Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
The tech world is gathered in Las Vegas this week for CES 2019. After several long days of new products launches and demos, the industry’s biggest players were asked for their opinions on the new gear coming out of the annual trade show. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was asked for his opinions on rival GPU maker AMD’s new Radeon 7 and chose to refrain from offering a boring, inoffensive response.
Huang spoke to the folks over at PC World while at CES and when asked for his thoughts on the Radeon 7 GPU, he stated, “It’s underwhelming, the performance is lousy, and there’s nothing new. [There’s] no ray tracing, no AI. It’s 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we’ll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we’ll crush it.”
Even after delivering the hottest take of CES 2019, the man in the leather jacket added an extra nugget of pain to the beating he just laid on the Radeon 7 unveiling, “It’s a weird launch, maybe they thought of it this morning.” PC World noted that Huang began chuckling after his dig at NVIDIA’s direct competitor. Huang has a history of friendly jabs at rivals, so his comments were not a total surprise to those who have covered the industry for many years.
One of NVIDIA’s big announcements at CES was the impending release of G-SYNC functionality for some FreeSync-certified gaming monitors. When asked if NVIDIA caved into external pressure to open their graphics cards for use with AMD’s FreeSync, Huang continued to spit heat, “We never competed. (FreeSync) was never proven to work. As you know, we invented the area of adaptive sync. The truth is most of the FreeSync monitors do not work. They do not even work with AMD’s graphics cards.”
Once Huang was finished torching AMD’s efforts in PC gaming graphics, he was asked about the negative public perception towards NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs and their exorbitant prices. “They were right,” Huang said. “[We] were anxious to get RTX in the mainstream market. We just weren’t ready. Now we’re ready, and it’s called 2060,” Huang said. “[It has] twice the performance of a PlayStation 4 and it’s only $350.”
As a parting gift to the PC hardware world, Huang also offered his opinion on the news that Intel was reviving its dedicated GPU division, “Intel’s graphics team is basically AMD, right?” Huang asked. “I’m trying to figure out AMD’s graphics team.”
When asked for comment on Huang’s carpet bombing of her company's newest GPU, AMD CEO Lisa Su explained: “What I would say is that we’re very excited about Radeon VII, and I would probably suggest that he hasn’t seen it yet.”
Su entered Wednesday’s keynote presentation wearing what appeared to be some sort of black leather jacket-type thing. It’s possible that Huang, a known proponent of super-cool leather jackets, felt a bit threatened.
The world of high-stakes PC graphics has never been this spicy.