Imagination Announces PowerVR Series 8XT GT8525: Their First Furian GPU Design

Back in March of this year, Imagination announced their next-generation GPU architecture: Furian. Their first new architecture since Rogue in 2010, Furian iterates off of what Imagination has learned in the intervening years to further improve their a…

NVIDIA Releases GeForce Experience 3.6 – ShadowPlay for OpenGL and Vulkan

This week NVIDIA has released a minor update for GeForce Experience that has a major new feature. This time we get support for capturing additional rendering APIs under ShadowPlay, bug and stability fixes, and a streamlined user experience making video and screenshot uploads feel like less of an interruption to precious gaming time.

Among the updates to GeForce Experience are fixes for the FPS counter in Shadow Warrior 2 and HDR mode, games crashing and recording should no longer affect in game FPS in Windows RS2. NVIDIA has also improved the overlay performance after the first launch, and the GeForce Experience overlay should be more stable and reliable as well thanks to this update.

Many years after ShadowPlay was first released and many months after Vulkan support saw its first major game come to market, OpenGL and Vulkan support are finally part of the ShadowPlay package, starting with GeForce Experience 3.6.0. This opens the possibility to capture video and stream games such as Doom, Minecraft, and No Man’s Sky. Presumably, if you’re so inclined, you also won’t be limited to DirectX for video capture and streaming on games that support both DirectX and OpenGL or Vulkan. NVIDIA notes that this feature requires driver 385.61 or later, so be sure to update those drivers if you’re updating GeForce Experience as well.

To cap all this off, Gallery Upload and Broadcast are now brought together into the same window with the same controls. On top of this, service providers are selected as part of the upload process instead of before the upload screen, and gamers can log into their providers directly from the upload interface as well, which includes YouTube for video, imgur, Google photos for photos with Facebook supporting both. The Windows video folder is also accessible from within the gallery.

Overall, the intent of creating an interface for sharing videos and screenshots without feeling like one leaves the game is well executed. In briefly trying this out with Project Cars I did hit some heavy hitch-ups about four minutes into recording video to a Samsung 960 Evo, which of course shows in the resulting video. I also had the screen go black on me once when trying to upload a video, but I did successfully upload on the second try and without living with this update the black screen may have simply been an anomaly.

All in all, we now have a more stable and streamlined package in ShadowPlay. Watching the game streaming and let’s play communities grow over the years I would say that the chicken came long before the egg, but the tools continue to mature and for users running systems that support shadow play the means to share their gameplay just got more capable and more usable.

NVIDIA Announces Earnings for Q1 FY 2018

This afternoon, NVIDIA announced their earnings for the first quarter of their 2018 fiscal year. NVIDIA has been having a lot of success moving their core GPU business away from just PC gaming, and into far more categories, and the earnings today suggest that they’ve made some excellent strategic moves, coupled with solid product launches. Revenue for the quarter came in at $1.94 billion, which is an increase of 48% from Q1 2017. Gross margin was up 1.9% from a year ago, with 59.4% for the quarter. Operating income was up a staggering 126% to $554 million, and net income was up 144% to $507 million. This resulted in earnings per share of $0.79, up 126% from a year ago when they were $0.35. Last year, NVIDIA had record revenues, and this fiscal year they are off to an even better start.

Despite NVIDIA diversifying, and creating new markets for their GPUs, gaming is still the core of the company. They have come a long way in some of their segments, but gaming still accounts for 53% of their revenue, meaning it is larger than every other segment combined. Interestingly, despite the high gains in practically all other segments, the growth in gaming was higher. Last year at the end of Q1 2017, gaming accounted for only 52.6% of their revenue. For this quarter, revenue from gaming was $1.027 billion, compared to $687 million a year ago. A strong year of Pascal under their belt, and the launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, shows that there’s still room for growth in the PC market.

Professional Visualization, which is the segment for Quadro, had much lower growth than GeForce, but still increased revenues from $189 million a year ago, to $205 million today. That’s reasonable growth of 8.4%, but compared to pretty much every other NVIDIA segment, it seems like it’s not growing at all.

Datacenter is where NVIDIA has really found a great home for their GPU business, especially with the growth in machine learning and AI. NVIDIA’s Tesla business was once an afterthought for the company (well, maybe not the company, but outsiders looking in), but with the launch of the Tesla P100 and smaller variants, and DGX-1, NVIDIA has found some big customers for their datacenter compute products, including Microsoft, Google, and several other cloud vendors. Datacenter revenue was up 186% to $409 million. To put that in perspective, NVIDIA didn’t even discuss datacenter revenues even two years ago, and it’s now their second largest business. Not only that, it’s very likely one of their highest margin businesses as well.

Automotive, which came out of the failed Tegra smartphone and tablet business, is still showing strong growth as well. There’s a great saying about making lemonade, and NVIDIA has certainly done that. Revenue for this segment was up almost 24% to $140 million for the quarter.

Finally, OEM and IP is the only segment to have a falling quarter, with revenues down about 10% to $156 million.

NVIDIA has followed up strong product launches with solid diversification of their core business, and the results speak for themselves. The last couple of years have been very strong, and it appears that growth is going to continue for at least the near term. NVIDIA is expecting revenues for next quarter to be $1.95 billion, plus or minus 2%, with a gross margin of 58.4% plus or minus 0.5%.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations