Get ready for more graphics power in your mobile devices, nVidia's first upgrade to its generation of "wireless media possessors" is here.
Ok, let’s see if we can’t escape 3GSM mobile phones for a minute. Well, perhaps not escape exactly, but at least inch away from the handsets directly as it appears there is news coming from outside Cannes as well. Graphics mogul nVidia has stepped up to the plate to announce an updated version of its GoForce chip for portable gaming devices and mobile phones.
Branded the 4800, it upgrades on the 4500 (which we covered last year) by adding 30fps MPEG 4 decode and encode at image resolutions of up to 640 x 480 and can compress three Megapixel images using jpeg to save memory. Full duplex, real time, two-way video conferencing at 352 x 288 pixels at 30fps is also now possible.
Features carried over from the 4500 include nPower, a battery saving technology that switches off unnecessary chip components when not in use, and the basic 128bit memory interface with 1.3MB of 128bit SRAM. Anti-Aliasing is still missing form the 4800 but like the 4500 its 3D capabilities do include: programmable shaders, bilinear and trilinear texture filtering, and texture compression.
The 4500 was dubbed “the world’s first wireless media prossessor” (WMP) at its launch in September and immediately picked up by Gizmondo for use in its gamepads. No development partners were announced this time around but nVidia did say it expects devices based around the 4800 to be released by the end of the year.