What happened
Shares of Nvidia (NVDA 4.43%) popped on the first trading day after Christmas, up 4.1% as of 12:35 p.m. ET today.
There's not a whole lot of news to explain today's pop, but Nvidia stock is most likely moving in response to an optimistic article forecasting tech attractions in 2022.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
In an article this morning on TrustedReviews.com, the author predicts that Nvidia will launch its next generation of graphics chips, beginning with the Nvidia RTX 4080, sometime toward the end of 2022, and that it will be "the most powerful GPU in the range," and better than anything in the 30-Series line. (Speaking of the 30-Series, the article also predicts Nvidia will unveil a new RTX 3080 Ti mobile GPU for gaming laptops as early as next month).
The article says 20-Series chips are also due for a refresh. But perhaps the biggest news could be an upgrade of Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud-gaming service. Currently, gamers can get up to 1440p resolution when gaming on the service, but with the holiday season having just passed, with presumably a whole lot of 4K televisions just sold, it's time for Nvidia to start thinking about upgrading its service to exploit the full graphics potential of these top-of-the-line TVs.
Now what
TrustedReviews isn't entirely certain when this upgrade will happen, but notes that Nvidia has said it sees no reason why it can't boost the resolution to 4K in the future for other devices. And, the article said, the company is optimizing the server to handle 4K performances without issue. The author anticipates this will happen sometime before the end of 2022.
At last report, GeForce Now had amassed 12 million subscribers, and was growing at a rate of about 4 million per year. Besides adding new games that can play on the service, improving the quality of the service itself is the best way Nvidia can keep GeForce Now growing. That will help maintain its lead over rival services from Alphabet (GOOG +1.49%)(GOOGL +1.50%) and Microsoft (MSFT 2.17%) and make sure that they never catch up, so that Nvidia continues to dominate cloud-based gaming now and in the future.
