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Tag: tegra 3

  • Ouya To Get Annual Hardware Refresh

    The Ouya is not a traditional games console. That much has been obvious since it first broke Kickstarter records last year. Now the company behing the console are saying it will do away with another vanguard of console gaming – the five to 10 year lifespan.

    Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman told Joystiq that the company intends to adopt the mobile strategy for Ouya. They will be releasing a new $99 console every year to take advantage of cheaper components. One such upgrade could be seen in the form of the Ouya’s built- in flash memory, which is currently set at 8GB, being expanded.

    Moving to an annual upgrade cycle may concern early adopters, however, as their initial investment may be obsolete after only a few years. Uhrman says that won’t be the case as games built for Ouya will be backwards compatible.

    Uhrman also addressed concerns that the Ouya console won’t be able to output visuals that would please the console gaming crowd. It’s true that the Tegra 3 can’t compete on the same level as a PS3 or Xbox 360, but the chip is fairly competent when it’s not tied to a mobile device. Uhrman says that the Ouya’s Tegra 3 doesn’t “have to balance power for battery life. So when all four quads are running, it’s 1.6 GHz.” She then claims it’s going to be the best Tegra 3 device on the market.

    Finally, those looking to upgrade their Ouya every year will be pleasantly surprised to learn that their profile and the purchases attached to it can be easily transferred between devices. That’s something that even the big guys have only started to figure out with Nintendo’s Wii to Wii U transfer tool being an adorable exercise in frustration.

    Ouya will be launching at retailers across the nation in June.

  • Nvidia’s Tegra 4 Isn’t Finding Support Among Smartphone Manufacturers [Rumor]

    The major tech at CES 2013 wasn’t the 4K HD TVs or that awesome water display, but rather mobile processors. Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung all announced their respective next generation processors that will be powering smartphones and tablets in the near future. One of the companies, however, may be having some trouble in getting companies to support its latest processor.

    Digitimes reports that demand for Nvidia’s Tegra 4 processor has been weak among OEMs. In fact, the only OEM confirmed to use the processor so far is Toshiba. The other major players, like Asus and Acer, are reportedly still undecided on which processors they will be using:

    Asustek Computer and Acer, which have been aggressive about the tablet market, have not yet decided whether to place orders for Tegra 4 as their focuses have already turned from 10-inch and above tablets to the 7-inch entry-level segment.

    Nvidia’s previous mobile processor – the Tegra 3 – is being used in devices like Google’s Nexus 7 and Microsoft’s Surface. It still enjoys relative popularity among OEMs so Nvidia may start focusing more on its previous generation processor while it waits for Tegra 4 demand to increase. To do this, the company is reportedly considering dropping the price of the Tegra 3 so that more OEMs start using it.

    Relying on the Tegra 3 is only a temporary solution, however, as Nvidia needs to kickstart Tegra 4 demand. It may be able to do this by working with Google again on the Nexus 7 refresh that’s rumored to becoming later this year. Having the Tegra 4 in such a high profile device would only help Nvidia’s case.

    Of course, all of this is rumor for now, and Tegra 4 devices won’t even start popping up until later this year. Nvidia still has some time to get people behind its latest mobile processor.

  • Ouya Ends Kickstarter Campaign With Over $8.5 Million

    The Ouya, an Android powered game console, has been on the minds of gamers everywhere for the past month since it raised over $1 million in a day for its Kickstarter campaign. Everybody in the industry had something to say about the Ouya from claiming it was going to fail to saying it was going to save gaming. Either way, it’s the second most funded project that Kickstarter has ever hosted.

    Funding ended last night for Ouya and the project has raised a little over $8.5 million. The only other project to earn more pledges was the Pebble, a watch for iPhone and Android. It brought in a little over $10.2 million.

    Despite claims that the Ouya was a fake or that it was going to fail, gamers obviously feel very different about it. On top of the insane amount of money raised, the console was backed by 63,416 people all wanting the console for very different reasons. There are those who obviously just want a new console, but many developers put in money to get access to dev kits.

    So now that the Ouya is funded, where do we go from here? The console will start going into full production now with a tentative release date of March 2013. During that time, developers will start creating games for the device. It’s a decently capable machine that’s powered by Nvidia’s Tegra3 processor.

    The processor is going to be its biggest weakness, however, when attempting to appeal to a hardcore audience. The makers of the console envision it as a place where the casual and hardcore can get along and just enjoy games. The only problem is that a lot of hardcore gamers demand the very best in visual fidelity and the Ouya just can’t deliver.

    What it will deliver is an inexpensive game console that will have all the benefits of modern game consoles, including media streaming, without the big budget games. The open nature of the console ensures that anybody can make games for it and sell their games directly to the players. Even the major players like Namco and Square Enix have pledged support for the console, albeit with ports of decade old titles.

    The most exciting thing about the Ouya is that it might do for the console what Steam did for PC gaming. It has the potential to open the living room to indies. There are plenty of indie developers who grew up on console gaming and they would love to return to those days. The Ouya is the embodiment of nostalgia and it’s going to use that to play on gamers’ emotions. As long as developers realize this, it’s going to at least succeed in some sense. If developers try to emulate modern hardcore experiences on the Ouya, it will fail in more than one respect.

    If you missed the Kickstarter campaign, you can still grab an Ouya for yourself. The company has opened up pre-orders on its Web site which includes a console with multiple controllers. For just the console and one controller, it will cost $109.99 with the console and four controllers running for $199.99. International orders will have to tack on an extra $10 onto the U.S. price.

    No matter how well the Ouya performs, it’s going to be interesting to watch its development over the next year. With the Wii U coming out later this year and the rumored Xbox 720 and PS4 coming out sometime in either 2013 or 2014, the Ouya has some competition ahead. The price and developer friendly SDK might just be enough to compete.

  • New iPad’s A5X Chip Benchmarked

    New iPad’s A5X Chip Benchmarked

    The new iPad is out and it is gorgeous. That Retina display screen is going to make apps look stunning on the device. All of that screen real estate can’t take all of the credit though. The new iPad’s A5X chip makes it all possible with a dual-core processor and quad-core GPU on board.

    At the new iPad announcement, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the new A5X chip would outperform Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip for Android tablets. The Tegra 3 is a quad-core processor and is capable of some pretty awesome 3D effects. It’s time to pit the two against each other to see if Cook was telling the truth.

    The fine people at Laptop Mag ran the GLBenchmark 2.1 on both the new iPad and a Transformer Prime tablet using the Tegra 3 processor. On the standard test, the new iPad processed 6,718 frames at a rate of 60 FPS. The Nvidia Tegra 3, on the same test, only processed 5,939 frames at 53 FPS. It’s not a huge difference, but the new iPad is definitely the victor.

    The next test saw the two processors duke it out with Geekbench, a tool that measures raw processing power. Here’s where the Tegra 3 really excels with an overall score of 1,571. The A5X on the new iPad only scored 692.

    When testing the power of processors, one can not leave out gaming. The test saw the Transformer Prime and the new iPad both running two different 3D games that push the graphical capabilities of the devices. Long story short: games on the new iPad look stunning due to its screen, but games have more detail on the Transformer Prime. This is due to the games being optimized for the Tegra 3. You should be seeing similar performance out of the A5X once games are built with it in mind.

    Here’s a video with side-by-side comparisons of the games running on both devices:

    Do you think that the A5X chip is a game changer in mobile computing? Or is it just a small upgrade? Let us know in the comments.

    [Lead image: MacLife]

  • CES 2012: Nvidia Talks Up Tablets, Android As The Future

    Nvidia, makers of fine PC video cards, have found a new future in mobile processing.

    Nvidia used their CES keynote to push the Tegra 3 quad-core processor and Ice Cream Sandwich operating system as the future of tablets and smartphones.

    In Nvidia’s keynote recap on their blog, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, talked up Ice Cream Sandwich as a unifying force for tablets and smartphones using Android software.

    “Ice Cream Sandwich unites, unifies and turns all the Android devices into a single platform, with one enormous installed base,” Huang said.

    The company took time out to boast about their new Tegra 3 processor and what it can do. They used popular iPad app Snapseed as a new app for Android devices that can only run on Tegra 3 equipped devices.

    More impressive is the ability for a Tegra 3 tablet to stream sophisticated games from a GeForce GTX-based gaming PC. The company took this opportunity to play Skyrim and Battlefield 3 on the tablet using a gamepad.

    Nvidia made it a point to say that tablets are their new bread and butter. This led to the announcement of the ASUS ME370T, a 7-inch tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich and their Tegra 3 processor. The tablet will sell for $249.

    The Tegra 3 processor has plenty of innovations for tablets besides being five times more powerful than its predecessor. The CPU features what they call a “ninja” core that allows the tablet to switch between the four main CPUs and a fifth lower-power “companion” CPU for less demanding tasks and standby mode.

    It also uses a software called PRISM that reduces backlight power consumption by 40 percent by modulating the backlight per pixel, frame and scene, all in real time. It also features DirectTouch which offloads the touch panel’s processing to one core which enables six times faster touch processing, lower costs and lower power consumption.

    With these new technologies, Nvidia is promising that tablets running on Tegra 3 will get 12 hours of battery life.

    Lastly, Microsoft pledged support for Tegra 3 by saying that their new Windows 8 mobile platform will have to use Tegra 3 due to the operating system’s multi-threading nature.

    Nvidia’s keynote was initially disappointing because there was no information about their next generation of GeForce GTX video cards, but tablets are still a growing market that requies this kind of exposure. There will be plenty of time for graphics cards later. Now it’s time for Nvidia to innovate in the mobile arena just like they have in desktop graphics.