The Future of Gaming is Android, Says Nvidia
Android is the most versatile operating system the company has known.
Given Nvidia's involvement with Valve's Steam Machines initiative, it's a little weird to hear the GeForce GPU company call Android the future of gaming. Then again, both Android and SteamOS are based on Linux, so maybe the prediction isn't quite so farfetched. The company also ignored the Windows platform with the recently-released Shield handheld console, which uses Android "Jelly Bean" even though it can stream PC games from a Windows-based, Kepler-based computer.
According to co-founder, president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Android is the most disruptive operating system that the company has seen in several decades. "We have some for WinRT or Surface but our focus is that going forward the vast majority of Windows on ARM will be Surface and the vast majority of everything else in Tegra is Android," he said. "Android is not just about phones."
He made the comments during a conference call with analysts following the announcement of Nvidia's third quarter financial results. He pointed out that Android resides in a number of platforms including phones, tablets, set-top boxes, games consoles, and some all-in-one PCs. He also noted that Android powers Shield.
"We believe that Android is going to be a very important platform for gaming in the future, and to do so we have to create devices that enable great gaming to happen on Android," he said. "Android is probably the most versatile operating system that we've ever known, and has the benefit of also being connected to the cloud. And so the day that you turn it on, it's incredibly useful, with all kinds of applications already on it."
In related news, Huang also said in the third quarter fiscal 2014 announcement that visual computing is increasingly important to more and more markets, that it's creating demand for GPUs and opening up large opportunities.
"The proof can be seen in the proliferation of Tegra into new verticals like automotive and set-top boxes, in our all-time high Quadro and Tesla revenues, and in the record number of customer trials for our GRID datacenter initiative," he said. "At a time when many are struggling with the decline in the mainstream PC market, our visual computing leadership has positioned us well to grow with the accelerating adoption of GPUs in the cloud and the world of connected devices."
Just recently, Nvidia and Amazon revealed G2 instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance designed for applications that require 3D graphics capabilities. The new instance is powered by Nvidia's GRID GPU with 1,536 parallel processing cores, allowing customers to build DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA and OpenCL applications and services without having to make expensive up-front capital investments.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
-
damianrobertjones "Android is the most versatile operating system the company has known."Reply
Didn't nVidia say nice things about Apple back in the day? it looks like nVidia is the whore that'll say nice things AS LONG as they're getting paid. -
rad666 This is just nVidia saying whatever they need to to make sales since they lost out on the console hardware to AMD.Reply -
jojesa I hope this time around nVidia follows up since Android devices might be available to the masses compared to Apple products.Reply -
stevejnb Reply12074071 said:The future of mindless time waste games will be on Android yes. However in depth plot and story driven games will find home elsewhere.
I think you've got it backwards. It's precisely the "in depth plot and story driven" games which in no way need PCs, fancy hardware, consoles, complex control schemes, intensive graphics, whatever. They can have extremely modest hardware overheads, simple graphics, and be awesome because they rely on good writing rather than fancy hardware to excel. These are precisely the types of games that could do great on Android with the mindless time waste twitch shooters being the ones that will have to remain on PCs and consoles.
Case in point - To the Moon. Or heck, any old RPG that people still rant and rave about today which was in no way made by fancy hardware. Plot and story driven games can and will do great on Android when devs decide to make them. -
scannall Sounds like sour grapes to me. Android in its current form is just too clunky to be good for gaming.Reply -
clonazepam Mobile has proven to be the money maker. You can make a ton of cash with a smaller team, and in a shorter period of time. Mobile games will usher in the era of quantity over quality like we've never seen before. Money talks. From the business perspective, I don't blame them, but damn it, I'm not happy. I also realize I'm a very small minority, so again, I can't really blame them, can I? What am I doing? Am I getting involved in games development and trying to make a difference, or am I just a consumer of whatever is shoveled out, and seems acceptable?Reply -
ZolaIII Android games are Linux games with basically added (rewritten) starting part in Java. Java is really something that needs to go in retirement. Google wanted to have quick apps ecosystem & developer's support so they went with Java. They also wanted cross architectural easy portability so they went with JIT. All of this is now about to brake back of they head! & they are aware of it. ART is AOT compiler bat after almost, two years of development & fortune that development must have been costing them is still simply is not working. On the other hand once compiled app will work much faster then when it's compiled Just in time (way back of time). Next thing is that apps are natively (most part) written in Java & that C++ for instance is much more faster. Next problem is that really good (best) optimized compiler will take long time to optimal compile app on mobile soc.Reply
Now what's wrong with precompiled packages that you can easily instal like in Ubuntu? Well not every moron cud make his on app that is totally useless & full of adds & every app should have to be compiled for every architecture. Bat now we have much more new developer's that know how to do it thanks to Googles pore job with providing up to date Linux kernel with desirable futures we have lot of new developers that practiced with compiling.
What's wrong with having easy installable OS (in use by user) independent games that are based on stripped down Linux (only really needed things)? NV is right about one thing future of personal computing is based on small (phablet like) hi mobile devices that can be connected to anything & there for & future of gaming (no matter what OS). -
coolitic What I think he means is, android/linux will begin eating up anything lower than enthusiast and some mainstream computers and replace them with portable versions.Reply