[McG]

nVidia: DirectX 11 Will Not Catalyze Sales of Graphics Cards

nVidia believes that special-purpose software that relies on GPGPU technologies will drive people to upgrade their graphics processing units (GPUs), not advanced visual effects in future video games or increased raw performance of DirectX 11-compliant graphics processors. There are several problems for nVidia, though. While ATi, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, is about to launch its Radeon HD 5800-series graphics cards that fully support DirectX 11 in the upcoming weeks, nVidia yet has not disclosed any plans regarding its DX11 GPUs, which means that in the eyes of computer enthusiasts the company is not a technology leader any more.

nVidia believes that in future computing performance will matter much more than graphics performance, which seems to make sense as forthcoming video games will demand a lot of purely computing power to process not only visuals, but also physics and artificial experience. Nevertheless, nVidia seems to put a lot of hopes onto its proprietary technologies, such as CUDA, Stereo 3D Vision, PhysX and others. This is understandable as the aforementioned technologies allow Nvidia to differentiate itself. However, as all proprietary standards (3dfx Glide is one example), they may not continue to be on the leading edge in the longer term.