Nvidia Corp. will help developers of video games to port their titles onto devices powered by Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip as well as Google Android operating system. The move will help small and large software designers to enable high-quality games on smartphones and tablets and thus increase demand towards high-performance devices featuring Tegra.

At the Game Developers Conference next month Nvidia will sponsor a session that will describe how to port games from PC and video game consoles to Google Android and Tegra. Nvidia will also showcase its own latest Android debugging and analysis tools that help to design and port video games for Google Android. The event shows a clear interest of the graphics and multimedia chip designer in high-quality games for mobile platforms.

Given Nvidia's leadership in graphics technologies on the PC, it is very natural for the company to transfer those technologies onto the market of handheld devices. Unfortunately for Nvidia, since modern mobile graphics processors do not really offer high performance and therefore applications do not need speed provided by Tegra and other expensive graphics solutions.

Nvidia officially promised to release a new generation of Tegra every year and each generation is projected to be two or three times faster compared to the previous one. As a result, the company will need to ensure that there are applications that take advantage of it. On the PC market the company already has appropriate program called "The Way It's Meant to Be Played" that is tailored to ensure that games run smoothly, but utilize all the latest technologies. A similar program can be created for the market of smartphones and tablets eventually. While this program is likely to indirectly help other vendors of ARM-based SoCs, it will also indirectly undermine success of Intel Atom-based x86 SoCs on the market of high-end mobile products.

Thanks to regular refreshes of AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce family as well as increasing performance demands of PC video games work enthusiasts and gamers update graphics cards once a year. It remains to be seen whether Nvidia manages to make users of tablets and smartphones to buy new devices more regularly than today.

Tags: Nvidia, Tegra, Android