NVIDIA Project Kal-El Tegra Tech Demo

NVIDIA is showing off it’s quad-core next generation Tegra chips for mobile devices this week at Computex with a new tech demo. The video below includes:

• Glowball, a game designed to fully exploit the power of quad-core
• True dynamic lighting rendered real time on the NVIDIA GPU of Kal-El; this is the first time true dynamic lighting is feasible on a mobile device and brings more life and interactivity to a 3D environment
• Real-time physics processing across the 4 CPU cores of Kal-El; the lifelike draped cloth responds to the environment’s gravity and objects and gives a greater sense of realism to the game; you can see the visual degradation when reducing to only two cores.

Below the video is a description of the tech demo.

Project Kal-El quad-core demo gives glimpse into future of mobile gaming

By Matt Wuebbling

A few months back, we unveiled Project Kal-El – our next-gen Tegra super chip – as the world’s first mobile quad-core processor. Kal-El combines a battery-friendly, powerhouse of a quad-core processor with a 12-core NVIDIA GPU that supports 3D stereo.

Given that dual-core processors are already on market, you might be wondering how Project Kal-El’s quad-core technology will improve the mobile experience. Rather than try to explain it, we’ve put together a hands-on demo to give you a sneak peek at the new capabilities coming to superphones and tablets later this year.

The ball serves as the light source. As it rolls, it casts its effect on different objects. This shows off the power of true dynamic lighting, rendered in real-time with physics (no canned animations here, folks). Thanks to Project Kal-El, Glowball’s true dynamic lighting brings more life and interactivity to a 3D environment. This marks the first time this type of lighting is feasible on a mobile device.

Glowball also leverages the accelerometer inside the device, affecting real-time movements of drapes throughout the game. As the user tilts the device, the gravity in the scene changes and drapes respond accordingly.

The movements are calculated using physics and are simulated across Project Kal-El’s four CPU cores. Again, no canned animations. As the ball rolls through the drapes, they respond how you’d expect them to in real life. In addition, as the ball collides into the jack-in-the-boxes and barrels, the scene responds. Notice how the visual quality degrades when only two CPU cores are used. It’s clear that the quad-core processor in Project Kal-El is required for this level of realism.