NVIDIA reveals new RTX desktop and laptop chips at CES 2021

NVIDIA's Vice President and General Manager of GPU Products, Kaustubh Sanghani, talks to Yahoo Finance about the company's big CES 2021 reveals and the impact of the pandemic on gaming.

Video transcript

DANIEL HAWLEY: We're here with Kaustubh Sanghani. He is the general manager and VP of GeForce at NVIDIA. Kaustubh, thank you so much for joining us. NVIDIA has obviously made some big announcements at CES 2021, virtually, obviously. And I just kind of want to go over those. So what can you tell us about the new chips that we have? I know there's the new G-Force 3060, as well as some laptops announcements.

KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yeah, thank you, Dan. It's great to be here virtually. And we had some really exciting announcements today. Firstly we announced that the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is coming to laptops. So we announced a record 70-plus laptops from every major OEM with the new GeForce RTX 30-series laptop GPUs based on the NVIDIA ampere architecture.

This includes our second generation of RTX and third generation of Max-Q technologies to deliver 2X D efficiency of the previous generations. So we really exciting news on the laptop front, starting at $999.

We also announced a new desktop GPU, the GeForce RTX 3060. The 60 class of products is really one of our most popular products. And the GeForce GTX 1060 four years ago, and based the Pascal architecture, was one of our most popular products ever.

And the 3060 is a great refresh for all those gamers, gaming with GTX products, delivering 2X the raster performance and 10x the rate racing performance. And as we all know rate racing is the future of gaming.

In addition to both of those big announcements, we also had a series of announcements really highlighting that RTX is the future. We announced that seven more games will support RTX functionality with rate racing and RDLSS.

And also a lot of momentum for our NVIDIA reflex technology, with two more games supporting reflex, making it seven of the top 10 competitive shooters supporting reflex. And also five new G-sync monitors and seven new mice supporting our reflex latency analyzer functionality. So all in all, a lot of exciting announcements for gamers. And really looking forward to all these products.

DANIEL HAWLEY: And one of those games is called DD War Zone, right? Just throwing it out there, making sure that I'm getting my War Zone fix in the best possible way.

KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yeah, you've got to be a lot more competitive in War Zone, Dan. Because with DLSS, you're going to see some great frame-grade improvements.

DANIEL HAWLEY: God, I hope so. You can't improve. I guess you can improve from worse. So, you know, it'll be something. I want to talk about the kind of COVID environment and how that's impacted gaming. Obviously myself, as well as people who already played are playing more.

But then there's people who, maybe, had stopped playing, or didn't play as often as they had wanted to, who jumped back in. Because there's no movie theaters. There's no sports events to go to. What does that meant for NVIDIA, especially on the chip side, when it comes to kind of demand from gamers who are looking for those devices that they really want to get to push their gaming as far as possible.

KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Yeah, so it's pretty clear that with COVID and all, that we're spending a lot more time at home. People are taking to gaming, and you know, high-performance PCs, including desktops and laptops, have become more important than ever for people.

People are taking to gaming, not just to play games, but it's also as a way to connect with their friends and family, and as a way to create and broadcast what they're doing. You can see that in pretty much all the metrics for 2020. If you compare 2020 to just two years prior, 2018, the number of concurrent gamers on Steam has gone up 2x.

The number of monthly active users on Discord has gone up 3x. The number of gaming hours seen on YouTube has gone up 2x, up to a whopping $100 billion hours of gaming watched on YouTube last year. And the number of viewers watching eSports has gone up to almost half a billion users.

So if you look at all of those numbers, it's natural that the demand for our gaming GPUs is also very strong. And as a result, I think, we've seen incredible demand out there.

It is true that it's pretty hard to find a GPU out there. And we really appreciate the patience of all our gamers, as we are trying our best to get as many GPUs as possible out there. Our Ampere launch was actually our fastest ramp ever. 2x faster than our previous ramp. So clearly we were planning for a lot of demand, but there's still a lot more out there.

DANIEL HAWLEY: Yeah, I was saying earlier, I was lucky I have the prior generation of chips, the 2070 in my own PC, and I managed to get that just before people started really, really going out there and buying. So I managed to get lucky. And I'm going to keep playing.

Kaustubh, thank you so much for joining us. Kaustubh Sanghani, he is the VP and GM of GeForce product at NVIDIA. Thank you so much.

KAUSTUBH SANGHANI: Thanks, Dan.