Amazing Nvidia Tegra 5 graphics capabilities revealed

At SIGGRAPH 2013, a conference dedicated to the discussion of high-end computing, Nvidia revealed plans for their next-generation mobile product designed to fit into their Tegra family – Project Logan.

In a nutshell, it is the Kepler architecture shrunk to fit into form factors such as mobile phones and tablet computers.

Nvidia calls it “Kepler Mobile” even though graphics cards based on the Kepler architecture have been around on laptops for quite some time. This is forgiveable because it’s not the same GPU that everyone imagined.

The graphics inside Tegra 5 consume almost a third of the power of competing devices like the Apple iPad 4 and Tegra 4, and it outperforms both with some incredible results.

Nvidia took their opportunity at SIGGRAPH to show off early, weeks-old prototype silicon running one of their most stressful tasks yet – their Digital Ira showcase.

Nvidia Tegra 5 running Digital Ira benchmark

It didn’t end there. Nvidia was first able to run real-time Tesselation on their graphics cards with the launch of the Geforce 400 cards based on the Fermi architecture. Fermi also included hardware for accelerating ray tracing for more realistic light sources, and also beefed up the shader and texture units to allow for effects that we take for granted today, like Bloom and HDR and better physics simulations.

Those technologies have made their way slowly into more efficient designs and it’s all there inside Tegra 5 as well. Nvidia showcased the other abilities of Tegra 5 with a short demonstration of an island with realistic terrain, water and lighting effects.

Running on the prototype board with what looks like a stock version of Android Jelly Bean, Nvidia may be less than 12 months away from getting this out into the market.

Mobile Kepler graphics power estimated to be better than a Geforce 8800GTX

If early power figures revealed at SIGGRAPH are to be believed, then Nvidia can get Tegra 5 into a phone with twice the power of an Apple iPad 4 and can slip it into a 10-inch tablet with as much as five times more power than the same iPad 4.

If that doesn’t blow your mind, it also supports modern graphics APIs such as DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4, CUDA 5.0, and may be capable of running Windows 8 RT.

Nvidia also estimates that the final silicon will be theoretically more powerful than – wait for it – a Geforce 8800GTX.

Tegra 5 lands in devices in Q2 or Q3 of 2014 and is set to find a home in many devices at a reasonable price point and will surely be an enticing buy for mobile gamers.