NVIDIA Releases 372.54 WHQL Game Ready Driver

Yesterday NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX 10 Series for notebooks. Following through they have sent out the new 372.54 driver update with support for the new notebooks and in the process moved us to a new driver branch with Release 370. This new branch gives us a host of other fixes, feature additions, and some game ready support for a few new game releases this month.

We start off with some small SLI fixes. First off there was an issue with shadow darkness randomly changing during gameplay in The Witcher 3. It also appears that if one wanted to run an auxiliary third GTX 1080 that SLI could not be turned on for the first two cards, which would be helpful if one wanted a hefty gaming rig and a card to run compute jobs on the side. Last on the SLI front, there is a new SLI profile for space engineers. Moving on there is also a corrected high DPC latency issue for GP104 cards, which includes the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. In software stability issues we see fixes for stuttering in the Netflix windows Store app and crashing in Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and in the hardware compatibility department NVIDIA has resolved an issue with high idle clock speeds while using two DisplayPort displays.

For the list of game ready support that typically comes with these driver updates we have last weeks No Man’s Sky, Next week’s releases of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Obduction, with Codemasters F1 2016 and Epic Game’s Paragon open beta capping off the list with their release this week. Out of the games receiving support, No Man’s Sky is receiving a beta SLI profile and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will have a DX11 SLI profile.

Finishing off with this week’s driver update, we have a list of new features. On the list is support for an updated version of NVIDIA’s BatteryBoost technology, lower power consumption for multi-monitor 144Hz G-Sync display setups, and some developer related updates. These last updates include support for OpenGL VR SDK 1.4 in Windows, and also a Windows cross-API interop between Vulkan and DX11, meaning Vulkan app compatibility with existing DX11 HMD runtimes. NVIDIA additionally lists driver support for DXGI 2 VR, and of course, this driver update provides support for the new GeForce GTX 10-series GPU powered notebooks.

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 372.54 release notes.

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 10-Series for Notebooks Unveiled, Launching Today

Although no two GPU launches are ever exactly alike, I think this year’s launch of the FinFET generation GPUs really drives that point home. Over the last 3 months we have seen an incredibly compact launch schedule from NVIDIA, having started wi…

NVIDIA Announces Record Revenue For The Second Quarter Of Fiscal Year 2017

This afternoon, NVIDIA announced their quarterly earnings for the second quarter of their 2017 fiscal year, which ended July 31. NVIDIA had record revenues for the quarter, coming in at $1.43 billion, which is up 24% from a year ago. Gross margin for the quarter was 57.9%, up 2.9% from a year ago, while operating expenses fell 9% to $509 million. Operating income for the quarter was $317 million, up 317% from Q2 2016 where it was just $76 million due to a write-down of the Icera modem division. This also impacted net income, which was up 873% to $253 million, and earnings per share of $0.40 was up 700% compared to the Q2 2016 results.

NVIDIA also released Non-GAAP measures, which “exclude stock-based compensation, legal settlement costs, product warranty charge, acquisition-related costs, contributions, restructuring and other charges, gains from non-affiliated investments, interest expense related to amortization of debt discount, and the associated tax impact of these items, where applicable” and therefore don’t factor in the Icera write-down. In Non-GAAP measures, revenue was the same $1.428 billion, and gross margin was 58.1% which was up 1.5% from the Q2 2016 Non-GAAP results. Operating income was up 65% to $328 million, and net income was up the same 65% to $313 million. Earnings per share were up 56% to $0.53 compared to last year’s Non-GAAP results.

At the heart of this is NVIDIA’s GPU business, which has diversified quite a bit over the last several years. For Q2 2017, NVIDIA’s GPU business brought in $1.196 billion in revenue, up 18% from last year and up 14% over last quarter. NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, which is primarily automotive now, but still powering a couple of consumer devices like the SHIELD Tablet K1 and the SHIELD Android TV, brought in revenues of $166 million, which is up 30% from a year ago. NVIDIA’s “other” category is the $66 million they report per quarter for the payment from Intel for licensing.

Broken down by market, gaming is still the largest market for NVIDIA, with revenues of $781 million attributed to gaming, which is up 18% year-over-year. This has been spurred by the recent releases of their latest Pascal GPUs for the desktop, which hold the current performance crown with the move to a new FinFET node. Professional Visualization brought in $214 million, up 22% from a year ago, and NVIDIA just announced Pascal based Quadro cards as well, so I would expect this growth to continue if Quadro matches GeForce. The Datacenter revenue had the biggest jump, up 110% year-over-year to $151 million, and NVIDIA has put a lot of effort and marketing into deep learning to achieve this kind of growth. Automotive accounted for $119 million in revenue, up 68% from a year ago, and NVIDIA’s OEM and IP market was the only one to see a small loss of 6% revenue compared to last year, down to $163 million.

For next quarter, NVIDIA is expecting revenues of $1.68 billion, plus or minus 2%, with GAAP margins of 57.8% and non-GAAP margins of 58.0%, plus or minus 0.5%.

With record revenue, a more diversified platform, and the current GPU performance crown, NVIDIA has been easily outperforming the PC market with their strong focus on one of the few bright spots in the PC market – gaming. We’ve seen several companies transition to practically only selling gaming computers, and that is because of the higher margins and strong sales they’ve seen. NVIDIA has been riding this wave with successful launches of it’s Maxwell products, and now Pascal.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations