NVIDIA nTeresting Newsletter - 1 March 2013

In this Issue

· The Tegra team went to Barcelona this week for Mobile World Congress. Jaw-dropping benchmarks, amazing new technologies and ultra-fun mobile gaming ensued!!!
· The day of launch GeForce driver timed with Crysis 3 was a boon for GeForce gamers.

Tegra Rocks MWC

The Tegra family - consisting of Tegra 4 and the just-announced Tegra 4i - had a great showing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. From amazing new performance benchmarks to our Phoenix reference phone to cool new HDR features for your phone or tablet, the Tegra team had it all covered.

We kicked off the show by lifting the hood and previewing how Tegra 4's 7 GPU cores and quad-core Cortex-A15 CPUs bring a consumer experience like no other. Tegra 4 is fast in real-world apps, but also in synthetic benchmarks, breaking records in the process. Numbers don't lie.

"NVIDIA Tegra 4 Benchmarked, Crushes Competition"

"NVIDIA Tegra 4 benchmarked, breaks all sorts of speed records"

"The benchmarks are coming in and there's no questioning it. The Tegra 4 is a total speed-demon."

"Apple's A6 processor is speedy to be sure, but the Tegra 4 nuked it."

"[Tegra 4] is pretty much twice as fast as the closest competitor: the already excellent Snapdragon S4 Pro."

The newest member of the Tegra family is Tegra 4i, our first integrated LTE processor that brings Tegra 4 goodness to mainstream smartphones. We showed it off at MWC in the Phoenix reference phone platform, and attendees couldn't get enough.

"While the Phoenix itself isn't for the end consumer, it certainly doesn't mean that we don't want one."

"Phoenix is a development device for OEMs built around NVIDIA's Tegra 4i platform, and on paper, it's a killer handset."

"The NVIDIA Tegra 4i is one hell of an SoC that will bring a new level of performance to devices that we use."

We didn't stop there. What makes Tegra rock are the amazing experiences you get from your Tegra-powered mobile device. And we showed off some new HDR camera features and graphically-intense games that made people take notice.

Our Chimera computational photography architecture brings the first always-on HDR photos and videos, HDR panoramic and persistent tap-to-track capabilities to your Tegra 4 or Tegra 4i mobile device. Reporters who saw it were impressed.

CNN called it one of MWC's hottest gadgets, writing "[NVIDIA] has been showing off real-time HDR photography capabilities that automatically adjust a picture for light and dark areas on the fly. It's something that today's cameras struggle to do, and certainly something where you need lots of power under the hood."

"... the new processor will allow users to take a Full HDR shot within 0.2 seconds, and that the processor is also capable of relaying live HDR details regardless of where you point the phone's camera. It's very clever."

"We had a chance to get a close look at this technology in action here at MWC and came away wishing we had Chimera in our mobile devices and cameras."

Consumers know to come to NVIDIA for gaming. And we didn't disappoint with five upcoming Tegra 4-optimized games at MWC - Zombie Driver, Burn Zombie Burn, Carie: Blood Mansion, RPG CODEX: The Warrior, Dead on Arrival 2 and RU Golf - that show off what Tegra 4's 72 custom GPU cores can do.

"Tegra 4 could help bring mobile gaming to the next level."

"The new games will be able to take advantage of the Tegra 4′s powerful processor and insane graphics processing units, bringing a new level of mobile gaming we just haven't seen before."

"Now that we are starting to see what the new Tegra 4 chip is capable of in both speed and graphics, you can expect nothing but more good things to come as developers learn to tweak and push the limits of what the hardware can do."

Got Crysis 3? Get GeForce

Crysis 3 hit last week and NVIDIA was ready with a day of launch driver. What did that driver do for GeForce owners?

"The dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690 remains the fastest card overall in Crysis 3, outpacing the new GeForce GTX Titan at both resolutions. Titan, however, clearly outpaces the other single-GPU powered cards which couldn't put up playable frame rates in this game, with the very high image quality settings that we used for testing."

SLI support was also ready day of launch.

"Near-perfect scaling is evident in Crysis 3. The game needs it, too, as performance on a single card is just about acceptable at 2,560x1,600. No other card/setup in this line-up can touch the two TITANs."

If two is good, then three is even better!

"The value ​​of the Asus ROG Ares II is certainly impressive in itself, but compared with two Titan GTX in SLI mode, it has nothing to stand up against. With a pair of NVIDIA's new flagships under the hood and a gliding smooth game displayed nicely across all three screens, we see no challenges to the gameplay here. When we connect a third GTX Titan, it pushed the FPS ​​even higher, with nearly 41 FPS on average, an almost unbelievably strong performance."

When a new game like Crysis 3 hits we want to play it, so we make sure our drivers are ready. And if you install GeForce Experience your game settings and driver updates are all handle automagically. One of the many advantages GeForce owners enjoy is our commitment to delivering ‘game ready' day of launch drivers delivered through GeForce Experience.