NVIDIA Clears Up Misconceptions about the Tegra 3

The NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor has been touted as one of the most powerful mobile processors available right now, and as such NVIDIA has a separate download store where you can download games that make the most of this impressive processor. The Tegra 3 promises special effects that no other processor can deliver, some great speeds and the ability to have console quality games on your Nexus 7 tablet or other Tegra 3 device. It all sounds too good to be true, especially with Samsung’s Exynos processor technically being more powerful, so I decided to do a little digging around and see if the Tegra 3 is indeed a brilliant chip that can produce graphics not seen anywhere else, or if it’s just NVIDIA’s marketing machine doing a brilliant job of making us think that it really is this good.

After looking through the internet for various forms of evidence, it seems that there are some misconceptions out there about what a Tegra 3 game really is to consumers.  It seems that Dead Trigger, for example, can be run on a non-Tegra 3 device such as the Samsung Galaxy S3 with Tegra 3 effects enabled. All that is needed is a rooted-S3 (or other Android phone/tablet with a powerful enough processor) and then ES Explorer to view the files within the game and simply change the settings to make the game think its on a Tegra 3 device. That led me to look into other Tegra 3 games, and no sooner did I start my search than I came up with video for Riptide GP, N.O.V.A 3, Sonic 4 Episode 2, Max Payne and GTA 3. All optimized for Nvidia’s Tegra 3, all running on Android devices that do not have an NVIDIA chip.

As a user of numerous Android devices running various flavors of Android and various chip-sets, I really don’t know if I should applaud NVIDIA on their marketing or be a bit aggrieved by the whole thing. Certainly, it’s been proven and is easy enough to try yourself that if you have a rooted device you can run Tegra 3 “only” games on other devices. Should this be a breach of advertising? It’s a fine line between telling the truth about what a chip is capable of, and making out that it’s the only chip that can do these things. On the other hand, perhaps other companies should advertise their chipsets with as much passion as NVIDIA obviously do with their chips. Whichever way you take it, this article is just to let you know that advertising is a powerful tool… sometimes perhaps too powerful.

After our findings we did some digging with NVIDIA. They stated that for the most part what we’ve written here is accurate and that the Tegra 3 chipset doesn’t have “magic” (paraphrasing) in there to make games play better. Those games will indeed run without Tegra 3 technology, as we confirmed. What NVIDIA cleared up, however, is that Tegra 3 games have gone through a rigorous vetting process where more often than not, NVIDIA’s team of developers and tech-heads are significantly used by game developers to get the most out of their products. NVIDIA acts in this case as a valuable resource in the development and Q&A in the software development process of these games. Specifically, game controller support, HDMI output optimization, game particle effects and more are all handled by the team at NVIDIA for the game developers to make sure the final product is as polished and optimized for the devices that hold Tegra 3 chips.

While they didn’t disagree with our findings they put an interesting spin on them to be sure. Certainly on one side we have the techies unearthing a misconception about these games, while on the other side NVIDIA is being pretty forthcoming about the whole thing.

For further information simply have a search on Google and make your own mind up. It’s thought provoking and very interesting.