After being postponed for a few months, the Global Game Developers Conference (hereinafter referred to as GDC) was finally held. As an event with huge industry influence and dedicated to game developers, GDC has never lacked impressive new technologies and new hardware demonstrations.
However, compared with previous years, the deep meaning behind the most eye-catching technology demonstration project at GDC this year may make some manufacturers unhappy.
And this is also the most eye-catching demonstration project of the GDC so far. Although you may feel confused when you see the above picture.
But in fact, it is a specially customized Chromebook, the CPU is MediaTek’s MT8195, and the GPU uses an NVIDIA RTX3060.
What everyone sees is the screenshot of this “Magic Revised” Chromebook running the game “German Headquarters: New Blood” with the RTX ray tracing effect enabled.
Some friends may be surprised that “German Headquarters: New Blood” is not a very new game, and RTX3060 has already been released. Why is it still showing up for a demonstration and will it become the most eye-catching demonstration project of this GDC?
Common Chromebooks are in this style: large bezels, small size, low performance, low price
This is because the Chromebook is actually a common “Internet laptop” in nature.
The performance of the processors used is mostly average, and the operating system (Chrome OS) it runs is also a lightweight operating system that Google focuses on “cloud storage, cloud applications”.
Therefore, it is also believed by the outside world that Chrome does not have the ability to run large-scale stand-alone games. To put it bluntly, Chromebooks, like netbooks that were once all the rage before, are now more like laptops for children to use for online lessons.
Then the question arises. Is NVIDIA preparing to turn the “learning machine” into a “game console” so that cheap and lightweight Chromebooks can play single-machine large-scale games from now on, so as to benefit such users?
High probability is not the case. Because from the title of NVIDIA’s official promotion of this matter (Arm is RTX ON), it can be seen that NVIDIA is not so much making a magical change to the Chromebook so that it can run games.
Rather, it only values the hardware and software conditions of the Chromebook based on the ARM processor and the Linux system.
NVIDIA’s GPU can now also work with ARM-based CPUs, run on Linux systems, and can also use various light-tracking technologies.” Perhaps this is the message that this demo project really wants to convey to the outside world.
For this reason, NVIDIA chose this period, and the intention to announce this “demonstrator” is worth pondering.
As we all know, AMD announced a new generation of Exynos SoC that they developed in cooperation with Samsung and integrated RDNA2 GPU not long ago.
And this Samsung mobile platform that uses the “A card” will be officially released as soon as the second half of this year, and is expected to be the master control solution for Samsung’s new flagship model.
Not only that, according to the currently exposed running scores, this new Exynos SoC, which is suspected of integrating 6 RDNA2 computing units, ran an amazing score of 8134 points in the 3DMARK test.
And this score is about 50% faster than the integrated GPU of Snapdragon 888 and more than 53% faster than ARM’s current flagship Mali GPU.
However, what you may not know is that the number of GPU cores in the current Qualcomm and ARM flagship masters has generally reached more than 1000 (for example, Snapdragon 865 and Snapdragon 888, both have 1024SP GPU specifications).
However, they were defeated by AMD’s RDNA2 solution with a core size of only about 1/3. This seems to indicate that traditional PC GPU manufacturers are still much better than mobile chip manufacturers in terms of underlying architecture design.
If one day in the future, NVIDIA really returns to the smartphone market in some way, and fights with AMD in this field, then what will happen?
First of all, at least for now, whether AMD or NVIDIA, the graphics core technology they hold is indeed far better than Qualcomm, ARM, PowerVR, and other mobile competitors.
At the same time, for consumers, the market competition between these two giants may also bring about a substantial leap in the graphics performance of mobile phones. Really playing “host-level graphics games” on mobile phones may become a reality.
