NVIDIA reveals DirectTouch to improve tablet touchscreens

by Steven Williamson on 10 January 2012, 12:24

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Ultra responsive, Less Power” is the tag-line that accompanied NVIDIA’s announcement of DirectTouch technology for Tegra 3-powered tablets during its press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Via DirectTouch, the chip maker plans to improve the performance of touchscreen panels on its Tegra 3 platform using the fifth companion core to help improve detection.

What this should mean is that users of tablets employing the Tegra 3 chip should experience a smoother touch experience with less lag between touch input and response.



NVIDIA claims that DirectTouch can speed up processing by six times its current rate while also lowering the amount of energy used.

It offloads much of the touch panel’s processing to just one of the CPU cores, enabling 6x faster touch processing, lower costs and lower power consumption,” reveals the American global technology company.

NVIDIA says DirectTouch reads touch signals and then processes them on the 500MHz NVIDIA Cortex-A9 'Ninja' core, resulting in a sample rate several times faster than a typical touch controller chip, which is removed from the equation, thus reducing system price and size.

Of course, we'd like to see this faster response time with our own eyes, but with Transformer Prime and other Tegra 3-powered tablets due to hit stores in 2012, it shouldn’t be long before we can test it out for ourselves.

During the event, NVIDIA and ASUS also revealed a Tegra 3-powered 7in Android 4.0 ICS tablet device, which is priced very competitively at $249, possibly in an attempt to take on Amazon’s affordable Kindle Fire.

More from CES 2012



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Looks cool, integra 3 also rocks!