Thriving To Build Gaming Community In India – Vishal Dhupar, NVIDIA

NVIDIA‘s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionised parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.  

The tech giant’s breakthrough in graphics has improved gaming performance. In a recent conversation with BW Businessworld, Vishal Dhupar - Managing Director Asia South, NVIDIA, speaks on NVIDIA’s gaming device range, new enhancements, India as a market, and more. Excerpts:

Tell us about NVIDIA’s gaming device range, new enhancements and lineup, and the planned technology for customers in India this year and after?

Our breakthrough in graphics for gaming includes real-time ray tracing for the ultimate realism and AI-based DLSS that marvelously improves the gaming performance. Real-time ray tracing allows scenes to be rendered with photographic levels of fidelity, creating physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions, and global illumination, giving the most realistic gaming experience. DLSS on the other hand is another powerful technology that uses special AI processes to give HD performance without sacrificing the image quality. We also released NVIDIA Reflex, designed for gamers to implement a low latency mode to get the best possible in-time response. 

Another striking range is the GeForce Experience which enables users to update drivers, optimize games, and share victories. We recently launched our 3080 Ti RTX GPUs which is a powerful flagship using the Ampere architecture. NVIDIA Ampere has taken RTX to new heights for professional workloads and has marked an important inflection point for NVIDIA. It speeds up the rendering of ray-traced motion blur for faster results with greater visual accuracy. The RTX GPUs built on the ampere architecture can accelerate graphics, rendering, compute and AI significantly faster than previous generations and has emerged as a game changer in the market.

NVIDIA has redefined computer graphics with GeForce. Also, the laptop business has become one of the fastest-growing businesses in the company. Which of your product is ruling the charts in India? Since the Indian market is known to be a price-sensitive market, how do you cater to this userbase keeping in check the quality? 

India as a country has a large base of both developers and students. There are a lot of students pursuing STEM education including engineering, which is a large student base. The market for laptop has always been there in India but the current pandemic has led the students to opt laptop as a medium to study and access the course content. Similarly, the demand for laptops with powerful GPUs like GeForce has taken a leap in the developer community owing to the work-from-home scenario. We have fairly a large share in the overall laptop market in the country which is powered by GeForce GPUs. 

In addition, the introduction to Ampere 30-series GPUs have created a remarkable increase in the demand for laptops in India. Talking about price sensitivity, we believe India is a value-conscious market and when they actually start seeing value, they have their options open irrespective of the price. Hence, we make sure to deliver the right product value for the customers while working with our notebook OEM partners. 

How do you see the gaming opportunity especially in a country like India, which has got a sudden boom during the pandemic in its already rising growth story? 

Gaming has in fact been growing rapidly in India for the past five years, not only in the recent past. This growth has been both in leisure gaming and e-sports, the former offering interactive digital recreation and the latter a new professional avenue to earn a living. In addition, the growth of gaming has also been driven by the widespread availability of broadband at a reasonable cost, a young demographic who are digital natives, exposure to global gameplay through channels such as YouTube & Twitch, changing societal norms and perceptions and access to physical experience points such as cafes. The pandemic has only accelerated this trend, especially with the widespread adoption of powerful notebooks in our work from home era, which allow even more Indians to both works and enjoy PC gaming.

Tell us about the investment trend taking place in the Indian gaming industry from NVIDIA’s point of view. 

As a technology provider, our main focus is towards creating the availability of gaming system builders and GPUs for the gaming segment. In terms of investment, we have seen an uptick in e-sports, tournaments and arenas as rising trends and some organizations who have gone public, as a new space for investments. 

What are the technological trends in gaming this year which NVIDIA may have missed?  

Technology trends have continued to move the gaming world forward. As technology constantly evolves, online gaming experiences continue to improve. This technological environment is constantly growing, which brings forth numerous transformations that not only need to be adopted but adapted to as well.

• Ray Tracing is one of the most growing trends amongst the developers for next-generation gaming, where the technology is currently supported by console platforms as well

• Technologies like DLSS combined with Reflex allows a high frame rate for gaming which translates into rich gaming experience

NVIDIA’s plans for the Indian market.

NVIDIA’s prime focus is to continue to strive to make it as convenient as possible for gamers across the country to buy our GPUs and access our technology at all point of sales and in every possible way. We are always thriving towards building the gaming community in India, where the gamers are able to access influencers, experts and peers, while sharing their gaming experience for leisure and for esports. We aspire to be one of the biggest gaming communities in the world and through our partner ecosystem as well as our own initiatives like the GeForce experience, we aim to provide not only the best PC gaming experience but indeed the best gaming experience possible across all genres of games for our Indian gaming community.

The developer community is another focus area for us for which we have our GeForce laptop for developers program. They are using GPUs for gaming, visualization, and for AI, ML, and Data Science for computing. Our notebook market has a dual-use for their laptops, they are workers by day and gaming warriors by night. Having a good quality GPU will help them strike a balance between their professional work and leisure gaming activities and that’s where NVIDIA RTX studio products come in.

We have approximately 400 million monthly active users when it comes to YouTubers. As the creator market expands, through our studio programs and new app launches like Canvas we are creating a beyond gaming experience. We are enabling all the requirements the Indian market demands, whether it’s pure-play gaming, developers who require GeForce acceleration or students who have dual usage.