2021 has been a busy year for Nvidia, a year that has brought its share of success and excitement; but it was also a difficult time for the company in many ways.
In this article, we'll take a look at Team Green's big wins this year, like the RTX 3080 Ti, and progress with GeForce Now, to name a few, as well as the trickiest aspects of 2021, like GPU stock levels. and the notable lingering absence of low-end Ampere graphics cards.
Maintain office dominance
It will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that Nvidia was the dominant force in the world of discrete GPUs during 2021. According to figures from analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, Team Green had a market share of around 80%, sometimes a bit more. , sometimes a little less, throughout the year (AMD has the rest).
So the status quo was very well maintained in this regard, although Intel remained easily dominant with laptop GPUs (thanks to integrated graphics in most laptops not having discrete graphics of course) . Team Blue could shake up the apple basket next year with their Arc Alchemist GPUs which should seriously challenge Nvidia, especially in the budget market, but we're making progress.
Nvidia has maintained its strong lead in desktop graphics cards this year thanks to the quality and powerful performance provided by Ampere, both in its existing lineup of GPUs released in 2020, and in a particular new model that appeared in 2021.
In all, Team Green released three new Ampere offerings this year, namely the RTX 3060 that was introduced as a lower-end option at CES in January, and the upgraded RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti that followed in May.
This RTX 3060 was certainly a welcome new option on the more affordable(ish) end of the spectrum, but it represented a slightly shaky value proposition, especially when considering stockouts and price inflation, something we'll come back to later on. this article. . And as we pointed out in our RTX 3060 review, its 3060 Ti sibling (released in late 2020) actually made more sense for not much more money (and it still does: for any extra expense, you get a good shot at extra performance).
Likewise, the RTX 3070 Ti didn't do very well in terms of value, in fact possibly even more so than the RTX 3060. In our review, we said that it doesn't provide enough extra oomph compared to the Vanilla RTX 3070, and that the RTX 3080 offered a lot more oomph for not a lot more money (in terms of MSRP, that is).
So while there was some disappointment with Ampere's new desktop releases, the jewel in the crown turned out to be the RTX 3080 Ti. Basically, it was just as capable as the mighty RTX 3090 in gaming, but not as expensive (but, of course, very expensive). It was the big winner of Nvidia's desktop GPUs in 2021, of course, although that being said, if I was looking for a good graphics card, I probably would have bought one of the high-end products at a (relatively) decent price if possible. get them (again, as mentioned, we'll come back to these stock and availability issues).
Ampere comes to gaming laptops
2021 also saw the launch of the RTX 3000 GPUs for gaming laptops, with the RTX 3080, RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 mobile versions (with Max-Q variants) appearing earlier this year in January, followed by the RTX 3050. You. and 3050 in May.
Overall, the mobile-first GPU clutch has been seen as a laudable performance upgrade over last-gen Turing laptop graphics cards, very well done. The complication with these new offerings was the variety of different power settings within the same GPU models, meaning the same graphics card offered different levels of performance based on thermals, cooling, etc. from the laptop. In fact, a well-cooled laptop could offer better performance than a poorly-cooled computer, where the latter has an RTX 3000 GPU, which is a higher level.
The RTX 3050 siguió la línea y fue visto como un golpe decente para una portable GPU asequible. More than the 3050 Ti which didn't seem to offer much more in terms of overall performance - and most importantly, falling behind the RTX 3060 mobile (meaning it was better to push the budget a bit further to get the 3060 if possible).
Overall, Nvidia has made solid progress with mobile GPUs to dramatically beef up gaming laptops, though some models aren't as convincing.
DLSS continues its momentum
DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is Nvidia's nifty technology that uses scaling (and AI) to reduce the demands on your GPU, essentially increasing frame rates with little impact on visual quality (in the broad sense).
Team Green has come a long way with DLSS in 2021, leading to many more games and some big name titles. These included Battlefield 2042, Call of Duty: Warzone, Rainbow Six Siege, Doom Eternal, Red Dead Redemption 2, Back 4 Blood, Outriders, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Diablo 2 Resurrected, Horizon Zero Dawn, and more (Baldur's Gate 3 has DLSS in early access too).
In total, by the end of 2021, Nvidia has over 140 games (and apps) that now support DLSS (remember, the developer must be in the game for it to support). Nvidia has also taken other steps to drive DLSS adoption by implementing a plugin for Unreal Engine and Unity Engine so that developers can easily incorporate the technology when working with these game engines.
Also, DLSS support for Vulkan and then DX11 plus DX12 games has made its way to Proton, which is Valve's compatibility layer that allows Windows games to play on Linux (and will be the driving force behind the Steam Deck). This represents a potentially significant performance improvement for DLSS games that might experience slight headwinds due to running through such a compatibility layer.
On top of all that, we've seen DLSS speed up early VR games, and it's also made its way to ARM-based laptops (with ray tracing). So there were a number of releases throughout the year, along with a huge increase in the number of games supported and the ongoing refinement of the AI-powered DLSS itself (which is now at version 2.3).
What's also highly notable is that back in September, Nvidia revealed a new AI-powered GPU twist in the form of DLAA, which is Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing. It basically does the same thing as DLSS to provide an inflated form of anti-aliasing (smoothing out jaggies in graphics). So far DLAA has only been used in testing with the Elder Scrolls Online MMO, but we can expect to learn a lot more about this technology in the coming year if it proves to be an effective way to fix the issues. general appearance of games with minimal impact on performance.
Not so blank canvas
Nvidia released Canvas to the world in June, a free (beta) app that uses an RTX graphics card in a really clever way for creatives. You just draw and scribble rough shapes on the left side of the screen using different material brushes (such as 'stone' or 'river'), and on the right side the app fills in the 'AI generated' images. The bottom line is that it's easy to create photorealistic images quickly, and if you haven't seen it in action, it's one of the best things Nvidia has done in 2021 away from gaming.
Another exciting development for creatives came earlier this year in April when GeForce Experience software received the ability to quickly and easily optimize settings for various creative applications, including Adobe Lightroom and Illustrator. (This is more or less along the same lines as the optimal settings Nvidia provides for the various games it supports.)
The ARM deal is locked
Last year Nvidia bought ARM for €40bn in a massive deal (literally and figuratively), but in 2021 that huge acquisition stalled. Several regulators have launched competition investigations (such as the UK and EU Competition and Markets Authority supervisory authority), and rivals of tech giants (such as Microsoft, Google and Qualcomm) have expressed widespread concerns that a takeover from Nvidia could mean that it could become much more difficult to use ARM's intellectual property.
More recently, in December, in the United States, the FTC took legal action to block the case due to its "anti-competitive" nature, with Competition Bureau Director Holly Vedova saying: "This proposed settlement would distort the incentives of ARM in the chip markets and allowing the combined company to unfairly undercut Nvidia's competitors.
It's the latest frustration to hit Nvidia with this acquisition, and arguably the biggest hurdle to date: all eyes are on how this case plays out. Team Green insisted from the start that they will "uphold ARM's licensing model and customer neutrality," which is "critical to ARM's success."
The Flow of Dreams from GeForce Now
Nvidia's streaming service had a head start this year, ending 2021 with a total of over 1,100 games available and offering a new flagship subscription with huge benefits.
To put that into perspective, this library of over 1,100 titles is up from the 500 games that were around when GeForce Now officially launched and came out of beta. You may recall that several of the big publishers also left the scene after the beta, and there are signs that some big names could reappear. For example, in October we saw a handful of EA games release for GeForce Now, so other products could follow (previously, only Apex Legends was available to stream).
It was also a great year for expanding coverage in terms of device support, as Nvidia introduced GeForce Now to LG smart TVs and Google's Chrome web browser, as well as support for the Mac M1. Other improvements have been made to the macOS app in...