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NVIDIA today has announced a new addition to its GoForce family of mobility GPUs called the GoForce 5500. Aimed squarely at gamers on the move, the GoForce 5500 brings advanced features that were previously unavailable to the handheld market. Besting even ATI's top Imageon processors, the GoForce 5500 delivers features not found anywhere else.

The company says that with the GoForce 5500, gamers can experience Quake 3 equal to that of the original PlayStation and even display high-definition resolution (1024x768) on a device such as a cell phone. Considering that most mainstream phones don't even produce resolutions over 320x240, this is an indication that future cell phones will be able to produce images and quality equal to or better than that of Sony's PSP.

GoForce 5500 focuses mainly on video decoding/encoding and 3D acceleration. Bringing a few firsts to the table, NVIDIA says that the GoForce 5500 is the first mobility GPU to be able to playback H.264, WMV9 and MPEG4 (DivX/Xvid) in real time at native DVD resolutions. NVIDIA didn't offer any figures on how games will be running on the new chip but indicated that customers can experience up to 3 times the performance compared to existing 3D accelerated handhelds.

Not to leave digital photography aside, NVIDIA's new GPU also gives us a clue as to where cell phones will headed in terms of photography features. The GoForce 5500 is designed to handle up to a whopping 10-megapixel image size which is more than twice the resolution needed to print out decent 13"x19" large prints.

NVIDIA states that cell phones and other similarly small devices will be incorporating the new GoForce 5500 and be available for purchase in time for the 2006 holiday season.

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