Nvidia has been putting out ARM-based platforms for a few years now, but has yet to really leverage its graphical expertise on mobile platforms. The GeForce ultra-low voltage (ULV) GPUs packaged with the company’s Tegra chips have been about on-par with the Adreno and PowerVR, but that could change with the release of Nvidia’s next ARM chip. At a recent event, Nvidia had a newly optimized demo of the Tegra 5 chip (codenamed Logan) which will feature a Kepler-based GPU similar to the cores in desktop GTX 600 and 700 cards.

This isn’t the first time Logan silicon has been shown to the general public — that was back in July, but the development board and demo have been further refined since then. The dev kit for Logan is still quite massive, but the system-on-a-chip (SoC) itself will be smaller than a dime when it is complete and ready for use in phones and tablets. Even without stepping the architecture down a notch –Tegra 5 will still be 28nm — the GPU in Logan looks to be capable of some impressive feats.

Nvidia talked about a few numbers at the event, but the centerpiece of Logan’s coming out party was the Faceworks “Digital Ira” rendering test, which Nvidia has been working on for a few years. This is an advanced real-time engine that renders a realistic human face with proper reflections, lighting, skin textures, and expressions that almost succeed in vaulting the uncanny valley. We last saw Ira on Logan over the summer, but the engine had been scaled down for the debut — the skin shaders are simplified and the scene is only being drawn at 1080p.

As the Tegra 5 SoC continues to develop, Nvidia has been able to boost Ira’s shader passes to render more realistic textures (as seen below). Much of this is thanks to Nvidia’s GameWorks developer tools. Many of the top Tegra-optimized Android titles have been built with this software in recent years, and it has now been updated for Tegra 5 (and to show off Ira). Still, the Logan dev kit only pulls 2-3W of power to do all this — the final Tegra 5 for phones should run at about 1W whereas a Titan needs at least 250W.

In a tablet, Nvidia believes the beefier 2W version of Logan will be more powerful than the PS3 or the GeForce 8800 GTX — in the neighborhood of 400 GFLOPS. Granted, these are both a few years out of date, but we’re clearly into the realm of desktop-level graphics. These raw numbers put the mobile Kepler GPU at around 5.2x the power of the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the most recent iPad. At this level there is the potential for memory bandwidth to bottleneck performance, but the company has not yet commented on this.

Logan, with its Kepler GPU, will support OpenGL 4.3 and CUDA 5 out of the box, which could allow more realistic graphics, but also true general-purpose GPU computing on a mobile device. Logan is supposed to go into full production in early 2014 and reach devices in Q2. This will be Nvidia’s last 32-bit ARM SoC — the follow-up to Logan, currently codenamed Parker, is expected to implement Nvidia’s custom ARMv8 64-bit processing cores and the next-generation Maxwell GPU.

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