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Nvidia Launches High Powered Mobile Graphics Chip
elbazo writes "Nvidia today launched their new mobile chip the GoForce 5500, which provides a massive jump in graphics technology for handheld and mobile devices. Capable of 'easily' rendering Quake 3, support for 1024x768 graphics output and real time playback of H.264, WMV9 and MPEG4 movies at high resolution the chip looks set to rock the mobile world."
I just wonder, if this chip has really low energy consumption, is it possible to make a videocard out of it (i.e. one that doesn't require extra large heatsinks to work)?
nVidia has been saying they were going to rock the mobile world for years. I'll believe it when I see more. nVidia may have been spanking ATI on the desktop (x1900 not withstanding), but ATI has been proven in mobile and handheld. nVidia's efforts have been too power hungry for anything but desktop replacement laptops. Lets hope things change, but I don't believe nVidia pronouncements of "rocking."
because headshots with railguns aren't yet frequent enough on subways.
...do you really want to play Q3 on your handheld?
:)
...okok, I do
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
While I could see easily the benefits such a chip would have on the tablet PC market, I fail to see how it will help the PDA/SmartPhone market when the idea has been tried again and again, and people have shown that they are simply not interested in watching movies on their 1.5" flipscreen phone, especially when one considers that the battery life would be ultimately non-existant after watching even a short full-length movie...
"support for 1024x768 graphics output"
Yes, we're living in the future!
Maybe they're trying to create a market for multimedia stuff where there currently isn't one, but this doesn't seem like what people want. I'd rather have a cell phone with a long battery life than one that has really cool graphics that drain the battery after 20 minutes.
Maybe they're hoping that fuel cell technology gets small enough for cell phones by the time this hits the market.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Slightly offtopic, but you might find it interesting nevertheless.m l)
The Motorola RAZR V3X sports a nVidia Goforce 3D 4800 WMP, but for some strange reason it's not used by the KVM. In other words games using the Java 3D API will have the same sucky performance as phones with no hardware acceleration. Some guy even started a petition to get Motorola to change it (http://www.petitiononline.com/v3xpet/petition.ht
Um... okay. So?
...I'll just go back to waiting for the optic nervesplice HUD overlay, thanks :D
I mean i guess it's cool they could do it and all, but... the PSP's screen size, frex, is acceptible. Barely. But my cellphone...? (I like how the articles cites "...the original Quake 3 for the Playstation," btw. Uh...)
I just don't get how it's desireable or even not-painful to be looking at smaller and smaller screens and cramming higher resolutions on them. So WHAT? You REALLY want to watch a full length movie on a moving train/bus/backseat on a screen the size of your hand? Ow. Ugh. Oh what an experience. Nah.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
And yet it has 1024x768, and no HDCP support?
Slashdotters seem to have a short memory anyhow. Here's a jogger.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Quake 3 was released in '99 - 7 years ago. I remember playing that on a 400 MHz G4 with an ATI 128 and being pretty impressed.
Well, I suppose that Nokia's Linux based web tablet (770) has a pretty decent 800x480 display, and I bet that something like this chip would be quite a good match for it.
... maybe.
I don't know about mobile phones though - maybe the highest end communicator style phones
Of course digital cameras are multifunction these days, and have large ridiculous DPI displays on them. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 3" 800x600 display on one soon. Again, this GPU would be good for that, and for playback of recorded video, and the 10MP capability suggests it might be targetted (in nVidia's dreams?) at high end consumer digital cameras (which will be 5MP to 8MP for the next couple of years).
You won't see it in a $200 phone though. Not this year or next anyway.
Oh, the sarcasm. It's so painful it hurts.
It REALLY bugs me seeing a laptop with a powerful graphics card (Alienware.). Anyone understand why?
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That is off the hook for using the phone as a (video) camera - I'm not much of a gamer, but if anything got me interested about upcoming phones it was the ability to always be carrying a high-def camera with you at all times.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
Why has no one developed an external fire-wire graphics card for laptops?
The only reason that I can think of is that even fire-wire is not fast enough?
Anyone know what order of magnitude increaase in communications speed we would need to make something like this work? (assuming that is the problem, or course)
In all seriousness, isn't it an archaic game? What is the point, its like saying an athlon x2 4800+ can run Solitaire with ease!
That's really the key question here, and the answer will determine how usefull it is. No one wants a mobile device, be it a PDA or whatever that kills the battery in an hour. I see no technical specs on power consumption, which is a bit worrying since I can only assume that nVidia isn't terribly proud of it.
AccountKiller
I think this could be huge for graphical interfaces. Everyone seems to be focusing on games just because the blurb mentioned Quake3, but what about Quartz3D on a handheld device. Hmmm? Handhelds would be great to fill with eye-candy. Touch screens with ripple effects, major WOW factor there.
http://www.stereo3d.com/hmd.htm is what you really need!
Now of course this is a statement in a press story so it probably has all the accuracy of well a press story (0) but what exactly does this mean?
Quake 3 was a PC game. It was the game I got a matrox G400 (bumpmapping) for, well that and dualhead, and I think was typically played at 1024x768 resolution.
So when was it released on the playstation. Oh right, never. A version was released for the playstation 2. Big difference right there but even with its improved hardware the PS2 is still not exactly up to snuff. The resolution is TV, wich is far far lower then you would ever accept on a pc.
So what exactly is this new chip capable off? Can it play at 1024x768 OR can it play at playstation (2) resolutions? Why does it compare a pc game with a lesser console version?
I smell a load of marketing. Reminds me of the days on the farm.
It may be powerfull but comparing it to a poor console version of an old console game is not exactly inspiring.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
At first I was going to crack a joke on how hard it would be to circle-strafe-jump on a mobile phone.
Then I realised that kids who can text at 40 characters per second probably won't even blink at the difficulty.
You know you're getting old when you still need a mouse and a keyboard for FPS games...
You were playing Quake 3 on a handheld 5 years ago?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Probably can run mods too. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Okay, the majority of the comments thus far come from a PC-centric mindset, that is, you assume that the consumers of this chip will have PCs so why would they bother? I see this product as far more likely to be aimed at South-East Asian (e.g. Malaysian) markets where people are far less likely to have computers, but practically everyone has a mobile phone. In those markets, a chip that can play Quake 3 is pretty damn awesome.
And let's not forget that video encoding and decoding are vital steps in video calls; if this chip can make those steps faster/better, an increase in the quality of those services is just a step away.
You aren't going to get HD resolution out of a fisheye lense, regardless of what electronics you have backing it. That's the real limiting factor with a phone. I have a phone that takes 640x480 stills, which is SD essentially (SD is actuallt 720x480 for NTSC, but the pixels aren't square). In reality, it does not get that kind of resolution. Sure it takes that many pixels, but it's all kinds of blurry and noisy. That little lense is just insufficient to really resolve that kind of detail. To get any kind of useful HD picture is just going to take a bigger, more expensive lense than you'd want to put on a cell phone.
I am not disagreeing with your comment but I have a small nit to pick; the PS2 does indeed have 1024x768 resolution, but only in VGA output mode, which AFAIK is only used in Linux, which in turn can only be run on old-style (big) PS2s because it requires the hard drive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps they could push these chips in the direction of "Car Computers." Personally, I think it would be really neat to have a full entertainment system, with a nice powerful LCD display at 1024x768 in my car. If I had kids, I suppose it would make more sense for long trips etc. ... just my $0.02 :-)
But your clearly and idiot. [Image of a defanged viper gumming its prey] That was a pretty effective insult...
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
Ooh, a cell-phone that you can play games on...
AND watch movies on...
heck, let's even throw on an FM radio; more features = more profits, right?
And we'll call it...
The N-Gage.
To their credit, though, if a cell-phone can take 10-megapixel pics, I'd seriously consider it.
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
But will it run Duke Nukem Forever?
The basic problem is that you bought a fuckin' eMachine! What were you thinkin!?!
... um ... oh, I know ... that it was a $500 laptop with 11b/g wireless, 2600 AMD CPU, a video card that would run The Sims 2, and that I could put 706MB of RAM in for an additional $20.
I was thinking
From that viewpoint, it's been great.
My point is that having non-upgradeable video cards for laptops is kind of silly.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yeah, this is going to rock the mobile world, definitely. The phone I had 5 years ago would drop calls. My current phone drops calls and periodically crashes, totally locking up when the bluetooth, camera, MP3 player, or web browser decides to take a shit. Now we have souped up graphics going into these bad boys, and man, it's gonna rock. I can't wait until I have to install a video driver update on my friggin' telephone.
1024x768 is perfect for what I'll call ther "vertual gadget"
THe rumer mills are saying Apple is woring on something like this. Recently filed pattents and trademarks back this up. I fuly expect them to sell some kind of touch sensitiv LCD scren handhald device that does NOT look or act like a small scale desktop.
Apples' range of portables has been, to be kind, lacking in features the past couple of years mainly because of their boat-anchor PPC fetish. Apple's Teh Shiny! has been the iPlod range of jewelry and fashion statements, their premier bottom-line enhancement mechanism. Video, hard disks, flash but no sign of an Apple PDA in the mix.
But... imagine an Apple PDA with Aqua, enough smarts to do the look-and-feel kabuki of its bigger brothers, a coat-pocket tablet-gesture device with a 1024x768 display and a Centrino, a shitload of Flash and no battery-sucking hard drive, able to run those new-fangled PPC/x86 fat binaries native. Of course it would be slow and not exactly the device most people whould run PhotoShop on, but as a workalike sibling to the iBooks with all the wireless connectivity Teh Shiny! comes with as standard today I figure it would fly out the door sales-wise.
The killer for this pipe-dream was fitting enough GPU power under the hood, affordable in power consumption terms, to make Aqua usable in less than geological time -- in independent tests, ten out of ten Apple owners never want to see a spinning beachball ever again. I speculated about Cell as a dedicated Aqua graphics engine but from what I've seen about its power consumption that doesn't fly. This device might just do the job though. Hmmm.
The concept of a 10MP image on a mobile handheld with a 10-cent fixed-focus plastic lens blows my mind. Like putting a 400 horsepower engine in a Yugo...
Someone wake me up when they start putting decent lenses in camera phones.
briefly searched and didn't see anyone mention the bitboys.. this seems to be their focus now, after it seemed that the bitboys were to take over all graphics hardware http://www.bitboys.fi/ worth a look arround, or a search if you'd never heard of them before.
actaully, Quake3 came out in either 1999 or 2000... the Test was open in 1999, and I was playing it the summer before I went to college, so yeah. =)
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
I think that this new chipset is pretty significant. While the ability to render Q3 at 1024x768 seems pretty useless on a tiny screen, the H.264 and WMV9 support stand out. These codecs (especially the H.264) could be used in the future to possibly do things like mobile TVIP from your house using something like a slingbox. This chip could also enable some pretty crazy menu effects/video effects in-phone, which could prove slightly useful. The limitations of the small cell phone screen do hamper this significantly, however.
Windows Vista needs good graphics card to support fancy desktop enviroment. Maybe there will be Windows Mobile Vista which takes advantages of this Chip! Wow so cool~
PCI Voodoo 3, 32 meg. Quake 3, 1024x768, Standard OpenGL, max everything else. I pull an easy 60 fps. I wish we would use a game that's a little more up to date for this type of comparison.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
To me, there is just something inherently wrong with a "mobile phone" having a 3D Graphics card... Isn't the purpose of a phone to allow one to *talk* to other people?
Or in the 1960s, did people expect their rotary phone to make breakfast and wash the dishes too????
i suppose nvidia knows of a device that is not yet announced otherwise a resolution like the one proposed is a huge waste. Also most of the cell phone manufacturers prefer that developers use Java rather than native code so 3D gaming capabilities are a little bit too much at the moment. Maybe nvidia should focus on their partners' network a little bit more ( just like they did with the desktop chips ).
...is their Linux support the same as their support for desktop models? If so I might have to rip out my ATI mobility I still can't get to work and plug that sucker in!
-Eric Kincl
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
damn good point, if only more laptop makers thought this way...
By opposite look: is it worth to play Q3 with strong desktop-like video card on the screen 3x3 inches wide? Is it worth?
:-) Honestly if you have some nice demountable construction with magnifier that you can attach to your mobile then you can achieve twice as big mobile phone display!
;-)
I would advise the mobile manufacturers to sell a huge magnifier together with their phones...
Buy your own: Nokia 3231, 5MPixel photos + 10xMagnifier, Q3 for free!
I hope that Nokia will not patent it, so:
LICENSE: I grant this idea to public for free. You can do whatever you want to do with it, I will not demand any fees or whatsoever... blablabla... The only requirement is that you MUST mention my name and website in any such as product based on my GREAT idea.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
It seems interesting the timing of this; I wonder if Apple will pick this up if they are indeed going to bring out a new IPod video. It seems to me this chip would be a perfect fit, with its resolution and H.264 capability.
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
Firewire - 400 or 800 Mbps (megabits/second) = 50-100 MB/second (Megabytes/second) minus overhead
PCI (standard old PCI) - 32 bits @ 33 MHz in most configurations = 133 MB/second 64-bit and 66 MHz PCI existed but were rare. Even standard PCI is faster than 1394.
AGP - 1x is 266 MB/sec, 4x is 1066 MB/s, and 8x is 2133 MB/s
PCI Express - x1 is 250 MB/sec, x16 is 4000 MB/sec (in both cases, this is minus some unknown amount of overhead.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's like it's 1996 already!
But...it's on your cell phone. That is so 2k6.
My P3-800 with a TNT2 card can easily render Quake3 at 1024x768. Man, I really should upgrade one of these years...
People with POS PCs like yours are not even in the fringe market for new GPUs.
Today's new GPU is next year's POS PC.
We all know that. I can't tell you how many decades I shelled out anywhere from $2000 to $8000 for the latest and greatest. Nowadays, the difference between a $500 laptop and last year's $2000 GPU PC is - nothing.
So why not make sure that video cards designed for mobile CPUs (as this one is), can be UPGRADED for existing laptops?
We don't buy a new car just because there's a new sound system out for it. We just have the new one installed.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Damn kids these days.... Back in my day, they'd stone you if you didn't know how to spell!
Karnal
At second glance, this announcement seems like an 'also ran' product. This chip is a Open GL ES 1.0 part. ATI just announced their OGLES 1.1 part. For us in the game industry that makes a huge difference, because 1.1 allows for bump mapping and real lighting. The 'Rooms Demo' screen shots are show some of these effects.
http://www.ati.com/products/imageon238x/
Of course, as usual Nvidia PR prowess is awesome, and has totally mindfucked everyone into believing this is something new.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_21673.html
COMPUTEX 2005--TAIPEI, TAIWAN--MAY 31, 2005
NVIDIA GeForce Go 6 Series and Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM) brings state-of-the-art NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series performance to notebook platforms with a consistent graphics interface enabling interchangeable graphics cards in notebook PCs.
They have had upgradable video cards for laptops for a while now. All the Dell M170/Insp90000/XPS have them, among others. You just limited yourself by cheaping out on a budget laptop.
You get what you pay for, and you don't get what you don't pay for... in your case: upgradeability.
They have had upgradable video cards for laptops for a while now. All the Dell M170/Insp90000/XPS have them, among others. You just limited yourself by cheaping out on a budget laptop.
... by saving $2500 today and investing it in Canadian, Japanese, and Euro value stocks ... my $4000 in two years can be used to buy - the exact same upgradeable system for $1000 and leave me with $3000 to blow on game software and titles.
Or
So, who's smarter - the guy who buys an xBox360 on Amazon for $2500 in Dec 2005 - or the guy who waits until Dec 2006 and buys the xBox360 bundled with all the useful stuff and a couple of good games at Costco for $200?
My money's on the latter, not the former.
[caveat - my first degree was in Marketing and Sales]
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Isn't the point of a laptop portability and not power?
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