Chip maker NVIDIA has sent invitations for an event called “Made to Game,” which will be held on 3 March as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
“More than 5 years in the making, what I want to share with you will redefine the future of gaming,” reads a line from NVIDIA’s president and chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang’s invitation to media.
In the invite, NVIDIA has promised that they will re-define the entire gaming experience. He also referred to the presentation as a “very special event”.
NVIDIA announced of its fourth quarter results during which the invite was extended. The results were better than expected as the demand for computer graphic cards witnessed a spike.
Despite the PC market struggling due to the emergence of mobile phone and console, the part of NVIDIA’s business devoted to graphics chips for the machines managed to maintain growth in 2014, thanks in part to its sharp focus on the strong PC gaming segment.
Jen-Hsun said NVIDIA is also benefiting from a growth of PC gaming, particularly in southeast Asian countries, and the constant rise of good production value games, which require ever more powerful machines.
With the future of the broader PC world still on shaky ground after years of declines, NVIDIA has been working to spread out into new areas, including data centers, automotive and mobile devices. At the Consumer Electronics Show last month, the company spent most of its presentation discussing its new Tegra X1 mobile chip and how it can be used to power car displays and automated driving. On Wednesday, NVIDIA said its technology is now used in 7.5 million cars, up from 4.7 million a year earlier.
NVIDIA has also been using Tegra to power its new mobile gaming devices: the Shield Tablet and Shield Portable. Huang declined to provide hard numbers on Shield’s sales but said he’s been “delighted” by its reception in the market and that he expects the company to expand the Shield business over time. “We found a niche in the market,” he said, referring to gaming tablets.
For its fourth quarter, ended 25 January, NVIDIA posted a profit of $193.1 million, up 31 per cent from $146.9 million, a year earlier. Revenue grew 9 per cent, to $1.25 billion. The quarterly revenue was at its highest ever and for the first time exceeded the quarterly revenue of rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD).