NVIDIA’s GRID Game Streaming Service Rolls Out 1080p60 Support

Word comes from NVIDIA this afternoon that they are rolling out a beta update to their GRID game streaming service. Starting today, the service is adding 1080p60 streaming to its existing 720p60 streaming option, with the option initially going out to members of the SHIELD HUB beta group.

Today’s announcement from NVIDIA comes as the company is ramping up for the launch of the SHIELD Android TV and its accompanying commercial GRID service. The new SHIELD console is scheduled to ship this month, meanwhile the commercialization of the GRID service is expected to take place in June, with the current free GRID service for existing SHIELD portable/tablet users listed as running through June 30^th. Given NVIDIA’s ambitions to begin charging for the service, it was only a matter of time until the company began offering the service, especially as the SHIELD Android TV will be hooked up to much larger screens where the limits of 720p would be more easily noticed.

In any case, from a technical perspective NVIDIA has long had the tools necessary to support 1080p streaming – NVIDIA’s video cards already support 1080p60 streaming to SHIELD devices via GameStream – so the big news here is that NVIDIA has finally flipped the switch with their servers and clients. Though given the fact that 1080p is 2.25x as many pixels as 720p, I’m curious whether part of this process has involved NVIDIA adding some faster GRID K520 cards (GK104) to their server clusters, as the lower-end GRID K340 cards (GK107) don’t offer quite the throughput or VRAM one traditionally needs for 1080p at 60fps.

But the truly difficult part of this rollout is on the bandwidth side. With SHIELD 720p streaming already requiring 5-10Mbps of bandwidth and NVIDIA opting for quality over efficiency on the 1080p service, the client bandwidth requirements for the 1080p service are enormous. 1080p GRID will require a 30Mbps connection, with NVIDIA recommending users have a 50Mbps connection to keep from any other network devices compromising the game stream. To put this in perspective, no video streaming service hits 30Mbps, and in fact Blu-Ray itself tops out at 48Mbps for audio + video. NVIDIA in turn needs to run at a fairly high bitrate to make up for the fact that they have to all of this encoding in real-time with low latency (as opposed to highly optimized offline encoding), hence the significant bandwidth requirement. Meanwhile 50Mbps+ service in North America is still fairly rare – these requirements all but limit it to cable and fiber customers – so at least for now only a limited number of people will have the means to take advantage of the higher resolution.

As for the games that support 1080p streaming, most, but not all GRID games support it at this time. NVIDIA’s announcement says that 35 games support 1080p, with this being out of a library of more than 50 games. Meanwhile I’m curious just what kind of graphics settings NVIDIA is using for some of these games. With NVIDIA’s top GRID card being the equivalent of an underclocked GTX 680, older games shouldn’t be an issue, but more cutting edge games almost certainly require tradeoffs to maintain framerates near 60fps. So I don’t imagine NVIDIA is able to run every last game with all of their settings turned up to maximum.

Finally, NVIDIA’s press release also notes that the company has brought additional datacenters online, again presumably in anticipation of the commercial service launch. A Southwest US datacenter is now available, and a datacenter in Central Europe is said to be available later this month. This brings NVIDIA’s total datacenter count up to six: USA Northwest, USA Southwest, USA East Coast, Northern Europe, Central Europe, and Asia Pacific.

NVIDIA Announces FY 2016 Q1 Financial Results

Today NVIDIA released their earnings for quarter one of their 2016 fiscal year (and no, that’s not a typo, NVIDIA is almost a full calendar year ahead with their fiscal year) and revenue was up for the quarter 4% over the same period last year, coming in at $1.151 billion. NVIDIA had a record quarter for gross margin, with 56.7% this quarter. However net income was down 2% to $134 million. Compared to Q4 2015, revenue was down 8% and net income was down 31% due to the seasonal nature of the GPU market. Earnings per share came in at $0.24, which is flat year-over-year.

One of the things that will be impacting their financials for fiscal year 2016 is the winding down of the Icera modem operations. The company is open to sales, but regardless it is expecting restructuring charges of $100 to $125 million. It will re-invest the money it had been using for modems and put it into deep learning, self-driving cars, and gaming, which are all areas where NVIDIA has seen some success at (I’ve heard they are known for gaming even).

NVIDIA has also announced Non-GAAP results which exclude stock-based compensation, acquisition costs, interest, and taxes on these items. On a Non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 56.9%, and net income was $187 million, which is up 13% year-over-year. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33.

Breaking the results down into the individual segments, the GPU unit accounts for the bulk of the revenue for the company. GPU revenues were up 5% year-over-year, coming in at $940 million for Q1. They attribute this to revenue from GeForce gaming desktops and notebooks growing 14% with strength in their Maxwell GPUs being one of the keys. Notebooks have also been a source of strength, and although they did not release numbers, notebook GPU sales were “well above year-ago levels”. Tesla GPUs also increase due to project wins with cloud service providers, but the Quadro line of professional graphics declined.

Tegra, once the tablet and possible smartphone SoC, has found its niche is the automotive infotainment field, but it is also the SoC inside SHIELD devices sold by NVIDIA. Revenue for Tegra was up 4% year-over-year, and up 29% as compared to Q4 2015, which was attributed to automotive systems and development services.

The final piece of NVIDIA’s pie is their licensing agreement with Intel, which is the standard $66 million per quarter.

For Q2, projections are revenue of $1.01 billion, plus or minus two percent, and gross margins of 55.7% plus or minus 0.5%.

It was another good quarter for NVIDIA, and during the quarter they launched the TITAN X GPU, as well as the NVIDIA SHIELD set top box. Yesterday, AMD announced that they will have a new GPU coming out this quarter, so it will be awesome to see how that plays out in the never ending GPU battle.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations

AMD Announces OEM Desktop Radeon 300 Series

Along with today’s announcement of the OEM mobile Radeon M300 series, AMD has also announced the OEM desktop Radeon 300 Series. This was a rather low-key launch with only a very brief press release on the matter along with AMD updating the OEM Radeon website, and as one might expect this is for good reason.

We’ve been through this event once before – most recently with the OEM HD 8000 series – so our regular readers will know the drill. Whether or not GPU manufacturers have new GPUs, OEMs will want new parts to sell, which leads to GPU manufacturers engaging in rebranding and subtle spec changes to create new parts to sell under a new series name. In AMD’s case this is complicated by the fact that they have been updating their GPUs in a piecemeal fashion – Hawaii, Bonaire, and Tonga have all landed at very different times – and AMD is not done yet as they’re going to be launching a new high-end GPU this quarter. So AMD needs a product lineup to include both the new part and their retained parts under a single brand, which leads to another incentive for rebadging.

In any case, as these are OEM parts I advise not reading into the names and specifications too much. AMD’s OEM and Retail parts can be very different at times – and at other times there aren’t any retail parts at all (HD 8000) – so these OEM parts aren’t necessarily indicative of what we’re going to see in retail in the coming months. Though based on AMD’s actions with the Radeon 200 series, we may yet see a similar rebadge happen for the retail 300 series.

Starting things off, we have the OEM R9 series. Today’s release tops out at R9 380 OEM (I can only imagine AMD is saving 390 for their new GPU), along with the R9 370 OEM and R9 360 OEM. The R9 380 OEM appears to be a variant of the desktop R9 285, which marks the first time that a Tonga card has been released in an OEM configuration. The quoted clockspeeds are identical to the retail R9 285, which means the “up to” GPU clockspeed should result in the R9 380 OEM being perfectly identical to the R9 285 if given its maximum configuration.

Meanwhile for the R9 370 OEM we have a cut-down Pitcairn card, with only 1024 of its 1280 SPs active. This makes it a variant of the retail R7 265, though with a slightly higher maximum GPU clockspeed. Truth be told I’m a bit worried to see a fresh Pitcairn part in 2015; Pitcairn has been a workhorse for AMD, having now survived into its 4th generation of cards. However at over 3 years old and based on GCN 1.0, it lacks more modern functionality such as the ability to decode 4K H.264 video files, AMD’s improved power management technology, and support for AMD’s Freesync technology.

Finally we have the R9 360 OEM. This appears to be a variant of the R9 260 OEM, featuring an AMD Bonaire GPU with only 768 of its 896 SPs enabled. Oddly, the listed memory bandwidth for the part, 104GB/sec, would require 6.5GHz GDDR5 memory given Bonaire’s 128-bit bus. I suspect that may be an error on AMD’s part, though it’s not outside the realm of possibility. In any case the R9 360 OEM also appears to be a regression from the R9 260 OEM; the latter was a fully enabled Bonaire part, whereas this one is not. At the very least it’s GCN 1.1 based, so it will have the newer features that the Pitcairn based R9 370 OEM lacks.

Up next is the R7 300 OEM series, which is composed of the R7 350 OEM and R7 340 OEM. Both of these cards are straight-up rebadges of AMD’s existing R7 250 OEM and R7 240 OEM parts, and both are based on the same GCN 1.0 Oland GPU. With just 384 SPs these are low cost, low performing parts. The difference between the two is their clockspeeds, with R7 350 being clocked quite a bit higher, whereas R7 340 is clocked lower in exchange for being available as a low-profile card. Unfortunately the memory situation is quite complex here, as these cards can be equipped with either GDDR5 or DDR3; the GDDR5 versions will of course be the much faster versions.

Among its other quirks, Oland lacks a hardware video decoder. So these parts are likely to be paired with low-end AMD Kaveri APUs, possibly for a Dual Graphics configuration.

Finally, for the R5 300 OEM series we have two more Oland parts. These are ultra low end, low-profile single slot parts. AMD does not even publish the GPU bandwidth numbers for these parts, and as a result I suspect these may be 64-bit parts to further cut down on costs. Of particular note, the R5 330 lacks HDMI support, so it’s almost certainly geared towards APAC markets where VGA is still in common use.

Wrapping things up, AMD’s press release mentions that these new OEM parts are shipping now. HP is already confirmed to be shipping PCs with these new cards, and we expect other OEMs to ramp up as well as they launch their back-to-school season computers.