Can Nvidia’s Tegra 5 mobile chip run Battlefield 3?

Behind closed doors at SIGGRAPH 2013, Nvidia demonstrated and talked in more detail about Project Logan, the complete system-on-chip that will eventually become Tegra 5.

Nvidia has previously shown Tegra 5 to be capable of running the Digital Ira benchmark, but they didn’t show any gaming capability beyond rendering a nicely detailed island.

While talking to developers and interested manufacturers at the secret meeting, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney said that he was excited that Tegra 5 and Mobile Kepler existed, as it allows game developers to do a whole lot more.

Sweeney also talked about how Tegra 5’s ability to finally run CUDA calculations and its support for Direct X 11 and OpenGL 4.3 makes the job of game porting and development much easier for studios new to the mobile gaming market.

Nvidia Tegra 5 running Digital Ira benchmark

Sweeney’s vision for the Unreal 4 engine, which will feature on next-gen platforms and scales from mobile phones all the way to consoles and desktop computers, is that devices running on Tegra 5 will be able to give gamers a similar experience to their desktop and gaming console counterparts.

Given Nvidia’s claim that Tegra 5 is more powerful in theory than the Playstation 3, it will be interesting to see just how much can be done on the hardware.

Battlefield 3 on Tegra 5

The reveal of Project Logan also gives a little more credence to a leaked video that was supposedly taken by an audience member at GTC (GPU Technology Conference) in March 2013. The video shows a developer off-screen demonstrating some new graphics hardware.

The video first shows off a small indoors scene of a building with gun powder marks, bullet holes, and blood on the floors – it looks really low-end. The audio is a bit muffled, but I’ve managed to get some of the dialogue into text here.

“Okay, so what we have here is state of the art graphics… its actually running on a high-end tablet, the latest-generation iPad 4. Forty percent of the A6x silicon is GPUs, a whole bunch of GPUs in there. So this is an iPad… pretty good-looking graphics, don’t you think?

Alright, so why don’t we now change over to… Kepler. [some pause] What do you guys think? A little bit different? So [we have] dynamic lighting, particle systems and rich geometry, High Dynamic range lighting, all the shadows and its a struggle to go back. This is Mobile Kepler.”

At the time, no-one though that it was possible to actually run Battlefield 3 on a tablet and the video was initially thought to be a hoax. But it is there and we now have proof from Nvidia itself that Mobile Kepler does exist and it is coming to devices sooner than you’d think.

While they have not committed to any time frames, Nvidia says that Tegra 5 will be in devices in Q2/Q3 2014.