at Computex 2025, Huang reflected on the success of GeForce and its position within the business today. On stage, Huang said that though the company owes a lot of its success to GeForce specifically, "our keynote is 90% not GeForce. But it's not because we don't love GeForce." He then added, "GeForce RTX 50-series just had its most successful launch ever, the fastest launch in our history. And PC gaming is now 30 years old—so that tells you something about how incredible GeForce is."

So, what's wrong with that? Well, setting aside the various issues that left much to be desired about the 50-series launch, it's the simple fact that PC gaming easily pre-dates Nvidia's GeForce product line. To begin at the beginning, the GeForce 256 debuted in October 1999 and is largely credited with introducing many PC gamers to the modern concept of a Graphics Processing Unit.

Still, it's not really fair to imply we wouldn't have PC gaming without Nvidia; it's understandable why the CEO of Nvidia would conflate the history of GeForce and the company with that of the platform itself during such a high-profile keynote but, simply put, PC gaming existed long before Nvidia was but a glimmer in Jensen Huang's eye.

You're probably already groaning, but allow me to explain a little more: I'm dating myself here, but you wanna know which massively influential game I share a birth year with? Doom. That's right, I'm as old as the first-person shooter genre as well as this here fine publication—but PC gaming is even older than that.

For a start, my American colleagues could probably wax lyrical about the Commodore 64 (to say nothing about this doughnut shop in Indiana that's still using one of the 42-year-old machines as part of its register system). However, as a Brit, I'd be much more in my element talking about copying game code out of the back of a magazine for the ZX Spectrum from 1982.

Conferring with my colleagues encouraged me to get even more into the weeds (should that be 'conifer-ring'?); the whole concept of a 'personal computer' pre-dates the aforementioned 8-bit systems, with the term originating with the release of the IBM PC in 1981—and you can bet your bottom dollar that people were trying to play games on that too. Basically, the concept of gaming on an upgradeable computer as opposed to a console is definitely older than a mere 30 years.

There you go, that's the 'um, actually'—unless you'd like to hear the one about how PC gaming as we know it was technically born on an oscilloscope in the 50's. Point is, we have always been asking 'but can I play games on it?' To say PC gaming is only three decades old takes an extremely narrow view of the history (to say absolutely nothing about what we lose when we focus on a purely Anglophone perspective).

But back to the here and now for Nvidia. The 'PC gaming is now 30 years old' comment was preceded by Huang saying, "GeForce brought AI to the world, now AI came back, and revolutionised GeForce." Besides bold claims earlier this year that the Nvidia RTX 5070 released in February would offer 'RTX 4090 performance at $549' thanks to DLSS 4 with AI-powered Multi Frame Generation, the company isn't simply content to leverage AI neural rendering to enhance the performance of its graphics cards. To say Nvidia is all in on AI is perhaps akin to beating a dead horse.

Recent Nvidia projects like G-Assist AI overlay as well as the actually pretty neat Signs, an AI-led platform designed to teach American Sign Language for free, are small potatoes compared to the $115.2 billion raked in by data centers alone this fiscal year. Nvidia EVP and CFO Colette Kress attributed this to, "Customers [...] racing to scale infrastructure to train the next generation of cutting edge models and unlock the next level of AI capabilities."

These data centre earnings easily overshadow what is far from loose change made by Nvidia's gaming division. Still, though PC gaming doesn't begin or end with Nvidia, the company obviously still has tremendous influence over the space. A case in point would be the company's stringent guidelines to the press covering the release of their latest graphics card, which you can read all about in Dave's live Nvidia RTX 5060 review.