Nvidia experienced a memorable 2024 in some ways, and certainly CEO Jensen Huang won’t forget the year in which his company finally outdid Apple as the most valuable firm in the world.
We also received a clutch of powerful new GeForce GPUs from Team Green, along with a huge move on the software front too, and, inevitably, AI continued to be a massive driving force for Nvidia.
Nvidia’s value exceeded $1 trillion in 2023, but it blew through the roof this year, with its stock heading steeply upwards throughout 2024 – driven, of course, in large part by its AI GPUs.
Indeed, Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company in June 2024, beating out the likes of Apple and Microsoft, exceeding a market cap of $3 trillion. Team Green slipped back a bit as the year went on, but then retook pole position from Apple in November 2024, approaching a $3.5 trillion valuation. Nvidia also barged Intel off the Dow Jones Industrial Average index.
Throughout the year, Jensen was gleefully stoking the AI hype furnace, unsurprisingly. A lot of leather jackets can be bought for the kind of cash Nvidia is now worth, and the swiftness with which this financial rise has occurred has been nothing less than breathtaking.
Is Nvidia going to be the first company to hit the $4 trillion mark? It’s a fair bet if the momentum behind AI keeps on chugging the way it has been – and maybe Nvidia is even set to become a household name eventually (something it most definitely isn’t yet, despite all this success).
The year of the Super graphics cards
Nvidia continued to dominate the desktop GPU market in 2024, to no one’s surprise, to the point of a near-monopoly in fact.
Helping to maintain its momentum here was a trio of new graphics cards for the Lovelace range which Nvidia revealed as the year kicked off. These fresh additions to the best Nvidia GPUs out there were the GeForce RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4080 Super.(And yes, we still can’t get over the fact that Nvidia made a ‘Ti Super’ as a way to jam an extra model into a cluttered mid-to-upper-range space).
These Super GPUs replaced the existing models in all but the case of the RTX 4070, which was kept in production to run alongside the RTX 4070 Super, but at a cheaper price point (obviously).
Overall, the new graphics cards were welcome introductions and powerhouse offerings, but what wasn’t so welcome were the price tags attached to them. In true Nvidia style, these mid-to-higher leaning GPUs were all expensive. Notably, the RTX 4070 Ti Super fell a little short in our review, being rather overshadowed by the RTX 4080 Super, which we declared was the enthusiast GPU we’ve all been waiting for.
Our review of the RTX 4070 Super also represented a big thumbs-up for the GPU, and it proved to be our favorite overall of the new graphics cards (even if its 12GB of VRAM limits the card’s 4K chops – the 4080 Super become the new champ here, of course).
On the issue of priciness, it’s true that some of these new Super variants got price cuts to a limited extent as the year rolled on, but overall, AMD’s mid-range remained the much better value picks compared to Team Green.
Otherwise, we didn’t see much else from Nvidia in the way of GPU releases, save for a fresh spin on the RTX 4070 with slightly slower video RAM. It was effectively the same as the original RTX 4070, though, and a move made by Team Green to ensure supply remained strong, we were told.
There was nothing to be seen elsewhere, and once again, tumbleweeds at the lower-end of the market. The old RTX 3060 remained a strong seller as a result – the 12GB flavor, with that VRAM loadout proving a definite carrot for some gamers – despite chatter from the grapevine around the middle of the year that Nvidia might be discontinuing this model.
Indeed, the RTX 3060 is still the most popular GPU out there going by the Steam hardware survey, with the RTX 4060 making good headway too – that graphics card remains our top pick for 1080p gaming (and it’s solid for 1440p as well).
Despite plenty of rumors suggesting a 2024 launch earlier in the year, we didn’t see the RTX 5000 series turn up this year, with the expectation now being that Nvidia will launch new RTX 5090 and 5080 (and possibly RTX 5070) GPUs at the very start of 2025 at CES.
There was some super new software, too
Broadly speaking, Nvidia GPU owners have had a somewhat rocky relationship with GeForce Experience. A good chunk of gamers with an Nvidia graphics card preferred to just install the graphics driver, and not bother with the companion software, GeForce Experience, at all – and Team Green took the hint. In 2024, Nvidia canned GeForce Experience and made an all-new official app.
The Nvidia App (oh, the hours upon hours that must’ve been spent in brainstorming marketing meetings coming up with that name) arrived in beta in February 2024. It was billed as an all-in-one replacement for GeForce Experience and the Nvidia Control Panel, plus the RTX Experience. All these separate pieces were instead housed under one convenient umbrella (where driver installs are handled, too).
The Nvidia App emerged as a full release in November, after being worked on extensively during the year. Nvidia even actively solicited feedback from gamers on which legacy features should be preserved, and more besides.
That feedback was listened to in terms of implementing elements such as in-game frame rate and latency info (plus much more) in the revamped overlay for the Nvidia App, and it offered some smart new features such as easy GPU overclocking. The new app was generally well-received, appears to run smoothly and responsively in the main, and fortunately, there are no onerous account or login requirements here either – hopefully that’ll remain the case going forward.
There was one notable niggle that cropped up in mid-December, though, when reports emerged that an option in the Nvidia App could cause considerable slowdown of gaming frame rates. Nvidia is currently investigating that problem (at the time of writing), and there’s a fix (of sorts) for the apparent bug.
Also on the software side of the equation, DLSS continued to dominate the frame rate boosting scene, and remains a powerful weapon in Nvidia’s armory of GPU tricks.
AI FTW still
Naturally AI remained an area where Nvidia realized some big successes this year, and as we already mentioned, it helped to drive the company’s market value skywards (or moon-wards, perhaps we should say).
Team Green was predictably keen to push forward with new Rubin AI chips, the successor to Blackwell for AI workloads, being announced just a few months after the latter.
It’s possible that Rubin, which was the focus of Computex 2024, could power the GeForce graphics cards that follow the next generation – mirroring the way Blackwell has been deployed for AI GPUs and RTX 5000 desktop boards – so this could have been our first (sort of) sighting of RTX 6000. (If RTX 6000 ever happens, and here at TechRadar, we’ve made arguments as to why there are valid reasons to doubt this – namely the juggernaut profits in the AI world, of which there are a bunch of major concerns around, it has to be said).
GeForce Now continues to evolve – with a catch
Last year was an important one for Nvidia’s streaming service for PC gamers, with the new ‘Ultimate’ subscription coming in (offering up to 240 frames per second, and a less laggy experience – for those with an internet connection up to the task, that is).
Early in 2024, Nvidia introduced a Day Pass for GeForce Now – allowing you to try out the full service for a day, to see how it works for you – and then towards the tail end of the year, a big upgrade was announced for the middle tier ‘Priority’ membership. This was renamed ‘Performance’ and Nvidia boosted its visual quality from 1080p to 1440p resolution (with ultrawide monitor support on top), all with no additional cost.
At least there was no financial cost, but there was a catch in the form of a monthly time limit imposed on these subscribers (and Ultimate tier members too). On the face of it, capping play time was a move to help Nvidia shorten queues and keep the streaming quality running smoothly, but it went down badly with some subscribers, who felt the 100-hour limit was too stingy.
Note that the new time limit doesn’t come into force until 2025 starts, and won’t apply to existing subscribers until 2026. Still, this led to plenty of threats of quitting GeForce Now on online forums – we’ll just have to see if that turns out to be mere noise, or whether a bunch of subscribers are indeed about to exit stage left.
Concluding thoughts
In 2024, Nvidia brought some high-quality graphics cards into its Lovelace range, although the more affordable end of the GPU market was totally neglected (again). The company continues to dominate the desktop graphics card arena, and that won’t likely change in the near future – especially not at the higher-end where Nvidia won’t even be challenged going forward, if the rumors are right.
The Nvidia App was a high point for Team Green – and it’s great to see gamer feedback helped to shape the software – with DLSS also helping to build on, and reinforce, its consumer GPU success.
AI was the massive money-spinner, though, and the driving force behind Nvidia exploding to become the world’s most valuable company.
As we touched on above, the worry for PC gamers might be that the blistering success of AI GPUs – if it continues, and it doesn’t seem a good idea to bet against that – could mean Nvidia’s gaming graphics cards are eventually side-lined, or perhaps dispensed with entirely. With AMD also looking to cash in on AI, and Intel’s GPU prospects seeming shakier these days, all this does prompt some concern around the future of desktop graphics cards in the consumer marketplace.
You might also like
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ZqQX8XuAbNyUx679qnpNtW-1200-80.jpg
Source link
