Nvidia boosts its mid-range video game chip with AI technology

(Reuters) – Nvidia Corp. (NVDA.O) said on Wednesday it is equipping one of its midrange chips for gamers with more artificial intelligence features to improve graphics, underlining the importance of gaming to the company despite slowing revenue for the segment. .

The new RTX 4070 chip, which Nvidia will start shipping Thursday, costs $599, putting it near the middle of the company’s $1,600 GPU range.

The chip it’s updating, the RTX 3060, is the fourth most popular gaming chip on the market, according to survey data in March from game distribution platform Steam.

While Nvidia’s data center chips for training AI systems like ChatGPT have supported the company’s revenue growth in recent years, the company still gets about a third of its $26.9 billion in 2023 fiscal revenue from gaming chips, even though gaming revenue fell 27%, due to a slump. the computer market in general.

Nvidia chips help PC video games render images on high-resolution screens more quickly to make games look more realistic. The 4070 chips will be the cheapest available that use Nvidia’s latest AI technology to do just that.

Instead of accurately calculating the value of each pixel on the screen, which can take extra time, Nvidia’s latest game chips use artificial intelligence to predict what seven out of every eight pixels should be, including creating entire frames using AI.

The game “isn’t like a movie where everything is pre-recorded. It’s dynamic, it’s moving, there’s input from the user. I can’t put a frame halfway between two frames. I have to really understand the movement between the two frames,” said Justin Walker, senior product manager for Nvidia’s GeForce, in an interview.

Additional reporting by Stephen Nelis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman

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