Nvidia: DirectX 11 Will Not Catalyze Sales of Graphics Cards

[Salman]

DirectX 11 Is Not the Defining Reason to Invest into New Graphics Cards – Nvidia

DirectX 11 - Not Important

“DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons. This is why Microsoft is in work with the industry to allow more freedom and more creativity in how you build content, which is always good, and the new features in DirectX 11 are going to allow people to do that. But that no longer is the only reason, we believe, consumers would want to invest in a GPU,” said Mike Hara, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia, at Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference on Wednesday.

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.

“Now, we know, people are doing a lot in the area of video, people are going to do more and more in the area of photography… I think that the things we are doing would allow the GPU to be a co-processor to the CPU and deliver better user experience, better battery life and make that computers little bit more optimized,” added Mr. Hara.

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.

At present there is a lot of software that takes advantage of Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA software development and runtime environments, which provides numerous benefits to owners of Nvidia GeForce hardware now. However, such software at present is incompatible with open-standard DirectCompute 11 (DirectX 11 compute shaders) and OpenCL environments, which are supported by ATI Radeon HD 4000 and 5000 families of graphics processors in addition to

Nvidia’s latest chips. Even though Nvidia has advantage in terms of higher amount of installed GeForce GPUs and at least some makers of software will decide to develop software using CUDA set of tools and aimed only at GeForce GPUs, the majority will settle with industry-standard DirectCompute and OpenCL, which puts all the interested parties – ATI/AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc. – into the same boat, where there will be no advantage of exclusive software. It is not completely clear why Nvidia is trying to downplay the importance of DirectX 11, which enables next-generation GPGPU software through DirectCompute.