25
Feb
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[Video] NVIDIA Shows Off The Tegra 4 With Enhanced Zombie Driver, Side-By-Side With 'Non Tegra 4'

Posted by in Android OS, Games, News, Videos

Yesterday, we got an eyeful of NVIDIA's new Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i, along with the Phoenix, NVIDIA's nifty reference device. The benchmarks were quite impressive compared to current-generation processors, but all we got to see in terms of gaming performance was a brief demo of Real Boxing.

In a video posted today to NVIDIA's YouTube channel, the chip maker shows off a "Tegra 4 enhanced Zombie Driver," side by side with the same game running on a "non-Tegra 4" device. The difference (as with many Tegra-enhanced games) is night and day. The video puts on full display Tegra's dynamic shadows and lighting, textural enhancements, and overall finesse.

22
Jan
nascartiny

NASCAR Mobile '13 Screeches Into The Play Store, Covered In Engine Grease And Logos

Posted by in Applications, News

Round and round and round she goes. Where she stops nob-holy mother of crap! That car just exploded! Okay, alright. Maybe I can understand a little bit of why folks like NASCAR. And in solidarity with my fellow southerners who adore the sport, allow me to share this with you: NASCAR Mobile '13.

2013-01-22 11.12.42 2013-01-22 11.12.54 2013-01-22 11.14.03

The app gives you access to news, schedules, driver information and a ton more. It even looks nice, utilizing the sidebar navigation we're all getting used to, and a Holo-ish feel. There are a few quirks, though, as some features (like the Sprint Unlimited Vote) require the user to open a browser, and sliding between videos—as in the center image above under the "Latest" subheading—was very difficult when I tried it.

17
Jan
gimpICON

Cool: Use Your Android Tablet To Paint In GIMP, Just Like A Real Graphics Tablet

Posted by in Galaxy Note 10.1 (GT-N8000 / N8010 / N8013), News, Samsung

Any self-respecting digital artist these days uses a graphics tablet to pipe pen input into PC applications. The problem is that good graphics tablets like the Wacom Intuos line are pretty spendy. If you've got an Android device lying around and like to use the GIMP image editor on Linux, you've got all you need for a basic graphics tablet setup thanks to a new app.

The XorgTablet app and driver developed by the gimpusers.com team allow you to select your Android tablet as an input device in GIMP. You may be thinking that sounds interesting but limited – after all, graphics tablets are useful because of the pressure sensitivity, and capacitive screens don't have that.

23
May
hi-256-0-982dd593f7cdd0043aa6d69d4adaeea3692552e3

[New App] Chainfire3D Hits The Android Market, Tweaks Your Graphics To Improve Performance And Battery Life

Posted by in Applications, News

Android app developer Chainfire released an interesting app into the Market recently called Chainfire3D - "an intermediary OpenGL driver." Basically, this app sits between your app and the proprietary graphics driver on your device and can manipulate the commands between the two.

This enables you do some pretty rad things with your device in order to increase efficacy, battery life, performance, etc. For example, you can use Chainfire3D to enable night-mode, which basically only powers the red pixels on your device in order to save battery life (yes, it makes everything look red - see below).

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Other features of Chainfire3D includes a multitude of texture manipulations, including the ability to reduce texture sizes and quality (for faster gaming) and unroll textures, which converts non-32 bit textures into 32 bit.