Good news: Tegra 3-enabled games are starting to appear in Nvidia’s Tegra Zone! Bad news: it’s only a pinball-style game at the moment, and a demo at that. Worse news: there’s actually no hardware on sale that can take advantage of it – the first Tegra 3 device, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime isn’t due until December. But hey, look at that quad-core rendering action! “Glowball” will be available in the Android Market, and on some Tegra 3 devices it’ll come pre-loaded.
An Nvidia engineer shows off the new game in a video, demonstrating an underwater level with some truly impressive graphics. In the demonstration all four cores are being used actively on a Honeycomb-equipped Transformer Prime, though the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade is slyly mentioned. The lighting and volumetric effects are dazzling, especially when pitted against a non-optimized version – it’s like jumping from the PlayStation to the PS3 instantly.You can even see the water reflections on the bottom of the ocean floor.
Check out the demonstration below:
Obviously this is just a small taste of the potential of Tegra 3 and other quad-core system-on-a-chip designs. We won’t be able to try out games like these first-hand until December, but the wait might not be as long as all that – Newegg has listed the Transformer Prime for a December 8th release, next Thursday. Here’s hoping the tablet – and its ICS upgrade – get here sooner rather than later.
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[via Droid Gamers]
