(Posted by: Eric Rees)
Mobile gaming has always had the handicap of having to try and live up to the graphical power of their bigger console brothers. Some games have tried and failed to get these good graphics, others have changed the rules to more stylized looks so all the processing power doesn't have to go to the graphics.
But coming down the road, NVIDIA hopes to change all that with their "Kal-El" processors. The company has aspirations to produce the world's first quad-core mobile processor to give mobile games a leg up in the mobile department. Hit the break for more details and some very impressive video demos.
But coming down the road, NVIDIA hopes to change all that with their "Kal-El" processors. The company has aspirations to produce the world's first quad-core mobile processor to give mobile games a leg up in the mobile department. Hit the break for more details and some very impressive video demos.
Back in February, NVIDIA came out and blew everyone away by saying that they'd have their new Kal-El quad-core processors inside of tablets by August. They say these bad boys will boast a 12-core NVIDIA GPU to boot along with the processor itself, all of this running at five times the performance of the current Tegra 2 chips. This before most phones had even made the jump to dual-core. Needless to say, it was a pretty shocking statement, and while the release date for tablets with these chipsets they are still pretty close because NVIDIA has had no qualms about showing off the power of these beasts.
Above is a little demo that NVIDIA put together when showing off the lighting effects of the Kal-El processor. It's pretty impressive overall, switching between heavy lighting effects with no noticeable strain on the processor doing any of the other responsibilities. But how will an actual game far on this monster? Well NVIDIA knew you would ask that.
So yeah, pretty impressive stuff for a mobile processor right? Hell, most desktops don't even have quad-core CPUs in them yet. Overall these chips look like they're going to be pretty awesome.
The problem here is the tablet itself. Touch screens aren't the most exact science in the world beforehand, but just think of trying to do a precision shot in Call of Duty or Battlefield with your thumbs. The point of these monster chipsets is to bring full fledged console experiences to the mobile sector but as I see it there will always be a disconnect between a touch control and an actual controller or a keyboard and mouse.
There are talks of tablets endorsing controllers for their games but that defeats the purpose of having a mobile tablet, carrying around a controller to go with it right? And just think, if you wanted to play you'd have to find a place to stand the tablet up while using your controller with both hands. But, with most tablets and smartphones these days there are HDMI out options so you can hook it up to a TV and enjoy your games, but at that point why not use a console?
While these Kal-El processors have taken down one hurdle of mobile gaming, the graphics, it presents a few others down the road. We'll see how these tablets pan out when they start hitting shelves at the end of this year and into the next.
The problem here is the tablet itself. Touch screens aren't the most exact science in the world beforehand, but just think of trying to do a precision shot in Call of Duty or Battlefield with your thumbs. The point of these monster chipsets is to bring full fledged console experiences to the mobile sector but as I see it there will always be a disconnect between a touch control and an actual controller or a keyboard and mouse.
There are talks of tablets endorsing controllers for their games but that defeats the purpose of having a mobile tablet, carrying around a controller to go with it right? And just think, if you wanted to play you'd have to find a place to stand the tablet up while using your controller with both hands. But, with most tablets and smartphones these days there are HDMI out options so you can hook it up to a TV and enjoy your games, but at that point why not use a console?
While these Kal-El processors have taken down one hurdle of mobile gaming, the graphics, it presents a few others down the road. We'll see how these tablets pan out when they start hitting shelves at the end of this year and into the next.
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