NVIDIA's CEO: Streaming Will "Never" Be As Good As a PC

NVIDIA’s CEO: Streaming Will “Never” Be As Good As a PC

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, talked with journalist at CES 2019 where he shared his vision about different subjects from autopilot cars to GeForce Now the cloud-based game streaming service currently in free beta testing. According to Jensen Huang the GeForce Now it’s growing according NVIDIA’s expectations but it will never replace a PC, he gives the example of eSports, and the input lag that will always exist on streaming services.

Credits to VentureBeat for this extract of the Q&A with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang:

It’s fantastic. We have hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Our strategy is ongoing. First of all, if your question is, “How long before streaming can be as good as a PC?” the answer is never. The reason for that is because there’s one problem we haven’t figured out how to solve, and that’s the speed of light. When you’re playing esports, you need the response in a few milliseconds, not a few hundred milliseconds. It’s a fundamental problem. It’s just the laws of physics.

However, we believe in it so much that we’ve been working on this for a decade. Our strategy is this: we believe PC gaming is here to stay. We believe everyone will at least need a PC, because apparently knowledge is still important. You can’t do everything on TV. You can’t live with TV online. But you could live with a PC alone. PCs are used by young people all over the world. It’s their first computing device, or maybe second after a mobile device. Between those two devices, those are the essential computing platforms for society. We believe that’s here to stay.

When people buy their games for PC, on Steam or Uplay or Origin or Battle.net, what we want to do with GeForce Now is take that experience, checkpoint it, and take it somewhere else, wherever they happen to be. If they’re in front of a TV, fantastic. If they’re in front of a mobile device, fantastic. But our core starts with PC. That’s our center point. That’s why GeForce Now plays PC games. That’s why GeForce Now allows you to take the PC games you’ve purchased and play them anywhere. That’s why GeForce Now runs every game that’s available. No porting is necessary.

Our strategy is very different. There are other strategies around streaming games, like Netflix or something like that. I think that’s terrific. The more expansive the gaming market is, the better. It will never replace the PC.

Read the full article at VentureBeat.