How NVIDIA’s position on the graphics card market will be affected by AMD’s purchase of ATI remains to be seen and we will most likely hear more about this from NVIDIA. At MercuryNews they’ve published an interview with NVIDIA’s VP Jen-Hsun Huang where he shares his thoughts on a number of interesting issues. The interview was made before AMD and ATI’s announcement so this is unfortunately not a part of the interview, but they do discuss everything from NVIDIA’s first programmable graphics circuits, which was large and very risky operation by NVIDIA, to how NVIDIA looks at its particiation in Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game console, for which it developed the graphics circuit. We also find out, from a person who should know, that we will not see movie-quality 3D graphics in games for another decade.
“We are a good solid 10 years away from photorealism. In the next several years, we will still just be learning to do the basics of film, like motion blur, depth of field — all of that stuff alone chews up a lot of graphics processing. We’re pretty excited about moving to high-dynamic range where the color system has the fidelity of what we see in real life. The images don’t seem realistic yet. Articulating a human form and human animation, the subtlties of humans and nature, are still quite a ways away for us.”
