NVIDIA CEO Throws Shade On AMD's Smartphone-Centric RDNA 2 Efforts For This Reason
Understandably, with AMD dabbling in the mobile SoC arena with RDNA 2, many have wondered about NVIDIA's stance on this practice. For example, could we see NVIDIA partner with other SoC makers to incorporate GeForce RTX technology (well, outside of its own custom Tegra processors)?
Well, the folks from ZDNet decided to right to the source: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, to see how he feels about this development. Huang's response is somewhat predictable given NVIDIA's market position and what technologies it has decided to focus on for the mobile sector.
"Ray tracing games are quite large, to be honest. The data set is quite large, and there'll be a time for it," said Huang. "When the time is right, we might consider it."
Huang has a valid point, and it's one that we raised in our initial article. Besides the large data sets required to enable ray tracing for a storage-contained mobile device, there's the question of performance. There are immense performance requirements to enable high-quality ray tracing effects on PC platforms. Trying to scale that down to a mobile device while maintaining a miserly power profile could be very challenging.
Huang says that NVIDIA's current strategy addresses the mobile gaming market with the GeForce Now streaming service. GeForce Now allows smartphone and tablet users to bypass any steep hardware requirements by streaming PC games over the internet -- even with ray tracing and all graphics goodies enabled.
"That's how we would like to reach Android devices, Chrome devices, iOS devices, Mac OS devices, Linux devices, all kinds of devices, whether it's on TV, or mobile device, or PC," Huang added. "I think that's for us, right now, that's the best strategy."
While NVIDIA seems content with sitting on the sideline for now on the [mobile hardware] ray tracing front, Samsung's first SoC with RDNA 2 architecture -- the alleged Exynos 2200 -- should be announced later this year, with the first products shipping soon after.
