Satya Nadella also noted that without the gaming community, Microsoft would not have reached its current heights.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in a recent Q&A session dedicated to the future of the Xbox brand, stated that the gaming industry played a key role in the development of both Microsoft and NVIDIA. Moreover, he admitted that he sometimes jokes about this with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
According to Nadella, investments in games helped not only create popular projects, but also accelerated the development of other technological areas — cloud services, the Windows operating system, and servers.
I joke with Jensen Huang: if it weren't for games, NVIDIA wouldn't exist. Think about it — without DirectX, the entire revolution of GPUs and hardware acceleration would not have happened.
One of the key moments for NVIDIA was the creation of the GeForce 256 video card — the first chip officially named a graphics processing unit. It transferred geometry processing from the central processor to the graphics chip, which significantly improved performance in 3D games and effectively started the modern era of GPUs.
For Microsoft, an equally important step was the appearance of DirectX technology in 1995, during the Windows 95 era. This set of APIs allowed programs — especially games — to directly interact with PC hardware: video card, processor, sound card, and input devices. Thanks to DirectX, developers were able to create games that run on millions of different computer configurations.
