NVIDIA may be making absurd amounts of money from AI data hardware these days, but the company still cares deeply about PC gamers, according to statements that CEO Jensen Huang made during a recent roundtable interview with reporters, one of which asked the leather-jacket-wearing executive whether “gamers were right to feel like an older child jealous of the newborn AI baby.” Jensen was seemingly unamused, pointing toward recent announcements that include the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a custom AI model foundry service that aims to transform games by bringing intelligence to non-playable characters (NPCs) through AI-powered natural language interactions. Huang also touched upon the controversy of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti launching with 8 GB of memory, claiming that it was “the right amount.”
From a PCWorld report:
In response to a question from PCWorld asking if gamers were right to feel like an older child jealous of the newborn AI baby, Jensen jokingly feigned insult.
“Number one, RTX was invented for gamers and for RTX, the technology, the most important technology is AI. Without AI, we could not do ray tracing in real time,” Huang said. “It was not even possible. And the first AI project in our company—the number one AI focus was Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Deep learning. That is the pillar of RTX.
“Number two, notice what we did with generative AI, the first application was ACE—Avatar Cloud Engine—you hurt my feeling so deeply,” Huang responded jokingly. The newly revealed ACE for Games is “a custom AI model foundry service that transforms games by bringing intelligence to non-playable characters (NPCs) through AI-powered natural language interactions.”
[…] Huang did touch a little on the other hot button topic on gamer’s minds: The 8GB of RAM in the recently launched GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card, which reviewers (including us here at PCWorld) have criticized.
“Remember the frame buffer is not the memory of the computer—it is a cache,” Huang said. “And how you manage the cache is a big deal. It is like any other cache. And yes, the bigger the cache is better. However, you’re trading off against so many things,” Huang said.
Likening it to an equation or even “kung fu,” Huang said it’s a balancing act weighing cost, power and the cores that sometimes you have to feel your way through. In the end, Huang said the 8GB of RAM in the first iteration of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti was the right amount.