Review Central spoke to Xochilt M. Balzola-Widman of NVIDIA, about the gaming market in the Middle East and Africa region, the future of PC gaming and th way the company is changing mobile gaming industry
Xochilt M. Balzola-Widman of NVIDIA.
Please tell us about NVIDIA’s strategies for the Middle East and Africa region?
MEA is a hugely exciting region for NVIDIA as we’re seeing massive growth across every country and strong communities forming. Those communities are key for us and our priority is to actively engage and help strengthen the gaming community.
There are huge titles coming out at the end of this year such as Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Far Cry 4 from Ubisoft and the stunning Witcher 3 from CD Projekt Red / Bandai Namco and we want to make sure everyone knows these games play best on NVIDIA.
We are working closely with our key resellers to help educate users on the best NVIDIA technology, especially GeForce Experience, which makes getting the best from your PC Games and sharing that worldwide easy and fun, for the first time, a PC is as friendly as your games console.
How important are the new appointments at NVIDIA for its overall regional strategy?
These appointments show we are strengthening in every sector. I come from Amazon where I led Kindle Sales and bring key Consumer leadership to NVIDIA at a time where products such as our SHIELD family have won amazing accolades around the world and are now making their way into the hands of our gamers.
Jaap Zuiderveld is a proven leader at the highest level and brings invaluable Enterprise experience to help our Quadro and Tesla families.
What sort of product roadmap can we look at for the next 4-5 months from NVIDIA?
We don’t publically disclose our product roadmap but we’ve had a hugely exciting past quarter. The NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet launched with our Tegra K1 processor and now the latest Nexus 9 by Google is also powered by Tegra K1.
The GeForce GTX 980 and 970 were launched last month and instantly revolutionized the GPU market, there has never been such an efficient, powerful chip for gaming. As ever, there are lots of exciting products just around the corner.
How big is the gaming market in the Middle East and Africa region?
MEA is home to lots of extremely passionate gamers, just as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as anywhere else in the world, as a result we have seen the gaming market continuing to grow year on year and we do not see this growth slowly down any time soon. In fact, the potential for continued growth is just huge.
Do you think gaming consoles and mobile products are eating into the traditional PC-based gaming market?
Not at all, we are simply seeing more and more people become gamers. There are lots of console gamers, in fact Xbox Live has 40m active users but what we’ve seen is many people who grew up with a Xbox 360 are now demanding what only a PC can give them – huge resolutions perfect for the new breed of 4K TVs while still delivering silky smooth gameplay.
These users are in addition to those that are growing up with the PC as their main platform thanks to games such as Minecraft and video services like YouTube and Twitch.
What this all means is that the PC gaming market is bigger than ever, Steam now has over 70 million active users and is by far the largest gaming service available. The PC is in great health and the appetite for gaming hardware like GeForce GTX GPUs continues apace.
What sort of demand have you seen for NVIDIA’s Shield range of products?
This is probably one of the most commonly asked questions we get and that’s no surprise. SHIELD has been receiving amazing reviews from the media since we launched in the US and some European countries in the summer.
It has been named ‘the best gaming tablet’ and allows you to not only enjoy Android games the way they were meant to be played but also play your latest PC blockbuster practically anywhere. It is a great honor to be able to bring the SHILED Tablet to MEA and both our resellers and the end users appear to be extremely excited.
Tell us about the Tegra K1 that powers the new Nexus 9. What are the benefits of offering 64-bit computing on mobile devices?
The Tegra K1 is the most powerful mobile chip ever and brings desktop class computing to mobile. This means that developers don’t need to cut down ideas or projects to make them ‘fit’ onto a mobile device, they simply make one version for desktop, notebook, and tablet and put their resources into making the software the very best it can be instead of having technological limitations – in the end, Tegra K1 gives more creative freedom.
64-bit computing brings a number of benefits, one is RAM and with 64-bit you can have much more memory in devices which means faster, smoother operation and more impressive apps. Tegra K1 also uses the latest ARMv8 architecture, compared to ARMv7 (typically found in 32-bit chips), which gives up to 3x the performance at the same power consumption, as you can imagine, this means you get amazing performance with amazing battery life.
