The Tegra 4 GPU, NVIDIA Claims Better Performance Than iPad 4

Dukutek.com- At CES the other day, NVIDIA announced its Tegra four SoC presenting some ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGE Cortex A15s managing from as much as 1. 9GHz as well as a sixth Cortex A15 managing from between 800 - 800MHz with regard to lighter in weight workloads. Though most of TOP DOG Jen-Hsun Huang's business presentation dedicated to the particular advancements throughout PC as well as video camera functionality, GPU functionality really should go to a significant improve around Tegra 3.

This huge discouragement for a lot of had been that will NVIDIA looked after the particular non-unified structure involving Tegra 3, as well as won't thoroughly support OpenGL ES 3. 0 while using the T4's GPU. NVIDIA statements the particular structure is more preferable suited to the type of content material which will be on equipment throughout the Tegra 4's leadership.

Rapidly commonalities to be able to Tegra 3, aspects of the particular Tegra four GPU happen to be improved upon. Whilst we live nonetheless somewhat faraway from a great GPU deep-dive within the structure, we complete have an overabundance of particulars as compared to had been originally announced on the push occasion.

    

Tegra 4 features 72 GPU "cores", which are really individual components of Vec4 ALUs that can work on both scalar and vector operations. Tegra 2 featured a single Vec4 vertex shader unit (4 cores), and a single Vec4 pixel shader unit (4 cores). Tegra 3 doubled up on the pixel shader units (4 + 8 cores). Tegra 4 features six Vec4 vertex units (FP32, 24 cores) and four 3-deep Vec4 pixel units (FP20, 48 cores). The result is 6x the number of ALUs as Tegra 3, all running at a max clock speed that's higher than the 520MHz NVIDIA ran the T3 GPU at. NVIDIA did hint that the pixel shader design was somehow more efficient than what was used in Tegra 3. 

 

If we assume a 520MHz max frequency (where Tegra 3 topped out), a fully featured Tegra 4 GPU can offer more theoretical compute than the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in Apple's A6X. The advantage comes as a result of a higher clock speed rather than larger die area. This won't necessarily translate into better performance, particularly given Tegra 4's non-unified architecture. NVIDIA claims that at final clocks, it will be faster than the A6X both in 3D games and in GLBenchmark. The leaked GLBenchmark results are apparently from a much older silicon revision running no where near final GPU clocks.

 

 Tegra 4 does offer some additional enhancements over Tegra 3 in the GPU department. Real multisampling AA is finally supported as well as frame buffer compression (color and z). There's now support for 24-bit z and stencil (up from 16 bits per pixel). Max texture resolution is now 4K x 4K, up from 2K x 2K in Tegra 3. Percentage-closer filtering is supported for shadows. Finally, FP16 filter and blend is supported in hardware. ASTC isn't supported.

If you're missing details on Tegra 4's CPU, be sure to check out our initial coverage.