Nvidia pulled on the plug on the Graphics Technology Conference after rescheduling the conference from March 22 to an online conference on March 24th. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang promised that Nvidia has great announcements to make, but it is not the correct time. In response to COVID-19 Nvidia has shifted to fully remote work, although they will do the occasional stream on updates. Hourly workers at Nvidia, who do not have a task they can perform at home, are still receiving full pay.
…This isn’t the right time. We’re going to hold off on sharing our GTC news for now. We will still stream tons of great content from researchers and developers who have prepared great talks. This is a time to focus on our family, our friends, our community. Our employees are working from home. Many hourly workers will not need to work but they’ll all be fully paid. Stay safe everyone. We will get through this together.
Nvidia is aiming to protect themselves from the virus, and plan to make their announcement when the virus outbreak starts subsiding. The Graphics Technology Conference was expected to reveal in-depth details on the Ampere GPUs which several leaks have started coming out and AMD revealed their RDNA 2 Architecture for a new family of GPUs. Multiple talks and conferences where planned that revolve around the future of virtual reality and ray tracing. Ray tracing is a particularly hot topic and selling point, one that Nvidia has tried running away with.
Nvidia has pledged their support to assist with researching COVID-19 and has even asked gamers to pitch support by utilizing the Folding@home application. Folding@home will connect computers to an international network that can use the processing power of the connected computers. The calculations needed to find optimal paths to prevent incubation of the virus inside a host’s lung are complex with multiple variables and require heavy loads of processing power to solve in polynomial time. Nvidia has pledged that they will assist the researchers that are utilizing the application.