This is the right strategy for Nvidia, especially in the mobile space, considering they'll also be the only ones with the full OpenGL 4.3 support, which means that if Kepler GPU's are popular, developers will be making some pretty amazing mobile games that will only be available on Kepler GPU's because they'll be the only ones to have OpenGL 4.3 for years to come.
I only wish this was Maxwell coming out next year, not Kepler, which was supposed to be in Tegra 4, but you know Nvidia and their delays...I also hope they don't screw this up by making the GPU very inefficient. If they do that, no one will want it, so this strategy will be irrelevant. They say it's very efficient, but over the years I've become a lot more skeptical about stuff Nvidia claims, at least in the mobile space.
If they can convince Samsung to use Kepler for Exynos 6, or Maxwell for Exynos 7, that would be a huge win for them. Samsung has been a little lost lately in terms of what GPU's to use in Exynos SoC's, so this may be Nvidia's window of opportunity, if they can prove their GPU is the best.
Well, NVidia are currently behind the competition in terms of OpenGL ES support, so they actually need to hope game developers don't decide to take advantage of the newest and greatest hardware features before they're ready. That would leave them without a horse in the race altogether - even their new Tegra 4 chip which hasn't launched yet can't support OpenGL ES 3.0.
Also, whether anyone licenses their hardware in the first place depends on how expensive it is and how much power it sucks down. Remember that we're talking about a full desktop GPU architecture here, the lowest power GPU that currently uses it consumes more power than an entire tablet. NVidia have screwed this up before, and given all the NRE costs of creating a new chip I can't see anyone going for this until they can test the actual power consumption in actual hardware.
> even their new Tegra 4 chip which hasn't launched yet can't support OpenGL ES 3.0.
To be fair, the Tegra 4 chip supports almost all OpenGL ES 3 features (via OpenGL extensions), but it lacks some checkbox items to be able to claim GLES3 conformance. Little things like numerical precision of the rendering pipeline, which will not have a giant impact on most game content but is required for conformance.
And as of today, nobody else has shipped a GLES3 device either.
I thought OpenGL ES was just a restricted subset of OpenGL, and old versions of it at that. It seems kind of weird for them to be behind if this is the case so maybe I don't understand this correctly.
Not exactly - it's more complicated than that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opengl_es). GLES was originally a simplified spec based on the desktop API, but optimized for mobile and embedded devices. They have since leapfrogged each other and removed (fixed function pipeline) and added (shaders) various features at various times.
The latest versions of ES and GL are largely, but not completely compatible AFAIK, with the desktop having a superset of features.
Yes, that's what everyone has been using so far, and that's what everyone will keep using for at least several more years (they've just started adopting OpenGL ES 3.0, so they won't change soon).
However, Nvidia is actually going to use the full OpenGL 4.3 in the next Tegra, next year, since it's using the full (but probably more optimized) Kepler PC architecture, so it has support for OpenGL 4.3. Nvidia is going from OpenGL ES 2.0 straight to OpenGL 4.3. For comparison, not even Intel's Haswell has OpenGL 4.3 support (still stuck at 4.0 only). Tegra 5 will also support CUDA 5.0.
Only because it's easier to support OpenGL ES. If a GPU is available that supports full OpenGL, that would give greater flexibility features to mobile developers.
Not many would use full OpenGL, which is optimized for CAD developers. The ES subset actually represents modern programming practices, with only a few extensions missing for the more recent features of the pipeline (hull shaders and such).
OpenGL ES 3.0 lacks geometry shader support, which means it's behind even DirectX 10 a bit. OpenGL 4.3 received full backwards compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0, so developers can still only develop for OpenGL ES 3.0 if that's what they want. But depending on how popular Kepler GPU's get in mobile, and if it's worth their time, they can use extra features in their games for those devices.
I think OpenGL 4.3 support would be a lot more helpful in making cross-platform games that work pretty much the same (but on a different scale of performance, of course) on both PC's and tablets, such as Battlefields 3 (the demo seems recorded so the video quality is not great):
I also wouldn't be surprised if Epic Games ports the (mobile) Unreal Engine 4 to mobile Kepler-based chips, first. EA seems to be doing that with Frostbite already:
I get it, but 4.3 seems to still include a lot of legacy stuff that have plagued OpenGL for awhile now. Pushing a new version of ES that was equivalent to Dx11 in the shaders supported might be better. Or perhaps they need to be at 4.3 to support CUDA?
I agree that pushing for OpenGL ES would probably be best, but that also means waiting 4 or more years before OpenGL ES 4.0 is probably going to be available, if the transition from 2.0 to 3.0 is any guide.
Plus, at least from Nvidia's point of view, which already had support for OpenGL 4.3 in Kepler from the desktop space, so they didn't have to do a lot of work to get it in mobile, this is a no-brainer, as it gives them some competitive advantage that probably won't be replicated very soon. I figure even if Imagination wanted to do it, it might take them another 2-3 years before they have it.
developers will be making some pretty amazing mobile games that will only be available on Kepler GPU's
No developer would do that unless the development was entirely sponsored by nvidia. There are almost a billion mobile devices out there, a substantial portion running OpenGL ES 2.0. There are a small number of tegra-optimized game variants that add absolutely trivial changes in return for some nvidia sponsorship dollars, but no one is going to bother with an exclusive for a single chipset.
Reading your post someone might think that nvidia has some clear advantage in mobile graphics and this is the big chance to make it big. They absolutely have no such thing, being seriously contested if not beaten by PowerVR and even ARM designs (of course nvidia does great things on the desktop, but having strength in 150W desktop GPUs does not translate into the same in sub-Watt GPUs). nvidia has had a lot of talk but a serious lack of actual delivery.
I only wish this was Maxwell coming out next year, not Kepler, which was supposed to be in Tegra 4, but you know Nvidia and their delays...I also hope they don't screw this up by making the GPU very inefficient. If they do that, no one will want it, so this strategy will be irrelevant. They say it's very efficient, but over the years I've become a lot more skeptical about stuff Nvidia claims, at least in the mobile space.
If they can convince Samsung to use Kepler for Exynos 6, or Maxwell for Exynos 7, that would be a huge win for them. Samsung has been a little lost lately in terms of what GPU's to use in Exynos SoC's, so this may be Nvidia's window of opportunity, if they can prove their GPU is the best.