"DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons." This coming from the same company that a few years ago said that there was every reason to opt for a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card, to complete the Windows Vista experience, at a time when it was the first and only company to be out with compliant hardware. In the wake of rival AMD's ambitious Evergreen family of DirectX 11 compliant graphics cards being released, NVIDIA made it a point to tell the press that the development shouldn't really change anything in the industry.

Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference, NVIDIA's VP of investor relations said "DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons. This is why Microsoft is in work with the industry to allow more freedom and more creativity in how you build content, which is always good, and the new features in DirectX 11 are going to allow people to do that. But that no longer is the only reason, we believe, consumers would want to invest in a GPU."

"Now, we know, people are doing a lot in the area of video, people are going to do more and more in the area of photography… I think that the things we are doing would allow the GPU to be a co-processor to the CPU and deliver better user experience, better battery life and make that computers little bit more optimized," added Mr. Hara

NVIDIA, which was until very recently a firm believer in graphics processing horsepower to serve as the biggest selling points of new GPUs, now switches its line on what it believes will drive the market forward. All of a sudden, software that rely on the raw computational power of GPUs (eg: media transcoding software), and not advanced visual effects that a new generation API brings with it (in games and CGI applications), is what will drive people to buying graphics processors, according to the company.

Mr. Hara concluded saying "Graphics industry, I think, is on the point that microprocessor industry was several years ago, when AMD made the public confession that frequency does not matter anymore and it is more about performance per watt. I think we are the same crossroad with the graphics world: framerate and resolution are nice, but today they are very high and going from 120fps to 125fps is not going to fundamentally change end-user experience. But I think the things that we are doing with Stereo 3D Vision, PhysX, about making the games more immersive, more playable is beyond framerates and resolutions. Nvidia will show with the next-generation GPUs that the compute side is now becoming more important that the graphics side."

The timing of this comes when NVIDIA does not have any concrete product plans laid out, while AMD is working towards getting a headstart with its next-generation GPUs that are DirectX 11 compliant, and also has compliance with industry-wide GPGPU standards such as DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL.