NVIDIA showed a packed ballroom at The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas its next generation mobile chip, the Tegra K1. Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 to demonstrate the power of the new 192-core super chip.
Epic Games made a pair of Unreal Engine 4 tech demos that were featured on the movie theater-sized screen on stage in high definition. Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 technology was used last year to showcase a real-time 3D model of the Tegra 4 Shield portable gaming system, which has a library of Unreal Engine 3 games.
This year, the technology was utilized to show how realistic the gaming environments on mobile will become in the first half of 2014 when Tegra K1 ships on multiple portable devices.
“We can take absolutely anything that runs on PC or high-end console and run it on Tegra,” said Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney. “I didn’t think that we’d be at this level on mobile for another 3-4 years.”
Representatives from Epic were not at CES, but NVIDIA did showcase an Unreal Engine 3 game, Trine 2, running on the big screen in a live gameplay demo. Developer Frozenbyte created an enhanced version of the game to take advantage of the Tegra K1 technology. It was playable after the press event on tablets, along with the Unreal Engine 4 tech demos.
“Over the past two decades, NVIDIA invented the GPU and has developed more graphics technologies than any other company,” said Huang during the hour-and-a-half press conference. “With Tegra K1, we’re bringing that heritage to mobile. It bridges the gap for developers, who can now build next-gen games and apps that will run on any device.”
Huang said one of the highlights of the Tegra K1 chip lies in its power to completely eliminate the lines between mobile and high-end PC and console gaming. Tegra K1 is the first mobile processor to deliver the same graphics features as next-generation gaming consoles (Xbox One, PlayStation 4) and faster performance than current generation consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3), all in the palm of your hand.
Tegra K1 provides full support for the latest PC-class gaming technologies — including DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4 and tessellation. These capabilities will enable PC and next console game developers to finally bring their stunning, visually rich titles to mobile devices.
NVIDIA blogger Noah Kravitz explained that the NVIDIA Kepler technology, which powers tens of millions of GeForce PC gaming cards, packs a punch in mobile form.
“The Kepler GPU powering Tegra K1 is 1.5 times more efficient than other mobile GPUs,” wrote Kravitz. “That means a better gaming experience and faster overall performance without sacrificing battery life.”
Difference Is Amazing
During the press conference Serious Sam 3 was shown on Tegra 4 and then on Tegra K1. The leap in graphic fidelity between these two chips – just a year removed from the Tegra 4 debut last CES – is amazing.
It took Epic Games Unreal Engine 3 technology eight years to evolve from PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to mobile devices with the launch of Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade on Apple iPad. With Unreal Engine 4, mobile games will be out in 2014 featuring the same visuals that PCs, Xbox One and PS4 deliver.
With developers, including Epic Games, already hard at work on Unreal Engine 4 games for 2014 and beyond, Tegra K1 will allow game makers to easily port the full console or PC experience to mobile devices. This should also open up new cross-platform gaming experiences, as gamers could start a game at home and continue it while commuting on their tablet. It also could open the door for Epic to release Android mobile games. To date, the company has focused on Apple’s iOS platform with its bestselling Infinity Blade franchise. But now the company has the option of developing for PC and consoles and releasing the same title on mobile.
“From here onward, I think we’re going to see the performance and feature gap between mobile and PC high-end gaming continue to narrow to the point where the difference between the platforms really blurs,” said Sweeney in a statement.
One of the trends at CES 2014 this year is new laptops and devices that incorporate both Android and Windows support. Huang said he believes the Android platform will continue to grow and evolve as a great gaming platform, which is why NVIDIA launched Shield last year. That portable gaming device was demonstrated on stage Sunday night as part of GameStream, which allows gamers to stream games from their GeForce PC or the cloud to the Shield with virtually no lag.
NVIDIA also introduced new G-Sync technology for PC gaming. Phillips, Acer, AOC, Asus, BenQ and ViewSonic all have monitors featuring this technology on display at CES. NVIDIA had several monitors demonstrating the new technology at their press conference, running Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft II. The technology uses the NVIDIA GPU to allow gamers to navigate a game map with no lag or graphical tears, which will appeal to both core gamers and the growing eSports gaming sector.
[EPIC ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Epic Games stories as reported in WRALTechWire.]
