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Nvidia Releases Tegra 4 Powered SHIELD Handheld
An anonymous reader writes "Today, Nvidia officially releases the SHIELD. After an unexpected delay last month, the company dropped the price of its hotly-anticipated handheld gaming system from $350 to just $300. Sporting a 5-inch 720p touchscreen attached to an XBox-style controller, the SHIELD is the first serious Android-based handheld gaming device. The SHIELD is also the first major device top ship with Nvidia's new Tegra 4 SoC. But the potentially killer feature of the SHIELD is its ability to steam heavy-duty PC games from your desktop right into your hands. Right now the selection of PC games is pretty scarce, with just 21 titles to choose from so far, though Nvidia promises more to come. Tom's Hardware just posted an exhaustive review of the Nvidia SHIELD, which includes demos of both Android gaming and PC streaming, display and battery testing, plus the usual bevy of performance tests versus the Tegra 3-based Nexus 7 (2012), the new Nexus 7 carrying a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, the iPhone 5, and a Wintel tablet with the Atom Z2760. Tegra 4 presents nearly four times the performance of Tegra 3, and leaves most of its competition in the dust. However, it also means that Nvidia is now the only ARM competitor without an OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation on the horizon, making Nvidia's new position as top dog quite uncertain."
Steampunks everywhere rejoice.
... its ability to steam heavy-duty PC games from your desktop right into your hands... very cool that it can sublimate PC games, but what about my PS3 and XBox games? I want those in gas form as well.
Not sure about the fluff features and the native android ecosystem, but I'm sure this will be the best handheld emulator platform we've seen in a while.
With a 64gig SD card you could probably have a near complete set of all Pre dreamcast console and arcade games.
However, it also means that Nvidia is now the only ARM competitor without an OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation on the horizon, making Nvidia's new position as top dog quite uncertain.
Tegra 5 is supposed to be OpenGL 4.3, so I wouldn't be concerned about them not having an OpenGL ES 3.0 chip.
Got hands one at PDXLAN in Portland a few weeks ago. What can I say but holy crap, I gotta have one. It's a like an oversized dreamcast controller with a LCD screen. It's streaming seemed flawless. We ran Borderlands and a few other games without issue. They were stating a pretty insane battery life, but that will be left to see what it really is. The screen was beautiful, it has a large number of games, and more coming. It was also running steam if I remember correctly. I know this isn't much of are review, but more of just saying, this thing rocks.
Let's talk important features. Can it run standard Android apps, such as NES.emu and ePSXe emulators? I already own a GameKlip for my Galaxy S4, but a standalone emulation device like this would be great for everyone that loves classic games.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Looking through the benchmarks, at a little more than double the resolution, the Nexus 7 gives a little less than half the framerate of this dedicated gaming machine. That should make it fantastic for general use, and makes the price seem attractive vs. the Allwinner imports.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Guess I'll have to get one from ebay/amazon if they every pop up there.
It's quite interesting that the Shield requires active cooling. Seems like the Tegra 4 Soc runs extreemly hot. There are customer complaints of over heating for the Toshiba Excite:
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Excite-AT15LE-A32-PDA0EU-00101Y-10-1-Inch/product-reviews/B00D78Q2NQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending&tag=at055-20
Also, there are rumours that smartphone OEMs avoided Tegra 4 because of heat and battery consumption issues.
Next...
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Really, Tom?
Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.
Kudos to Nick Fury and his team on this device. When is HYDRA coming out with their device?
According to Anandtech only 74.8 GFLOPS - comparable to an iPad 4. Other sources say 96 GFLOPS, but only when in power-hungry overclock mode: image. The real winner for Q4 2013 will be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 - 129 GFLOPS. That leaves Tegra 4 completely in the dust.
The main reason the Tegra 4 is in no tablet/phone, is because Tegra 3 real performance and power usage was worse than advertised/marketed, and therefore the tablet/phone makers did not trust Tegra 4 would be a good bet. Another (smaller) reason was that NVIDIA is quite pushing their own agenda and brand, whereas other vendors do not meddle with their customer's business so much. Unluckily they did not learn from their experience and suggest in their latest video (the face-demo) that Tegra 5 uses 2 to 3 Watts when under full load - truth is that the load was not given. NVIDIA knows a little too much about marketing...
Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.
I suspect that they didn't exactly make heroic efforts for ATI/AMD customers; but my understanding is that their GPU requirement(Nvidia only, GTX 650 or higher) corresponds to the introduction of "NVENC", an feature that provides on-chip hardware encoding to h.264, with access to the framebuffer. If you want low-latency streaming, you more or less need something similar to that capability (grabbing the finished frame back over PCIe and encoding it on the CPU definitely isn't going to help your latency)...
This is not to say that ATI/AMD doesn't have similar features that could be pulled together to make it work (I haven't checked); but they are taking advantage of a fairly specific feature of some of their chipsets, not just running a generic driver that checks PCI IDs against a whitelist.
Now, what I don't understand is what, exactly, I gain from being able to stream games across my LAN. If I'm that close to my computer, why would I be playing on a 5 inch screen, not a 27 inch one?
Who in total are still miniscule compared to the number running Intel graphics (Intel is the #1 graphics card manufacturer by volume).
Which then begs the question - if you have an NVidia card, you're already self-selecting people who probably also have a nice PC (it probably requires a recent video card too), and these people are probably loving their rig to play in front of multiple monitors and specialized keyboards and mice and who probably wouldn't want to play on the dinky thing that is SHIELD.
It makes what Sony is doing with PS4 at least easier to stomach - there are plenty of reasons why you might not be able to play on the PS4 (usually, someone wants to watch TV...), so picking the game up on Vita makes perfect sense.
May not be as beefy, but it can also stream apps from your PC with a free app. Of course, it doesn't have the same amount of marketing muscle.
Individually, I know you can display Shield games on your TV, and I know Shield can stream Steam games from your PC.
Can it do both at once? That seems to be an important question.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The battery is huge! An Iphone 5 has a 5.45Wh battery. With that battery the iPhone would easily survive over a week.
Is it just me or this thing is the most beautiful thing ever seen ??? Apple will reach this level in ... never!
Curiously yours, crip.
Because you know they pretend they report to Nick Fury.
Seriously, yesteryear's products a day late and a dollar short.
Epic fail.
It won't have a long life at all so why pay a premium for this turd?
More like obsessive MMORPG players rejoice -- you can actually get up to go to the bathroom without interrupting your multi-hour dungeon raid. No more Poopsocking!
Soo, Wii U / PSP / Vita kind of thing for PC, by nVidia...
Even Sony's Vita, with wonderful screen and dozens of decent games struggles at two times lower price, it's astonishing how arrogant or clueless nVidia is.
What is the advantage of this thing? Cheapo crappo games? No thanks.
Mainly if that Screen doesn't go back farther. I picked up one of my gamepads to see how it would be if I had a screen at the same place, and i have to bed the gamepad down to see a screen like that. Really uncomfortable to play like that. But i see form pictures the buttons and pads are more flat then normal gamepads.
Be seeing you...
1) the new Nexus 7 from Google has a Snapdragon 600 chip, NOT the out-of-date S4 Pro. For 'marketing' reasons Qualcomm and Google have agreed to mislabel the SoC used in the tablet.
2) Nvidia does NOT lack an OpenGL ES3.0 ARM SoC part 'on the horizon'. Was the author a complete cretin? Nvidia, with Tegra 5 (Logan) at the end of this year, or sometime in 2014, brings the same graphics cores to ARM that it uses in its desktop PC. In one leap, Nvidia bypasses EVERY current competitor in the ARM GPU space. Doesn't mean the Tegra 5 will sell better than the Tegra 4, but that isn't the point.
3) If the author was not quite so clueless, he'd know the Tegra 4 has already failed in the marketplace, making its lack of the near (as yet) used OpenGL 3.0 totally irrelevant. Nvidia is trying to rush to release its much cheaper Tegra4i, a somewhat slower part that it is happier to mass produce and discount in order to get some design wins. Given the manufacturing cost of the Tegra4, it is unlikely Nvidia will bother to make many of them at this late stage.
The entire Tegra project has been one long nightmare for Nvidia to data. Qualcomm, using old ATI graphics technology, now dominates the high-end marketplace, eliminating any hope for the Nvidia parts that use their old GPU tech. However, Nvidia now moves to phase 2, a few years late. Just as AMD puts GCN graphics in its x86 SoC parts, giving them desktop compatibility, so is Nvidia with Tegra5. No-one in the marketplace, certainly not Qualcomm with Adreno, or Imagination with PowerVR, comes close to matching the GPU expertise of Nvidia and AMD. As ARM games move beyond their crappy casual toy status, and move to PC like ambitions, Nvidia (and ATI soon) expect their GPU tech to dominate the high and mid-end.
There is a problem, however. Qualcomm is becoming the new Intel, and Apple is already kinda the new AMD (in the ARM SoC space). Will either company choose to license GPU tech from Nvidia or AMD in the near future? Apple is probably already working with Nvidia for ARM parts released late 2014 at the earliest. Qualcomm will find it much more difficult to give up its current market leading Adreno GPU project.
The near future is all Qualcomm (outside of Apple products). The mid-term is harder to call- Nvidia is down and out if Tegra5 fails to deliver. Unfortunately, Tegra5 hits when the demand for real graphics power in ARM devices is still too low, meaning that Tegra5 will struggle not to price itself out of contention.
Longer term, and AMD appears. AMD knows it can find no customers currently for much more powerful (and more expensive) ARM devices. However, in a couple of years, as demand for x86 computers circles the drain, the demand for powerful ARM parts (including mains-powered) will start to really surge.
Nvidia should be leaning on Google like crazy to ensure Android 5 includes a desktop/laptop version that challenges the traditional PC, and needs loads more GPU performance. The Chromebook project, while quite successful, would not be a great destiny for the Tegra5.
Is all bandwidth a waste?
LAN transmissions cost next to nothing. Internet transmissions are far more expensive, up to $10 per GB for cellular and not much cheaper for satellite. So if you don't keep your library on every device, keep them on a network share. I've been using Rhythm Software File Manager on my OUYA console to get NES homebrew games into EMUya from a network share
I don't carry my netbook everywhere. I like to game on the go. I leave the netbook in the car.
I guess my use case differs from yours because I carry my Dell netbook on the city bus with me.
I have the old Nexus 7 tablet, but I've discovered that not all games are enjoyable with only multitouch control. Which controller that clips onto a Nexus 7 do you recommend?
You could just run a cheap HDMI or DVI-to-HDMI cable from your PC to your HDTV. For older PCs or netbooks that don't have HDMI out, you could do the same with VGA and audio. And if your TV is old too, Sewell Direct sells very affordable VGA to composite converters.
It's gambling on both Android being a viable game platform
The inevitable cross-pollination with the OUYA ecosystem could help.
and gamepad-and-tablet-had-a-transporter-accident form-factor being appealing.
Gamepad telefragging a tablet has been popular since Nintendo introduced the Game Boy in 1989.
Just as AMD puts GCN graphics in its x86 SoC parts
Why does this confuse me every time I read this? GCN used to stand for GameCube, and AMD bought the company that bought the company (ArtX) that had designed the Flipper GPU for GameCube.
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