nVidia confirms Epic line on mobile graphics development

When 3D graphics was first delivered to an unsuspecting population by nVidia, the market rapidly mirrored the early Wild West land grab and scramble. Products that were thought to be ‘the standard' one week, were rendered [No pun intended – Ed] utterly useless the week after. nVidia is now presenting this scenario as a single, authoritative slide – confirming KitGuru's interview with Epic last year.

When KitGuru caught up with gaming legend Mike Gamble at the unveiling of the first ever Epic University in the UK, we managed to cover a vast amount of ground.

One area that was particularly interesting was the rapid rate of development of mobile graphics and the way that this would impact (a) the development of handsets in general and (b) the creation of a common gaming platform in particular.

Mike's opinion on this rate of development was clear when he said, “But the rate of development is much faster. Really quick. The development of hardware and software that took place over 10 years with PCs and graphic cards, is taking just two or three years with mobile platforms”.

The story that appeared on TweakTown yesterday included a great new graph from nVidia which seems to say almost exactly what Mike had predicted.  Looking at where nVidia reckons mobile graphics power will be in 2014, then checking directly left to see where it intersects the PC graphics line, we can see that Jen Hsun's chaps believe phones will have more than GeForce 7000 / Radeon HD 2000 levels of power available for games.

Putting a Sony PlayStation 3 or XBox 360 into a phone is no mean trick. Certainly when Hexus reported that ATI had ponied up with Nokia back in 2006, the world plus dog expected it would happen within a couple of years. It wasn't that quick, but it's definitely coming.

KitGuru says: While we all love the idea of modern PC gaming running on phones, the reality is that the reduced screen size and usage model (i.e. being out and about) will probably mean a different kind of evolution. Think PlayStation-to-Wii or XBox-to-Kinect and you're probably in the right zone.

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