On Wednesday, Nvidia Corporation announced its decision to integrate more artificial intelligence features into one of its mid-range chips for gamers, i.e. RTX 4070, highlighting the significance of gaming for the company, despite the slowing revenue in this segment.
Nvidia is set to begin shipping the new RTX 4070 chip from Thursday, priced at $599, positioning it in the middle of the company’s range of GPUs, with a maximum list price of $1,600.
In March, survey data from the game distribution platform Steam showed that the chip it replaces, the RTX 3060, was the fourth most popular gaming chip in the market.
Despite Nvidia’s data center chips being responsible for the majority of the company’s revenue growth in recent years, approximately a third of the company’s $26.9 billion in fiscal 2023 revenue was still derived from gaming chips. However, the gaming revenue experienced a 27% decline due to the overall PC market’s lackluster performance.
Nvidia’s chips are essential for faster rendering of high-resolution images in PC video games, enabling more realistic visuals. The RTX 4070 chips will be the most affordable option that incorporates Nvidia’s latest AI technology to achieve this.
The latest Nvidia gaming chips use artificial intelligence to predict the value of approximately seven out of every eight pixels on a screen, including generating entire frames, instead of calculating each pixel’s value individually, which can be time-consuming.
In an interview, Justin Walker, senior director of Nvidia’s GeForce products, explained that, unlike pre-recorded movies, games are dynamic with user input, which makes it challenging to put a frame halfway between two frames. He further added that they have to understand the motion between two frames to enhance the gaming experience.