NVidia Interview

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We try to be our own most important competitor. Our goal is to obsolete our products before someone else does. In the process of doing that we will deliver truly state of the art products for our customers. We've set the goal of delivering an entirely new generation of graphics capability and performance every 12 months. We have no fewer than 3 separate development teams operating concurrently to obsolete each other. Imagine 3 internal competitors that know exactly what each other are doing! That's the toughest competition anywhere!

Every developing marketplace needs some way of measuring the goodness of a product. 3D Winbench is a good start at a metric for measuring goodness of 3D cards and systems. Is it perfect? No. Is it important that the industry support such a metric? Yes. Otherwise, it's very hard to get a quick understanding of a product. But it's just that - a *quick* understanding, not a *complete* understanding. You wouldn't buy an automobile based on the horsepower of the engine. Yet knowing the horsepower of the engine does give you a quick understanding of the auto. And that's the value of 3D Winbench.

Yes! But that's the wrong question. What you should have asked is whether we have optimized our drivers to exaggerate our performance on 3D Winbench98 relative to Riva 128 performance on real 3D applications. The answer to that is an absolute *NO*. We have certainly used 3D Winbench as one of the tools for improving our drivers. 3D Winbench does things with D3D that no existing applications mimic. Any company that has not extensively studied 3D Winbench is arrogant and has likely produced a set of D3D drivers that are far less robust than they should be. Similarly, any company that has high 3D Winbench scores with disproportionately less performance on real applications should be viewed with _great_ suspicion. NVIDIA is extremely self-conscious about Riva 128 performance and quality on real applications and has made a huge investment in testing and quality assurance. Looking great on benchmarks while looking slow on real apps is a slimy way to build a business. We won't do it.

For 3D applications, I'd also like to understand the performance on a mix of real world applications that seem similar to what I will use. I'd also want to know how state of the art my card was because that would give me some idea of how long it would be before I would have to replace it. So I'd try to understand the basic technology beyond 3D processor speed: AGP, amount of memory, graphics memory bus width, and support for high resolutions. I'd also want to know it's 2D performance and whether the technology was coming from a reputable company that would service their products. I'd also want to know the price and what software came bundled with the card.

Great 2D and 3D performance in a single card. Extraordinary performance upside due to the 128-bit bus. Riva 128 based cards will run new high resolution titles well at 800x600 and beyond. Plus, the true power of the Riva 128 is just beginning to be tapped. Our next software release will *dramatically* improve performance on both D3D and OGL. Riva 128 based cards scale in performance well up to 400 MHz on P2 systems. Throw in a world class OpenGL implementation (full ICD!) and then be amazed at how little it all costs.