Nvidia Shows Off Its Kal-El Chip With A New Game [First Heard About At MWC 2011, The Kal-El Chip Gets A Field Test With A Game Of Glowball]

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About four months ago, when the Mobile World Congress show was going on, we were neck deep in news coming out of that, but one thing that definitely got some eyebrows raised was word out of Nvidia about their upcoming lineup of superhero-named processors, especially the next one to emerge, the quad-core Kal-El (which, again, is Superman’s Kryptonian name in case you don’t follow comics). Kal-El recently got a pretty nice demo thanks to a game called Glowball, which featured a whole lot of impressive lighting tricks packed into one game.

Basically, Glowball takes a little superball with an internal light source all its own to a deranged kind of carnival in which you smack the ball into jack in the boxes in a certain order in order to activate a button in the middle of a room, which then makes an enormous clown’s head come to life and swallow your ball. Coulrophobes everywhere just about lost it at that last statement, but we’ve got a screenshot of same above.

You control said ball by tipping your tablet around, as the game is controlled via accelerometer. And with all that lighting around, and all that movement coupled with an unusual control scheme, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is going to have a lot of lag, but initial reports say the game is very smooth.

Kal-El, at last report, was set to offer five times the performance of Nvidia’s Tegra 2, and the most interesting part of Kal-El’s Glowball demo was that the chip it was running on was “preproduction silicon”, which means that the model that actually starts getting into stuff we can buy will be fully 25 to 30 percent faster.

This is actually looking like it could be the start of something impressive, and if we’re going to actually get into that “post-PC era” we keep hearing about something’s going to have to be done about the fact that most laptops are quite a bit more powerful than tablets. Kal-El and his descendents may well pull that off.

So what do you guys think? Like the thought of having a Kal-El tablet, or is it too much gimmick and not enough punch to separate you from your laptop? Hit the comments section and tell us what you think!

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