Tegra K1 puts a Xbox 360 and a PS3 in your pocket

Just the other day some friends and I were talking about how much longer we would have to wait to have Xbox 360/PS3 quality games and graphics on a mobile device. And little did we know that Nvidia was about to answer that question far sooner than we anticipated. The new Tegra K1 has 192 CUDA cores and takes the same Kepler architecture we find in their desktop GPUs to the mobile world.

The performance improvements are quite significant:

The K1 is not only more powerful than a Xbox 360 and a PS3... it's almost as powerful as both of them combined! (And it offers additional benefits, such as DX11 and OpenGL 4.4 support.)

Even more impressive, it can do this while using just 5W - compared to the 100W used by each of these game consoles. Nvidia has also scored a nice partner, showing Unreal Engine 4 running on the K1 as well as some games, like Trine and Serious Sam 3.

Though there's still room for improvement (as always), it's incredible that we will have access to this kind of graphic power in mobile devices this year. And best of all, in the second half of the year a new K1 version will pop up, with a dual core 64 bits "Denver" CPU (the current version uses a 32bit quad-core "plus 1" CPU).

... So... how long will we have to wait till the same thing happens to the newer PS4 and Xbox One? Four years? Less? What's your take on that?

Epic Citadel Running on Javascript now Available

A while back we saw Unreal Engine 3 ported to Javascript and running inside a browser. In case you didn't believe in it, you can now see it with your own eyes, as the Epic Citadel demo is now available for everyone to try - although it's highly recommended you use the latest Firefox (development version) to ensure the best performance (and keep in mind most other browser aren't supported, or... crash - as it's the case with Chrome; though they're trying to fix it).

It's still the first steps, but one can already imagine every game to be platforma agnostic and running inside your browser. No more worrying about buying game for Xbox, or PlayStation, or Windows, or Mac. You'll just fire up your browser and play.

Hopefully, that will also ease developer's lives, as they'll no longer have to worry about cross-platform ports and development. Meaning games will also be able to be cheaper, and thus less prone to pirating.

... It still may take a decade (or more)... but I think it's pretty clear we're heading that way - and I'm glad for it.



[via Mozilla]

Unreal Engine 4 Infiltrator Demos show us "Next Gen" Graphics

Want to know how next generation games will look like? The kind of games you'll be able to play with the upcoming PS4 and Xbox 720, or any "decent" PC?... Well... if you thought Unreal Engine 3 was cool enough to make things realistic... just wait and see what Unreal Engine 4 is able to do.

What you're about to see in the following video is being rendered live, in real time, by a single Nvidia GTX 680 graphics card.

Sure, pretty graphics aren't enough to make a game "good"... but it certainly helps when you're tempted to spend time just looking around and seeing how good things look! :)

In 10 year's time, I guess you won't be able to tell the difference between rendered CGI and real live videos... (not even when it comes to human faces and expressions!)