NVIDIA announces GoForce 4500 Mobile Graphics Chipset

NVIDIA announced its GoForce 4500 hardware, a graphics accelerator designed specifically for use in mobile devices, such as the upcoming Gizmondo handheld. The chipset boasts some impressive specifications, such as 1280KB, 128-bit VRAM, and a programmable shader technology that will allow developers to apply six simultaneous textures to every pixel.

Perhaps more importantly, it is clear that 4500 has been designed with the needs of mobile in mind, and it therefore sports acceleration for mobile's particular multimedia needs (JPEG, MPEG4, enhanced 8X digital zoom for camera phones), as well as some advanced, power-saving features.

Most notable among these was the GoForce's Early Z technology, which identifies non-visible sections of each frame of animation and promptly discards them. NVIDIA claims that this features reduces a handset's graphical processing load by up to 60 percent, thereby yielding a similar reduction in power consumption.

Although it is generally agreed that three-dimensional gaming is the next frontier for mobile, NVIDIA hasn't forgotten that most current mobile titles remain two-dimensional. The GoForce 4500 will include a 64-bit 2D graphics engine designed to reduce the CPU load produced by sprite-based games, making them run faster and more efficiently.