Nvidia has been making lots of inroads in the smartphone and tablet market with its Tegra chips. The dual-core Terga 2 processor is already being used on the Motorola Xoom tablet, among other products. However the company is already working on its next generation mobile chip which it has code named, not so humbly, "Kal-El". The quad-core based chip isn"t due to be released until later this year but today Nividia has released a new video via YouTube that shows off the graphics capabilities of Kal-El.
The video, which you can check out below, shows a demo-game called Glowball that will actually be released to the Android Market when Kal-El based Android devices are released. The video and demo shows off the lighting features of the processor. The light reflections are dynamic and are handled in real time, making Glowball"s visuals much more realistic than most mobile based games that have static and flat lighting. The ball also moves into stacks of barrels which fall down more realistically. While PC gamers are certainly used to such in-game physics effects having such features on a smartphone or tablet-based game is currently not possible.
To further demonstrate the point, two of Kal-El"s four processor cores are turned off during the video demo. The reduced frame rate of Glowball is instantly unplayable with all of the lighting and physics effects turned on. The video"s narrator also points out that the demo is being run on pre-production silicon which means the final production version should be between 24 to 30 percent faster than even this impressive video shows.