NVIDIA made it a point to say that high-end games developed for the PC or even current generation consoles could be ported over to Tegra K1 without issue. It’s perhaps over reaching a bit to claim the latter given the delta in performance (which NVIDIA hopes to make up in 4 generations!), but you can definitely argue that titles built for the previous generation of consoles (Xbox 360/PS3) could easily be ported to Tegra K1.
At its CES press conference NVIDIA teased the idea that Tegra K1 is actually more powerful than the last generation of consoles. The slide below attempts to drive that point home:
With a GPU clock of 950MHz (admittedly, a bit on the high end), NVIDIA can deliver substantially more raw horsepower than either previous generation console (192 CUDA cores * 2 FLOPS per core * 950MHz). Peak texture filtering performance and more importantly, memory bandwidth are lower than what was possible on these consoles but the numbers we’re talking about here aren’t substantial enough to prevent porting from happening. There may be some optimization needed but it definitely looks like Tegra K1 is the first mobile platform that can more or less run Xbox 360/PS3 titles, at least from a performance standpoint.
In pursuit of making porting and game development as simple as possible, NVIDIA demonstrated its NSight Tegra plugins for Visual Studio. Without changing the IDE that developers are used to, NSight Tegra allows developers to use the NDK toolchain all within Visual Studio. I’m not enough of a developer to know whether or not NVIDIA’s efforts in this space truly make life easy enough to port Xbox 360/PS3 games over to Android, but its VS integration demos looked convincing at least.
NVIDIA had a port of Serious Sam 3 running on Tegra K1 demo hardware just fine. Any games that are prepped for Steam OS are very easy to port over to Android. Once you make the move to OpenGL, the rest is allegedly fairly simple. The Serious Sam 3 port apparently took a matter of a couple of weeks to get ported over, with the bulk of the effort going into mapping controls to an Android environment.