A little over a month ago, NVIDIA unveiled that it would begin licensing out some of its IP, such as Kepler (used in desktop, workstation and mobile parts). With that, it seemed likely that some company would implement it into some mobile part, and that’s now proven to be the case. First out of the gate? NVIDIA itself.
The announcement was made at the ongoing SIGGRAPH conference, and a big announcement it is indeed. It goes without saying that Kepler is a market-leading architecture, so to even get a taste of that on the mobile side is highly intriguing. At the forefront, mobile Kepler (codenamed “Logan”) offers support for OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, DirectX 11, Tessellation (yes, on a mobile device) and NVIDIA’s CUDA 5.0. All this, in a power envelope of about 2W. This is ambitious, to say the least.
Specs like these are not always that useful on paper, and NVIDIA knows that. So at the event, it has a couple of tablets on display showing off what the mobile Kepler chip is capable of. The demos can be seen below:
NVIDIA showed us the same FaceWorks demo not long ago for a desktop GPU launch, so to see it running on mobile is highly impressive – despite the character lacking hair (bald is cool, though).
Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney is also impressed – so much so that he’s made his own blog post over at NVIDIA. “Starting today, NVIDIA’s engineers are demonstrating Unreal Engine 4-powered desktop PC game content to a select group of journalists and industry insiders. It’s all running on a chip no bigger than a fingernail, and is just a taste of what mobile Kepler will make possible.“
Am I the only one who gets depressed when they hear of Unreal Engine but no new Unreal Tournament in the works?
I digress. Mobile Kepler is looking great, but when it will hit the market, we’re unsure. If its promise of a 2W power envelope holds true and it’s able to deliver what we see above, then it sure can’t get here soon enough.