2nd November 2016, 7:00 AM
NVidia does have very good reasons not to try and reinvent the wheel. The ARM standard is very good after all, and creating a new standard breaks compatibility with a LOT of code that'd have to be redone entirely from scratch. It's the same reason AMD prefers to stick with the x86 standard rather than go and invent an entirely new architecture for desktops. (IBM tried inventing a new design in the form of PowerPC, but even Apple eventually had to abandon that in favor of the ubiquitous x86 standard for their desktop Macs.) Addon cards are a different thing. Since everything is still being mediated through the main CPU, addon cards can differ in their design very significantly, and so long as the driver, OS, and other elements like APIs remain the same, games will still work just fine with them. The new Pascall design from NVidia is an entirely different design from their previous models, and yet I can throw all my old 3D games at it without issue thanks to the driver and the common ground of the x86 processor at the core of my desktop machine.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)