Nvidia shares jump after CEO shows new processors for video games
- Nvidia erased most of Friday's losses after introducing new graphics cards for video games.
- Gaming is Nvidia's biggest business.
Nvidia shares rose Monday after CEO Jensen Huang revealed new graphics cards that will be used for more sophisticated video games, potentially boosting the company's biggest business.
Huang said during a presentation at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, that the new graphics processing units (GPUs) have been "10 years in the making." Gaming brings in the majority of Nvidia's revenue, although the company also sells products for data centers, cars and visualizing projects like buildings.
Investor enthusiasm about the announcement lifted Nvidia shares more than 3 percent, making up for most of the losses on Friday after the company's disappointing revenue forecast. Huang said the new cards will deliver considerable performance gains over the company's Pascal generation of GPUs, which came out in 2016.
Nvidia's new GPU, the GeForce RTX 2070, starts at $499, and the more powerful GeForce RTX 2080 Ti starts at $999. Preorders are available now, and the products will open to the public on Sept. 20, Huang said.
The launch comes a week after Nvidia introduced Turing, its eighth-generation chip design for GPUs. Turing follows the release last year of Volta, whose data center products face competition from Google's cloud business. Nvidia said the first Turing-based GPUs for visualization will be available in the fourth quarter.
Intel has begun work on GPUs that will rival Nvidia's, but they're not expected until 2020. Nvidia shares have jumped nearly 30 percent this year, while Intel's stock is up less than 1 percent.