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Nvidia really lucked out with VR, crypto and AI all happening at once and all just happening to need exactly what they make (surly they can’t have seen all that

Nvidia really lucked out with VR, crypto and AI all happening at once and all just happening to need exactly what they make (surly they can’t have seen all that coming deliberately?) I wonder if consumer VR would have faired better if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back.

andromeduck 7y ago
I don't think they saw crypto but AI and VR was definitely not just luck.
- option 7y ago
  Of course, AI wasn’t just luck. NVIDIA have been a player in super computing way before deep learning wave started. CUDA was released in 2007
TomVDB 7y ago
I don’t think there is any significant money in VR today in terms of revenue. As for crypto and AI: I don’t think anyone saw that coming, but it was a safe bet that, one day, a technology would emerge that could use this kind of calculation power. And that promoting and investing in GPU computing in general was thus a smart thing to do. IOW: making your own luck.
aloer 7y ago
I don’t think it affected the adoption of VR much. OTOH it might be very beneficial in the long run that VR had a slow start. Probably the most dangerous thing to happen here is if customers are forever scared away due to bad but expensive early experiences. As far as I can tell, the hardware development continued and the next wave of VR will have much higher quality and more performant GPUs to make a good first impression. It would look differently if the entire VR field would’ve collapsed due to low sales but tbh it looks like it’s maturing slow and steady and that’s how it should be So essentially high gpu prices might have given the field just enough time to mature with patient early adopters before it goes main stream. At least that’s how I hope it will be
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  My own experience with VR was that it is held back by an extremely clunkly interface. Nobody wants to wear those huge headsets for long periods of time, and you can't even move around in the virtual world because of all the claptrap that is connected to it. I had much better luck getting people to try things like Daydream, which have extremely limited processing power but could do cartoony graphics just fine. I think the industry really missed an opportunity to start with lightweight AR. Let the users walk around by showing them where they are and overlay things on top. There are plenty of useful applications; many require precision sensing that phones don't have, but there are others that can be done with just an accelerometer and a camera.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > Nobody wants to wear those huge headsets for long periods of time, and you can't even move around in the virtual world because of all the claptrap that is connected to it. This is part of why I find Facebook's Quest so compelling.
    - angryasian 7y ago
      Also a Quest owner, and find it incredibly compelling. Very good content overall. Still a long way to go, but as a standalone headset there are some great capabilities that I'm seeing that can't be done with a tethered headset. Check out the new space pirates arena videos. I've already modded the headset , look up frankenquest ( makes a huge difference IMO ). VRCover added. Also unlocked and sideloading.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Ya, the Quest has been one of those lifestyle changing devices for me. Still, you are kind of stuck with limited mobility even without wires, but at least you can setup the space you use for VR almost anywhere.
  - jonas21 7y ago
    I think it's been well-known in the industry since the early days of VR that people don't like clunky headsets. But it's not like you can just will into existence a small, lightweight, standalone headset that delivers a smooth VR experience. There are hard technical problems to solve: inside-out tracking, battery life, heat management, optics, etc. The Oculus Quest is a step on the way there, but even after spending billions of dollars, they still have a long way to go. The problem with lightweight AR is that with current technology, it's not that useful. If you've ever tried Google Glass or Focals by North, there's not much you can do with them that couldn't be done better with a smartwatch [1]. And if you try to pack a larger FOV display or more processing power into the glasses, you end up with something like HoloLens, and then you've got a similar problem to the VR headsets -- it's probably not something that you'll want to wear for long periods of time (you can't anyway due to battery life), and certainly not something you'd wear walking down the street. It's not that these are missed opportunities. On the contrary, there are a lot of people who have been working on them for years with billions of dollars spent in the process. But they're hard, and it will take time to get there. --- [1] The one exception was being able to capture quick moments with the Glass camera -- but of course, that raised privacy concerns.
baybal2 7y ago
> Nvidia really lucked out with VR, crypto and AI all happening at once Not really. Team Green is very careful after the crypto kerfuffle to jump on minute trends like "AI," and very reasonably so. The first wave of cookie cutter "AI" companies are already beginning to offload their GPUs.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  I see a lot of negative comments about how "AI" is a fad here. While I don't think it's uses are as great as advertised in the business sector, which is where most of this forum seems to originate, AI applications in academic discplines, especially the natural sciences haven't even begun scratching the surface. You can make a fantastic living keeping on top of the latest ML papers and having a degree in a physical science. There are so many obvious problems to be solved by AI algorithms that people haven't even gotten around to applying CNN's to yet. Source: me with 500 paper ideas in my head
  - sseveran 7y ago
    I agree with this a lot. When discussing this with someone who has been around ML/Optimization since the 70s he pointed out that it took 20 years for simple things like a Kalman filters to make their way out in to all the places in the world where they turned out to be useful. That is likely true of more modern ML technologies.
  - woeirua 7y ago
    As someone in this space, I think that most people vastly underestimate the actual practical considerations in converting a neat CNN or ML algorithm into a usable product. It's trivial to use the newest flavor of ML to write an academic paper and hold up a new high score for a particular problem. It is very hard to make that a usable commercial product, because often 95% accuracy is not good enough, or it's better to have a deterministic failure mode than to have a semi-random one.
    - cat199 7y ago
      scientific research doesn't always relate to 'products' - but scientific research still happens and needs to happen.
varelse 7y ago
Sure, but the really lucky break IMO was a decade of INTC repeatedly punching itself in the face w/r to manycore computation. I was at Nvidia from 2001 to 2011 (and now back) and I spent 2006-2011 as one of the very first CUDA programmers. It was pretty obvious within a week or two that this technology was going to be huge, and I more or less made my career with it. But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen's Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn't understand manycore. Eventually, they gave up, and now they're playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within. Now if someone threw a large pile of money at AMD again, things could get really interesting IMO. But the piles of stupid money seem biased towards throwing ~$5M per layer at the pets.com of AI companies these days.
- doh 7y ago
  > But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen's Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn't understand manycore. Eventually, they gave up, and now they're playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within. Reminds me of "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". So many companies have this reaction (e.g. RIM with BlackBerry). Wondering if this is some kind of "corporate instinct".
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    This is "The innovator's dilemma" material. TL.DR. yes, it's a perfectly rational (but short term biased) reaction that corporations mostly can not resist having.
    - doh 7y ago
      I was just thinking about it as I wrote it. I think that's correct and glad you brought it up.
kllrnohj 7y ago
> I wonder if consumer VR would have faired better if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back. I don't think VR changed the GPU demand landscape at all. Most of that market has high overlap to those already doing PC gaming. And if you're already doing PC gaming, you probably already have a GPU perfectly capable of doing VR. Consumer VR would fair better if there was a halo game to justify the investment. Entry-level VR still starts at $400, and there's not a lot of games where you go "yes I must try this", and fewer still that are then also VR exclusive to really force you into the VR experience.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Beat Saber is VR’s killer app ATM, especially for non-hardcore gamers and fitness enthusiasts. In fact, I think VR’s main appeal will be to non-gamers, which makes the less powerful GPU on the quest a non issue.
  - cat199 7y ago
    > VR’s killer app ATM there is no such thing as a 'killer app' "ATM" - a 'killer app' by definition is one that transforms technology/society and that afterwords, we 'cannot do without' (or at least think so) - eg. personal computers+spreadsheet, smartphones+mobile internet, etc. If a 'killer app' is 'at the moment', it isn't a killer app because there is a 'next' moment, implying that the previous 'killer app' wasn't 'killer' because we can now do without it
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      If someone lost 40 pounds playing beat saber everyday, wouldn’t that be transformative to them?
    - jonplackett 7y ago
      That’s exactly what best saber is. I bought an oculus quest purely due to beat saber. Everything else it can do was/is/will be a bonus!
oarabbus_ 7y ago
Highly doubt that crypto mining affected VR adoption. The technology simply isn't there yet to be mainstream. It will be in 5 years, though.
- criddell 7y ago
  VR always seems to be just 5 years away. I'm starting to come around to the idea that it's here now and the size of the market is just pretty much what it's going to be.
  - Miraste 7y ago
    It might be longer than five years, but the market has massive potential. I've owned a bunch of headsets, and I demo them to anyone who wants to try one. The reactions go like this: initial shock and awe (more and more so as the tech has improved), followed by childlike glee and fascination. I've shown skeptics an Apollo 11 recreation, telling them to just try it for five minutes, and no one has spent less than an hour yet. They come out amazed and wondering why these aren't everywhere. Then they ask how much it costs (~$4000) and their excitement vanishes. You can get a setup for much less than that now, but it's blurrier, slower, uglier, more nauseating, and lacks important features like finger tracking. It won't be smartphone-level for a long time, if ever, but once the tech reaches affordable levels, I'm convinced there will be a larger audience.
    - criddell 7y ago
      VR (and AR) is amazing to demo. I had the reactions you listed the first time I played the blocky pterodactyl game in 1991. If they can get rid of the headset requirement, then I think the potential is almost limitless.
    - miketuritzin 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, what $4000 VR setup are you showing people?
      - 7y ago
ww520 7y ago
I don't think it's luck. It's just that Nvidia has good strategy and execution to leverage their core GPU technology to a number of different areas that can be benefited with massive parallel processing. Couple years back when I was researching for stock investment I looked into NVDA's product offering. I used to thought NVDA was only good at video cards but was surprised to find they had already fanned out to a number of different areas with their GPU technology. Basically anything that needs massive parallel computing is a candidate to apply the GPU. From memory, they were into super computing, cloud computing, animation farm, CAD, visualization, simulation, automative (lots of cars have Nvida chips), and of course VR/AI. Crypto I don't think was on their product roadmap. It just happened.
spullara 7y ago
You gotta give the CEO credit for investing in CUDA for years before any of these use cases appeared. He knew that it would be massively better at parallel computing than the CPU but it was a chicken-and-egg problem. No one was going to figure out the use cases until it existed.
- pishpash 7y ago
  GPGPU has been around for at least 20 years and the roadmap was clear. Pretty sure it came down to execution.
  - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
    I remember being in uni in the early 2000's and going to a conference where one of the presentations was how they tricked a GPU into "rendering" an image that was basically a simulation of fire propagation, and how it was faster (about an order of magnitude) than the fastest CPU simulator. They had a few issues because it was complicated, and the texture data type were not exactly what they needed, and, and, and... And then CUDA emerged. So it's not like they magically thought of GPGPU -- there were people working on it before CUDA, but yeah, they had the vision and invested the money and hours of work to make it happen.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      I wrote a shader to do computation once. It wasn't too bad actually.
paggle 7y ago
It’s not luck as much as it was realizing early on that parallel computing was going to be big and getting CUDA out there before the world needed it.
amatheus 7y ago
Wouldn't it be the inverse? That these fields are happening because of the graphics cards advancements?
dyeje 7y ago
I mean, technically we don't who Satoshi is. Maybe it was Nvidia all along.
jessriedel 7y ago
> if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back. Except in the short term, doesn't increased demand for chips generally decrease unit prices, rather than increases them? Do you really think there was such a large shock, and prices rose so fast, that this permanently hobbled VR uptake even years later when chips are cheaper than they would be in the absence of crypto and DL?

andromeduck 7y ago

I don't think they saw crypto but AI and VR was definitely not just luck.

option 7y ago
Of course, AI wasn’t just luck. NVIDIA have been a player in super computing way before deep learning wave started. CUDA was released in 2007

TomVDB 7y ago

I don’t think there is any significant money in VR today in terms of revenue. As for crypto and AI: I don’t think anyone saw that coming, but it was a safe bet that, one day, a technology would emerge that could use this kind of calculation power. And that promoting and investing in GPU computing in general was thus a smart thing to do. IOW: making your own luck.

aloer 7y ago

I don’t think it affected the adoption of VR much. OTOH it might be very beneficial in the long run that VR had a slow start. Probably the most dangerous thing to happen here is if customers are forever scared away due to bad but expensive early experiences. As far as I can tell, the hardware development continued and the next wave of VR will have much higher quality and more performant GPUs to make a good first impression. It would look differently if the entire VR field would’ve collapsed due to low sales but tbh it looks like it’s maturing slow and steady and that’s how it should be So essentially high gpu prices might have given the field just enough time to mature with patient early adopters before it goes main stream. At least that’s how I hope it will be

metalliqaz 7y ago
My own experience with VR was that it is held back by an extremely clunkly interface. Nobody wants to wear those huge headsets for long periods of time, and you can't even move around in the virtual world because of all the claptrap that is connected to it. I had much better luck getting people to try things like Daydream, which have extremely limited processing power but could do cartoony graphics just fine. I think the industry really missed an opportunity to start with lightweight AR. Let the users walk around by showing them where they are and overlay things on top. There are plenty of useful applications; many require precision sensing that phones don't have, but there are others that can be done with just an accelerometer and a camera.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > Nobody wants to wear those huge headsets for long periods of time, and you can't even move around in the virtual world because of all the claptrap that is connected to it. This is part of why I find Facebook's Quest so compelling.
  - angryasian 7y ago
    Also a Quest owner, and find it incredibly compelling. Very good content overall. Still a long way to go, but as a standalone headset there are some great capabilities that I'm seeing that can't be done with a tethered headset. Check out the new space pirates arena videos. I've already modded the headset , look up frankenquest ( makes a huge difference IMO ). VRCover added. Also unlocked and sideloading.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Ya, the Quest has been one of those lifestyle changing devices for me. Still, you are kind of stuck with limited mobility even without wires, but at least you can setup the space you use for VR almost anywhere.
- jonas21 7y ago
  I think it's been well-known in the industry since the early days of VR that people don't like clunky headsets. But it's not like you can just will into existence a small, lightweight, standalone headset that delivers a smooth VR experience. There are hard technical problems to solve: inside-out tracking, battery life, heat management, optics, etc. The Oculus Quest is a step on the way there, but even after spending billions of dollars, they still have a long way to go. The problem with lightweight AR is that with current technology, it's not that useful. If you've ever tried Google Glass or Focals by North, there's not much you can do with them that couldn't be done better with a smartwatch [1]. And if you try to pack a larger FOV display or more processing power into the glasses, you end up with something like HoloLens, and then you've got a similar problem to the VR headsets -- it's probably not something that you'll want to wear for long periods of time (you can't anyway due to battery life), and certainly not something you'd wear walking down the street. It's not that these are missed opportunities. On the contrary, there are a lot of people who have been working on them for years with billions of dollars spent in the process. But they're hard, and it will take time to get there. --- [1] The one exception was being able to capture quick moments with the Glass camera -- but of course, that raised privacy concerns.

baybal2 7y ago

> Nvidia really lucked out with VR, crypto and AI all happening at once Not really. Team Green is very careful after the crypto kerfuffle to jump on minute trends like "AI," and very reasonably so. The first wave of cookie cutter "AI" companies are already beginning to offload their GPUs.

acollins1331 7y ago
I see a lot of negative comments about how "AI" is a fad here. While I don't think it's uses are as great as advertised in the business sector, which is where most of this forum seems to originate, AI applications in academic discplines, especially the natural sciences haven't even begun scratching the surface. You can make a fantastic living keeping on top of the latest ML papers and having a degree in a physical science. There are so many obvious problems to be solved by AI algorithms that people haven't even gotten around to applying CNN's to yet. Source: me with 500 paper ideas in my head
- sseveran 7y ago
  I agree with this a lot. When discussing this with someone who has been around ML/Optimization since the 70s he pointed out that it took 20 years for simple things like a Kalman filters to make their way out in to all the places in the world where they turned out to be useful. That is likely true of more modern ML technologies.
- woeirua 7y ago
  As someone in this space, I think that most people vastly underestimate the actual practical considerations in converting a neat CNN or ML algorithm into a usable product. It's trivial to use the newest flavor of ML to write an academic paper and hold up a new high score for a particular problem. It is very hard to make that a usable commercial product, because often 95% accuracy is not good enough, or it's better to have a deterministic failure mode than to have a semi-random one.
  - cat199 7y ago
    scientific research doesn't always relate to 'products' - but scientific research still happens and needs to happen.

varelse 7y ago

Sure, but the really lucky break IMO was a decade of INTC repeatedly punching itself in the face w/r to manycore computation. I was at Nvidia from 2001 to 2011 (and now back) and I spent 2006-2011 as one of the very first CUDA programmers. It was pretty obvious within a week or two that this technology was going to be huge, and I more or less made my career with it. But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen's Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn't understand manycore. Eventually, they gave up, and now they're playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within. Now if someone threw a large pile of money at AMD again, things could get really interesting IMO. But the piles of stupid money seem biased towards throwing ~$5M per layer at the pets.com of AI companies these days.

doh 7y ago
> But instead of stepping up to the plate and igniting a Red Queen's Race that would have benefited everyone, INTC first tried to discredit the technology repeatedly, then they built an absolutely dreadful series of decelerators that demonstrated how badly they didn't understand manycore. Eventually, they gave up, and now they're playing catch-up by buying companies that get within striking distance of NVDA rather than building really cool technology from within. Reminds me of "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". So many companies have this reaction (e.g. RIM with BlackBerry). Wondering if this is some kind of "corporate instinct".
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  This is "The innovator's dilemma" material. TL.DR. yes, it's a perfectly rational (but short term biased) reaction that corporations mostly can not resist having.
  - doh 7y ago
    I was just thinking about it as I wrote it. I think that's correct and glad you brought it up.

kllrnohj 7y ago

> I wonder if consumer VR would have faired better if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back. I don't think VR changed the GPU demand landscape at all. Most of that market has high overlap to those already doing PC gaming. And if you're already doing PC gaming, you probably already have a GPU perfectly capable of doing VR. Consumer VR would fair better if there was a halo game to justify the investment. Entry-level VR still starts at $400, and there's not a lot of games where you go "yes I must try this", and fewer still that are then also VR exclusive to really force you into the VR experience.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Beat Saber is VR’s killer app ATM, especially for non-hardcore gamers and fitness enthusiasts. In fact, I think VR’s main appeal will be to non-gamers, which makes the less powerful GPU on the quest a non issue.
- cat199 7y ago
  > VR’s killer app ATM there is no such thing as a 'killer app' "ATM" - a 'killer app' by definition is one that transforms technology/society and that afterwords, we 'cannot do without' (or at least think so) - eg. personal computers+spreadsheet, smartphones+mobile internet, etc. If a 'killer app' is 'at the moment', it isn't a killer app because there is a 'next' moment, implying that the previous 'killer app' wasn't 'killer' because we can now do without it
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    If someone lost 40 pounds playing beat saber everyday, wouldn’t that be transformative to them?
  - jonplackett 7y ago
    That’s exactly what best saber is. I bought an oculus quest purely due to beat saber. Everything else it can do was/is/will be a bonus!

oarabbus_ 7y ago

Highly doubt that crypto mining affected VR adoption. The technology simply isn't there yet to be mainstream. It will be in 5 years, though.

criddell 7y ago
VR always seems to be just 5 years away. I'm starting to come around to the idea that it's here now and the size of the market is just pretty much what it's going to be.
- Miraste 7y ago
  It might be longer than five years, but the market has massive potential. I've owned a bunch of headsets, and I demo them to anyone who wants to try one. The reactions go like this: initial shock and awe (more and more so as the tech has improved), followed by childlike glee and fascination. I've shown skeptics an Apollo 11 recreation, telling them to just try it for five minutes, and no one has spent less than an hour yet. They come out amazed and wondering why these aren't everywhere. Then they ask how much it costs (~$4000) and their excitement vanishes. You can get a setup for much less than that now, but it's blurrier, slower, uglier, more nauseating, and lacks important features like finger tracking. It won't be smartphone-level for a long time, if ever, but once the tech reaches affordable levels, I'm convinced there will be a larger audience.
  - criddell 7y ago
    VR (and AR) is amazing to demo. I had the reactions you listed the first time I played the blocky pterodactyl game in 1991. If they can get rid of the headset requirement, then I think the potential is almost limitless.
  - miketuritzin 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what $4000 VR setup are you showing people?
    - 7y ago

ww520 7y ago

I don't think it's luck. It's just that Nvidia has good strategy and execution to leverage their core GPU technology to a number of different areas that can be benefited with massive parallel processing. Couple years back when I was researching for stock investment I looked into NVDA's product offering. I used to thought NVDA was only good at video cards but was surprised to find they had already fanned out to a number of different areas with their GPU technology. Basically anything that needs massive parallel computing is a candidate to apply the GPU. From memory, they were into super computing, cloud computing, animation farm, CAD, visualization, simulation, automative (lots of cars have Nvida chips), and of course VR/AI. Crypto I don't think was on their product roadmap. It just happened.

spullara 7y ago

You gotta give the CEO credit for investing in CUDA for years before any of these use cases appeared. He knew that it would be massively better at parallel computing than the CPU but it was a chicken-and-egg problem. No one was going to figure out the use cases until it existed.

pishpash 7y ago
GPGPU has been around for at least 20 years and the roadmap was clear. Pretty sure it came down to execution.
- dr_zoidberg 7y ago
  I remember being in uni in the early 2000's and going to a conference where one of the presentations was how they tricked a GPU into "rendering" an image that was basically a simulation of fire propagation, and how it was faster (about an order of magnitude) than the fastest CPU simulator. They had a few issues because it was complicated, and the texture data type were not exactly what they needed, and, and, and... And then CUDA emerged. So it's not like they magically thought of GPGPU -- there were people working on it before CUDA, but yeah, they had the vision and invested the money and hours of work to make it happen.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    I wrote a shader to do computation once. It wasn't too bad actually.

paggle 7y ago

It’s not luck as much as it was realizing early on that parallel computing was going to be big and getting CUDA out there before the world needed it.

amatheus 7y ago

Wouldn't it be the inverse? That these fields are happening because of the graphics cards advancements?

dyeje 7y ago

I mean, technically we don't who Satoshi is. Maybe it was Nvidia all along.

jessriedel 7y ago

> if gamers didn’t have to compete with miners and data centres for chips and had more reasonably priced cards a few years back. Except in the short term, doesn't increased demand for chips generally decrease unit prices, rather than increases them? Do you really think there was such a large shock, and prices rose so fast, that this permanently hobbled VR uptake even years later when chips are cheaper than they would be in the absence of crypto and DL?