Battlefield 3 promotional image for the "Air Superiority" game mode. (via EA & DICE)
Mobile devices have come a long way when it comes to gaming but are not yet up to par with traditional PCs or laptops for that matter. That’s because some PC games require a tremendous amount of GPU power to play with all the bells and whistles enabled, such as anisotropic filtering and antialiasing. Mobile devices need a reduced power requirement to be able to run a full day without recharging and therefore their onboard GPUs run considerably slower but require less power than full-on desktop cards (from dozens of watts to hundreds of miliwatts respectively). That gap between the two platforms looks to be shrinking after NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsun Huang demoed their latest iteration of the Kepler Mobile (Logan/Tegra 5 perhaps?), the company’s mobile version of their high-end desktop counterparts. According to Huang, the Kepler Mobile chip will be able to play high-end PC games such as Crysis, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Medal of Honor: Warfighter (or any DirectX 11 games).
To demonstrate the power of the Kepler Mobile Huang pitted the latest gen iPad against a prototype tablet running the Kepler chip with both playing the graphic-intensive Battlefield 3. The side by side comparison was like night and day with the iPad downgrading the graphics to the power of 1999 technology, while the Kepler-based tablet ran the game smoothly (albeit in console-esq fashion) even with HDR lighting, particle effects and dynamic shadows enabled! Obviously the Kepler Mobile DNA will probably be featured in the Tegra 5 slated to debut sometime in 2014 and will feature CUDA, SMX, Dynamic Parallelism, and Hyper-Q technology along with a revamped ARM Cortex CPU. As to when we will actually see mobile devices with the Kepler Mobile GPU embedded into them is anyone’s guess. However, it does look as if NVIDIA is stepping up their game in the mobile market to surpass rival AMD’s Temash tablet, which is able to run graphic-intensive games as well.
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