Mobile is about to get much prettier

Ahead of its showing at CES 2015, Nvidia has demonstrated some serious next-gen mobile capabilities through its Tegra X1 “super chip”.

How next-gen? Well the company has showcased Epic Games’ Elemental demo running off the chip.

You may recall the “Elemental” demo being used to show off Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 technology on PC in 2012, and in 2013 it was used to show off the PlayStation 4’s technical capabilities.

Now Nvidia is flexing its Elemental processing prowess on mobile.

In case you forgot what the demo looks like, here’s a clip:

The new processor is based on the chip maker’s Maxwell graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture, which it said was rolled out only months ago in the GeForce GTX 980.

Tegra X1 provides double the performance of its predecessor, the Tegra K1, which debuted at last year’s CES and was based on its previous generation Kepler architecture, Nvidia said.

According to Nvidia, because Tegra X1 supports a full suite of modern graphics standards, it took a developer just a week to get “Elemental” running on the chip, with a little longer spent on optimization and polish.

“While the demo is as powerful as ever, on Tegra X1, Elemental consumes just a fraction of the power,” the company said.

Nvidia promised that Tegra X1 supports all major graphics standards, including Unreal Engine 4, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, CUDA®, OpenGL ES 3.1 and the Android Extension Pack.

Tegra X1’s technical specifications include:

256-core Maxwell GPU
8 CPU cores (4x ARM Cortex A57 + 4x ARM Cortex A53)
60 fps 4K video (H.265, H.264, VP9)
1.3 gigapixel of camera throughput
20nm process

While mobile is one of the applications for the chip, Nvidia is aiming to give “supercomputer-class” power to a new generation of automotive applications, autonomous machines and embedded products as well.

But the gaming applications are something special, if you can picture mobile devices pushing out PS4-level graphics. That’s definitely something.

Tegra X1 should start appearing in the first half of 2015.