Many a game developer has opted to use Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 for last-gen console game development, and that is set to continue with Unreal Engine 4 catering to PS4 and Xbox One developers. But Nvidia thinks Unreal Engine 4 games should also be playable on mobile devices, and has therefore created a new Kepler-based Tegra chip to close the gap to console-level performance.
PS4-quality games on a smartphone or tablet may sound unbelievable, but Nvidia thinks otherwise. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has used CES to announce the Tegra K1–a mobile chip with 192 computing cores complete with DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.4 support.
Nvidia is calling the new chip the “first-ever console class mobile technology” and to back up the company’s claims on performance, they put together a Tegra K1 demo running Unreal Engine 4 which you can watch below:
The K1 chip is only a prototype piece of hardware at the moment. Nvidia says the K1 is three times as powerful as Apple’s A7 chip and delivers performance beyond that of an Xbox 360 or PS3. So imagine games of that graphical quality running on a near-future Android tablet and you get some idea of what’s coming.
There will be two versions of the K1 available to use in mobile devices. The lower performance chip is 32-bit, uses a quad-core ARM A15 CPU, and will run at 2.3GHz. We can expect to see that in the first half of 2014.
The performance part, however, won’t arrive until the second half of the year and will use Nvidia’s forthcoming dual-core 64-bit ARM-based Denver CPU running at 2.5GHz. And while both sound great on paper, we need to see what such powerful processors do to battery life and the heat produced by the devices carrying them before reaching a verdict.
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