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Nvidia Releases Tegra 4 Powered SHIELD Handheld

Posted by Unknown on from the slices-and-dices dept.

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."

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Emulator platform by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No need to store them all on your device itself. Upload all your roms to google drive/dropbox, pull right from there. This is how i have my Ouya setup.

    --
    Good-bye
  2. Got my hands on one at PDXLAN by Psyberian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Got my hands on one at PDXLAN by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If that is the case, why not just play on the PC?
      If it can't at least be usable at the Mcdonalds down the road or the starbucks a block further it seems totally useless.

    2. Re:Got my hands on one at PDXLAN by dpidcoe · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There was an nvidia booth at maker faire in san mateo this year, and they had one there. I was attending with a friend who was a game developer, so we went to check it out. I was thoroughly unimpressed, not because there was anything wrong with the system (it played games as far as I could tell), but because all of our technical questions were met with blank stares. Eventually they told us to come back in an hour because the one technical guy was off getting lunch or something. Apparently nvidia sent a booth full of marketing people to an event specifically for engineers and technical people.