Hasta La Gadget!

NVIDIA’s apparently still not out of news from its CES 2013 presser — the company just unveiled the i500 Soft Modem chip. The soft modem, which is the fruit of the company’s purchase of Icera and is utilized with Tegra 4, is a baseband processor that can do 1.2 trillion operations per second and is reprogrammable with software to work with a lot of different networks. The modem, which is 40 percent the size of a conventional baseband chip, is sampling to manufacturers this month.

Joseph Volpe contributed to this report.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, NVIDIA

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A video shown on-stage during NVIDIA’s press conference just unveiled “Project Shield,” a gaming controller / portable console running the just announced Tegra 4. The controller looks an awful lot like a PlayStation 3 DualShock 3, albeit with an HD screen attached. NVIDIA’s promising 38 hours of gaming out of the rechargeable lithium ion batteries built-in, a swanky audio system “on par with” jamboxes, and a full-on Android gaming experience. A micro SD sits next to an HDMI output, one USB port, and a standard eighth inch audio jack, directly below the customizable 5-inch “retinal display” touchscreen. Update: It’s a 1,280 x 720 screen at 294 dpi, for the record.

NVIDIA’s hoping Shield will replace your average controller as well — perhaps with that newly detailed Grid system? — and company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off its use in-tandem with a swanky LG 4K television on-stage, navigating through media without pause. He also gave us a taste of a few games running on it (Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin and a boxing title) via NVIDIA’s Tegrazone gaming store. But beyond just Android games we’ve already seen, still-in-development Unreal Engine 3 title Hawken was also given a multiplayer run, and looked notably more attractive than the previous two titles.

As good as the handheld’s newfangled Tegra 4 chip seems to be, it still can’t hold a candle to Nvidia’s own GTX 680 — Huang explained that the Shield can play more than just Tegrazone games — it can take over your gaming PC, too. He explained that Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software can pipe PC gaming to the handheld over your local network, giving Shield owners access to their Steam library (navigatable by Big Picture Mode, of course) directly from the device. It looks like users will be able to purchase PC games through Tegrazone, too.

Huang showed the crowd Need for Speed: Most Wanted running in real-time on the device. It’s … well, it’s really impressive. There’s little (if any) perceptible lag, and this is a racing game we’re seeing (as in that lag really matters). The next game up is Assassin’s Creed 3, which looks similarly impressive on the Shield’s 5-inch screen. Finally, we’re seeing Steam launched directly from Tegrazone, and it launches directly into Big Picture Mode. Beyond just playing games via streaming, it looks like we’ll be able to buy them directly on Steam, through Shield. We’ll be getting a closer look at Project Shield later this week, and we’ll be sure to put it through its paces. Oh, and we’ll ask for a price and release window, as we’ve yet to hear official word on either. Can’t wait? Tide yourself over with NVIDIA’s official press release after the break.

Update 2: NVIDIA tells us Project Shield’s roughly in the beta stage of development, and currently doesn’t include an LTE radio (WiFi only). It’s running Jelly Bean at the moment, but may change by the time it’s expected to ship, in “Q2 2013.” Still no word on pricing, sadly.

Joseph Volpe and Sean Buckley contributed to this report

Continue reading NVIDIA unveils Project Shield, a Tegra 4-powered Android gaming handheld

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, HD, Mobile, NVIDIA

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This week the folks at NVIDIA made with the reveal of the NVIDIA Tegra 4 SoC, a processor with 72 GPU cores – and with it came the next-generation NVIDIA Computational Photography Engine, architecture that basically gives your camera the ability to take amazing photos. This processor process takes a massive amount of image data in at once, allowing you to create what you’d only been able to do with HDR before here, now, with a single exposure – instantly.

A demonstration was done with an unnamed tablet onstage with a bright window behind a bar, a photograph taken of NVIDIA’s CEO and a lady. This photo, with most traditional cameras, would be blown out in one way or another without a doubt. What NVIDIA was able to do was not only take an image with exposures mixed to create a balanced image, they were able to do it instantly, right there on the spot. Additionally, it was shown onstage live, with a sliding screen showing a preview of what would be photographed with ease.

This is what NVIDIA calls the first “Always-On” HDR Camera. They’ve made to clear that this process will work for all apps – anything working with a Tegra 4 processor. Much in the same way that music changed for the better, became much more high definition with each new generation of transmission technology, NVIDIA makes the case that this technology will change photos.

Stick around all week right here on SlashGear in our NVIDIA Tegra hub as well as our CES portal for more NVIDIA action than you know what to do with!

NVIDIA Tegra 4 brings on “Always-On” HDR Camera technology is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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[CES 2013] NVIDIA is not quite done with their press conference just yet, and this time we are looking at the birth of Skynet. No, we’re kidding, it would be the rise of cloud computing, and over the course of time, the infrastructure cost has been lowered dramatically recently. Gamers do ask themselves how come cloud computing did not bring that much benefit in terms of gaming, but things look set to change with the introduction of NVIDIA Grid. Basically, the NVIDIA Grid is a rack that is packed full of GPUs, and has been equated to be roughly the equivalent of 700 Xbox 360s where processing power is concerned.

During the demonstration, it was shown that the user interface has been rendered in the cloud (similar to what Vudu offers), which is great since clients are then able to be ported in a jiffy. Some product pimpin’ was done where LG’s Smart TV saw the NVIDIA Grid client ported over, where the TV then ran games onver the cloud in a fluid manner. Granted, this is just a side-scroller, but it is impressive enough. Following that, an Android client that ran NVIDIA Grid showed the game where the gamer last left it, meaning the client’s hardware does not matter any more since all it does is stream data back and forth.

NVIDIA is working to grow their list of partners for the NVIDIA Grid system, and we do look forward to see how widespread NVIDIA Grid’s adoption rate would be.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Dropbox For Windows 8 Now Available For Download, EnGenius Announces Wireless AC Home Entertainment And Media Pods,

Here it is: the next biggest, baddest mobile processor, the silicon monster that’ll power your next coveted super-smartphone. It packs 72 GPU cores, 4 A15 CPU cores, and a built-in LTE. More »