Jensen Huang: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so wait. First question. Was that the plan all along? When did you realize that— I realized I didn’t learn about it until it was too late. We should have implemented all 32. But we built what we built, so we had to make the best of it. That was really an extraordinary time. Remember, RIVA 128 was NV3. NV1 and NV2 were based on forward texture mapping, no triangles but curves, and tessellated the curves. Because we were rendering higher-level objects, we essentially avoided using Z buffers. We thought that that was going to be a good rendering approach, and turns out to have been completely the wrong answer. What RIVA 128 was, was a reset of our company. Now remember, at the time that we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created. We were focused on transforming the PC into an accelerated PC because at the time, Windows was really a software-rendered system. Anyway, RIVA 128 was a reset of our company because by the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with Nvidia’s architecture. Thirty competitors have already shown up even though we were the first company at the time that we were founded, so the world was a completely different place. The question about what to do as a company strategy at that point, I would’ve said that we made a whole bunch of wrong decisions. But on that day that mattered, we made a sequence of extraordinarily good decisions. That time—1997—was probably Nvidia’s best moment. The reason for that was our backs were up against the wall. We were running out of time, we’re running out of money, and for a lot of employees, running out of hope. The question is, what do we do? Well, the first thing that we did was we decided that look, DirectX is now here. We’re not going to fight it. Let’s go figure out a way to build the best thing in the world for it. RIVA 128 is the world’s first fully accelerated hardware-accelerated pipeline for rendering 3D. The transform, the projection, every single element, all the way down to the frame buffer was completely hardware-accelerated. We implemented a texture cache. We took the bus limit, the frame buffer limit to as big as physics could afford at the time. We made the biggest chip that anybody had ever imagined building. We used the fastest memories. Basically, if we built that chip, there could be nothing that could be faster. We also chose a cost point that is substantially higher than the highest price that we think that any of our competitors would be willing to go. If we built it right, we accelerated everything, we implemented everything in DirectX that we knew of, and we built it as large as we possibly could, then obviously nobody can build something faster than that. Today, in a way you do that here at Nvidia, too. You were a consumer products company back then, right? It was the end consumers who were going to have to pay the money to buy that.…

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