Nvidia unveils Tegra K1, a 192-core GPU that runs Unreal Engine 4

Nvidia's next mobile GPU, dubbed the Tegra K1, will boast a 192 CUDA core processor, Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang announced at CES today.

Huang said the 192 cores of the Kepler-based architecture in the Tegra K1 are "all fully programmable, all massively parallel." The next-generation Tegra chip, Huang said, is more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 while using a fraction of the wattage.

"We've brought mobile computing to the same level as desktop computing," Huang said at Nvidia's CES press conference. "We've brought mobile computing to the same level as super computing. We've brought the heart of GeForce and the soul of Tesla to the Tegra family."

To reinforce the power of Nvidia's Tegra K1, which supports DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.4 technologies, Huang also announced that Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 would support the new chip.

"We can take absolutely anything that runs on PC or high-end console and run it on Tegra," said Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney in a prepared statement. "I didn't think that we'd be at this level on mobile for another 3-4 years."

Nvidia illustrated Tegra K1's graphics power with a handful of demos, including one that showed a human head with realistic rim lighting and subsurface scattering and another that highlighted the particle effects, HDR lighting and global illumination K1 is capable of. Real-time demonstrations of UE4 running on Tegra K1 were also shown, as was gameplay from a custom version of Trine 2.

The Tegra K1 will come in two variations, Huang announced, one with a 32-bit quad A15 CPU (up to 2.3 GHz) and one with dual 64-bit Denver CPUs (up to 2.5 GHz). In a release, Nvidia announced that the 32-bit version of Tegra K1 will start showing up in devices in the first half of 2014, with the 64-bit version arriving in the second half of the year.