NVIDIA Releases 378.66 WHQL Driver: Game Ready, More Ansel, With 10 and 12-bit video

Not wanting to be left out of the Valentine’s day fray, NVIDIA has swung by to drop off their driver updates in preparation for this week’s releases and next week’s release of Halo Wars 2. Cyber photographers can itch their shutter finger with new game support for Ansel, and we’ve been given more high bit depth video support.

As the 378.66 driver update continues with release branch 378 we see the list of fixes start with an issue keeping surround from being enabled on an XGPU. When G-Sync and V-Sync are both enabled, there was a long delay while switching between windowed and full-screen modes. Players of Second Life will no longer experience a blue tinted world after disabling advanced lighting, and The Division no longer shows shadow flicker after enabling PCSS. On Kepler GPU’s in Battlefield 1 NVIDIA has fixed in game flickering when using TAA and menu text no longer jitters for the Battlefield Day 28 Patch when SLI is enabled. Users playing on SLI GTX 1080’s with surround on HDMI 2.0 should have less system crashes while launching games now, and Heroes of the Storm should be done crashing on startup as well. Also, GeForce 860M Notebooks are no longer causing Direct X games to crash. Finishing up the fixes, we have a Minecraft Java SE Binary crash that was pointing to nvinitx.dll, and a fix for the GTX 980 Ti struggling to detect multiple TV models.

Alongside this release, NVIDIA has added Video SDK 8.0. This finally exposes high-bit-depth (10/12-bit) decoding for VP9 and HEVC to projects using NVIDIA’s specialized NVDEC video decoder. Video SDK 8.0 also adds support for OpenGL input surfaces for encoders, weighted prediction, and H.264 ME-only mode enhancements. NVIDIA is also providing Game Ready support for Sniper Elite 4, For Honor and Halo Wars 2. For Honor and Paragon both now have Ansel support and additionally, NVIDIA recommends those interested in playing For Honor do so with a GTX 1060 at 1080p, a GTX 1070 at 1440p, and 1070 SLI for 4K for an excellent high quality experience.

Anyone interested can download the updated drivers through GeForce Experience or on the NVIDIA driver download page. More information on this update and further issues can be found in the 378.66 release notes.

AMD Releases Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.2.1

Despite the arrival of Valentine’s day, gamers are still gonna game, and AMD is in to prepare us for this week’s game releases. The new update for Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.2.1 comes with display driver version 16.60.2011 (…

NVIDIA Reports Q4 2017 And Fiscal 2017 Results: Record Revenue

NVIDIA’s fiscal year for 2017 ended on January 29, 2017, and for the fourth quarter and full year, NVIDIA reports they had record revenues. For Q4 2017, NVIDIA is reporting revenue of $2.173 billio.n, up 55% from a year ago. Gross margin came in at 60.0%, which is up 3.5% from Q4 2016. Operating income for the quarter was $733 million, up 191%, and net income was up 216% to $655 million. The very high growth in operating income and net income are even more impressive, since Q4 2016 was also a record for them at the time. NVIDIA reported $0.99 per share earnings for this quarter, up 183%.

Even though 2016 was a record year for NVIDIA, 2017 was even better. NVIDIA reported record revenue of $6.91 billion for the full fiscal year 2017, which is up 38% from a year ago, and had a net income of $1.666 billion. Earnings per share for the year were $2.57. They also repurchased $739 million in shares over the last year, and paid $261 million in dividends.

The majority of NVIDIA’s revenue came from their Gaming segment, which includes their GeForce GPUs. The launch of Pascal has clearly been very successful, and for the quarter NVIDIA’s Gaming segment had revenues of $1.348 billion, up from $810 million a year ago. This is a gain of 66.4% year-over-year, on a market they were already at the top of. This quarter, they also launched the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti mobile GPUs, and a new SHIELD TV, along with unveiling the GeForce NOW game streaming service.

Professional Visualization had much more modest growth, being up “only” 10.8% from last year, with revenues of $225 million for the quarter. They just launched the GP100 Quadro though, so it may have even more growth to come.

Datacenter has been a big focus from NVIDIA in diversifying their portfolio, and this quarter they had some announcements here as well, with a collaboration with Microsoft on the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, powered by Microsoft Azure cloud running on NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning system. They unveiled the DGX SATURNV AI supercomputer, and partnered with the National Cancer Institute and US Department of Energy to build CANDLE to “advance cancer research”. The growth of NVIDIA’s Datacenter segment has been almost exponential, and it is now the second largest source of revenue for the company. For Q4 2017, NVIDIA reported $296 million in revenue from this segment, up from $97 million a year ago, or an increase of 205.1%.

NVIDIA has also diversified into Automotive with their Tegra lineup, after originally releasing it as a mobile SoC. This has also been a boon for the company, and they are now powering self-driving cars, and the infotainment systems of major manufacturers like Audi, and Mercedes-Benz, and they’ve partnered with Bosch on self-driving systems as well. This segment saw revenues of $128 million for the quarter, up from $93 million a year ago, or 37.6%.

Finally, the OEM and IP segment had revenues of $176 million, down from $198 million a year ago. Unfortunately NVIDIA has not gone into much detail about just why this is dropping, and how revenue from this category breaks down.

For next quarter, NVIDIA is expecting revenues of $1.9 billion, plus or minus 2%, and gross margins between 59.5 and 59.7%.

The diversification of NVIDIA from a purely GPU company has clearly paid dividends, especially when their core market is doing as well as it is. The datacenter growth is clearly very high margin as well, considering the jump in net income for the quarter.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations