There won't be a Tegra 5 because the company is making the Logan processor

Sep 5, 2013 14:56 GMT  ·  By

There are a few questions that have, thus far, stumped most NVIDIA fans, like why the NVIDIA Shield handheld gaming device is restricted to US and Canada, why NVIDIA doesn't seem to mind ”overpricing” their graphics cards, and why they delayed the Tegra 4 SoC.

The meeting we had with Luciano Alibrandi, the director of NVIDIA's public relations department, EMEA, elucidated some of those mysteries.

Not all though. To give just one example, we still don't know when the NVIDIA Shield will reach Europe, and why it hasn't yet.

What we do now know is that $1000 graphics cards are meant to be expensive. NVIDIA never expects more than 2% of its customers to purchase it, so they always expect reviewers to say something along the lines of “the card is great but don't buy it.” They don't mind because the targeted consumers buy it anyway.

Also, according to NVIDIA, Tegra 4 was never actually delayed. More likely, it was always possible for it to come out later than everyone hoped, because many of the available engineers were working on Tegra 4i.

That said, while there haven't, so far, been many Tegra 4 product launches, this has changed, and is changing, thanks to tablets from ASUS, HP and Toshiba.

It also bears noting that releasing Tegra 4 late could work in NVIDIA's advantage. After all, if it had come out in 1H 2013, it might have been too early for owners of Tegra 3 slates to feel comfortable upgrading.

Thus, sales would have been week or delayed until late 2013 anyway.

Moving on, it wasn't Tegra 3 that the folks at the meeting were excited about, but Logan. Normally, we'd call it Tegra 5, but Alibrandi has been very clear on the fact that there is and will be no Tegra 5.

There wasn't any info on the CPU parts. Only the GPU, but what we saw was impressive. Essentially, the Kepler GPU in the Logan will be on par with the 8800 GTX, with 192 SMX cores.

Thus, Logan will be capable of console-level games. Assassin's Creed won't be ported to Android and ARM any time soon, but games on par with it should show up in short order.

After all, the tablet market has billions of customers, instead of the millions of the console segment. There is no reason game developers should shy away from adding a fifth element to the gaming ecosystem (PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Wii being the other four).

Compared to Tegra 4, Logan will be 3-4 times better at drawing graphics. We got to watch a demo of a lifelike human head grimacing and being astonished (among other things), although the lighting system was the real focus. And that was only a very rough demo. The final product will supposedly be much better at color and light rendering.

Logan will be released in the first half of 2014, with OpenGL 4.4, DX11, CUDA 5.0, Tessellation. The closest competing chips only have OpenGL ES 3.0. Its power draw will be of 2W, for full-day operation.

Note: Sebastian Pop and fellow editor Ionut Arghire are on the floor at IFA 2013 and are bringing you pictures and live reports on the latest products and previews. Find them all here.

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