Every few years a new bit of technology bumps digital graphics to a new level. Where once HDR lighting was the new darling on the scene, bloom became the next big thing and tessellation on from that. This year, it's been all about the facial rendering techniques, specifically deep tissue light refraction and we've seen it in several demos from big developers, as well as GPU manufacturers. However, just a few months on from showing us its new face technology running on a Titan GPU, Nvidia has managed to get it to run on a mobile chip, without much loss of clarity.
Don't believe me? See for yourself: [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx0t-WJFXzo']
This is all running on Nvidia's new chip, codenamed Project Logan and it is able to pull off almost all of the fancy effects that the Titan GPU can. It doesn't have quite as many passes, but there's HDR lighting, FXAA, deep-skin tissue light refraction and DX11 support.
The most amazing part of this whole thing however, is that Logan isn't some power hungry mobile chip that when fitted in a tablet will mean constant recharging. While the Titan powered demo used over 240 watts just for the graphics card, the Logan chip manages almost the same level of detail, with just 2-3 watts.
It also supports high detail tessellation, as this island demo shows: [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miEglxHz1iA']
What all of this means, is that developers will be able to build a game for the PC and scale it down to the mobile and tablet gaming space, without much of a loss in detail.
KitGuru Says: My jaw is on the floor. Mobile graphics have come on so fast in the past year it's unbelievable. [Thanks Kotaku]
Yeah, thanks to competition and huge market demand. Looks like the early years of desktop graphics where several players battle it out with comparable performance based on very different designs. Just hope this competition keeps up and increase the number of players rather than consolidating them.