China's gaming demand is picking up quickly: NVIDIA
The Chinese market is on a fast track to recovery with many opportunities, from gaming, Internet cafés to creation sectors, the US-based chip giant NVIDIA said in Shanghai on Friday.
NVIDIA has a large family of products covering graphic computing and artificial intelligence, while its consumer-oriented products are popular in China.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic market demand is picking up quickly, with warm response to GeForce RTX 40 gaming GPUs (graphics processing unit). The spotlight is on the new "sweet spot" RTX 4060 GPUs, featuring ray-tracing, an affordable price and high power efficiency, Liu Nan, senior director of NVIDIA China Consumer Market, said in Shanghai.
US tech firms, including Apple, Intel, Microsoft and NVIDIA, are showing interest and confidence in the Chinese market, despite the tech sanctions from the United States. For example, Intel announced in July it would produce a tailored AI chip specifically for the Chinese market.
People play new games at the Bilibili World 2023 exhibition in Shanghai on Friday.
Several highly anticipated games hit the domestic market this year including NARAKA and VALORANT, operated by giants Tencent and NetEase, after Chinese regulators sped up game approval processes.
VALORANT, a popular 5 vs 5 first-person shooter (FPS) game, officially debuted domestically on July 12, and is operated by Tencent locally. Tencent plans to invest 1 billion yuan (US$139 million) over three years to boost a "VALORANT gaming ecosystem," the company said recently in Shanghai.
The new games require complicated and advanced graphic support, which pushes users to upgrade computing gears, especially GPUs. NVIDIA is expanding its footage in the gaming industry as its DLSS (deep learning usper sampling) ecosystem now supports more than 300 games globally.
Studio VFSXboys members demonstrate a new 3D-created work Flower in Shanghai.
Meanwhile, Internet cafés nationwide are upgrading gears to woo gamers back with new GPUs and new eSports games.
According to industry figures, more than 3 million GPUs in China's Internet cafés require upgrading in the future, or 750,000 annually from 2023.
Chain Internet café operators like GreenTree of Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, and TaLang of Jiangsu Province have ordered over 4,000 RTX 4060 GPUs since their domestic debut in June. After the RTX 4060 release, its first-week sales in the Chinese net café market reached a record high in the recent four years, showing strong market recovery and surging demand, NVIDIA said.
Besides relatively lower prices, the 60-Series GPUs cuts power costs for net café owners. For example, it can save about 10,000 yuan annually for a net café operating 100 computers, compared with using previous-generation GPUs.
For Shanghai-based chain Internet café operator Wanyoo, all new outlets are required to adopt advanced RTX 4060 GPUs, or above.
The booming generative AI wave also fuels the demand of advanced GPUs, which help designers and streamers process pictures and videos, create 3D models and avatars, and render them easily and fast.
NVIDIA's tools and software have accelerated for designing tools Stable Diffusion, NVIDIA Canvas and Douyin's Jianying, known as CapCut overseas.
Studio VFSXboys, which has 3.6 million followers in Bilibili, demonstated a 3D-created work Flower. It took only five days with four NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPUs with AI accelerated content generation, compared with a one month workflow on previous GPUs.
"The process of AI generating and video rendering is much faster, cutting the time by at least half ," a VFSXboys member nicknamed "008" told Shanghai Daily.
