Less than a decade ago, it took a desktop PC and one of Nvidia's TNT2 graphics processors to run Quake III: Arena smoothly with the detail turned up. Today, Nvidia can do the same in a handheld with a system-on-a-chip smaller than a dime.
Nvidia has posted several videos of the its new Tegra mobile SoC in action, and the chip can apparently handle Q3A at 35 FPS at a resolution of 800 x 480 with lightmaps, dynamic lighting, high geometry detail, antialiasing, and anisotropic filtering all enabled. Behold:
There's plenty more where that came from. On Nvidia's Tegra YouTube page, you'll find videos of a Tegra-powered handheld outputting 720p video to an HDTV via HDMI and rendering a 3D city from a first-person perspective as part of a navigation utility.
If this sounds a little familiar, it's because developers already got Quake III running on an iPod touch a while ago. In that case, however, the game had lightmaps disabled, geometry detail turned down, and presumably no AA or AF. (Thanks to Engadget for the tip.)
