Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, started his graphics chip company in 1993 and is now the last man standing. Back then, no one could have predicted that PCs and game machines would spawn the powerful visual computing we have today. In a speech in San Jose, Calif., Huang talked about how video games and movie special effects are only the tip of the iceberg for visual computing, which encompasses everything from digital art to medical imaging. Huang is celebrating the growth of this ecosystem this week with his own new visual computing conference, dubbed Nvision 08. But it’s a turbulent time for Nvidia as the company struggles against competitors and its own product bugs. After his speech, Huang took questions on a wide range of topics at a press conference. I’ve blended questions from the general press Q&A with my own one-on-one questions in this edited transcript.

VB: I remember when I interviewed you 14 years ago. You talked about how your graphics chips could be used as “Windows accelerators.” It was like there was no other use for a 3-D chip.
JH: The real breakthrough for our industry came when we at Nvidia discovered this perspective: graphics is not just putting pixels up on the screen, but graphics can be a medium for artistic expression. That was when we decided we had to build programmable shaders (subprograms that add custom special effects to a 3-D scene). We didn’t want graphics to just all look the same. This medium has a real artistic element. To deal with that, we had to create an infinite palette. To do that in a computer architecture, we had to make it programmable. That was the insight that allowed us to see that programmable shaders were the future. We blindly believed in it and made everyone believe it. Now, when you say that computer graphics is an artistic medium, you don’t sound like a psycho. That notion isn’t more than 10 years old.

VB: A lot of people in the world get excited about computer-animated art in movies or video games. But you’re excited about digital still art.

JH: If you think about what these people are doing, computer-generated art is part math, part imagination, and part programming. You have to know what the technology is capable of doing. It’s a complicated thing. It’s not for your average artist. Yet, as extraordinary as it is and as beautiful as it can be, it is really complicated to make worthy. Most people think all of the valuable things in life are expensive. But it’s hard to make a digital art piece expensive because it’s easy to replicate. The whole point is that it is written in software so that it can be generated flawlessly over and over again. There are complicated issues to solve with digital art. It doesn’t take away from how amazing digital art can be. I don’t know how artists even come up with the combination of skills to do it. I admire them for it and I hope that someone can figure out how to make it valuable.

VB: How long will it be before Jeff Han’s “multi-touch” display technology becomes a reality in daily computing?

JH: It’s in the iPhone. But as soon as we have a reasonable touch-display for desktop computers, it will be ready. The TouchSmart from HP is not bad but we need something better. The iPhone screen is wonderful but it’s hard to make it bigger. We need to find the technologies to make multi-touch more popular.

VB: In 3-D graphics, we saw 50 graphics companies emerge and then they all collapsed except for one, Nvidia (three