Slashdot Mirror
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."
... 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.
Play video games AND get the wrinkles out of your clothes at the same time! This is revolutionary!
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.
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
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.
Assuming an individual already owns and Android based phone, it would be much cheaper and sensible to just buy one of those Moga or Moga pro controller add-ons for emulators. If you're not going to take advantage of the streaming-from-PC features of the Shield, I can't see how it would be worth $300 to you.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Really, Tom?
Rejoice to what? A blatant marketing post? This thing is DOA. D. O. A.
Kudos to Nick Fury and his team on this device. When is HYDRA coming out with their device?
Are they playing Volleyball?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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.
So you store your games on a remote server so you can play them locally? Jesus what is wrong with people today? It's like, "Waste as much bandwidth as possible" is the aim of pretty much everyone.
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.
I put them on a remote server so I dont have to install them on the many devices i have. Also, all my friends have access to the cloud store too. Finally, the biggest single file i have on there is 27MB (Majora's Mask), not exactly putting a dent in any modern bandwidth allocation.....................
Good-bye
Is this what's known as "vaporware"?
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...
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.
YOU MUST NOT MISS IT! http://www.sport3trade.net/ The website cheap /wholesale/ and /retail/ for many kinds of fashion /shoes/, like the/nike,/jordan, also including the/Handbags,/Sunglasses,/Jeans,/Jerseys,/Hat,/Belt and /watches, All the products are free shipping, and the price is competitive, after the payment, can ship within short time.
(Discount jordan/shoes) $40,
(Air /Max /shoes) $41,
(Nike/shox /shoes) $40,
(Handbags) $39,
(Sunglasses) $18,
(wallet) $19,
(Belt) $18,
(T-shirts) $20,
(Jeans) $39,
(watches) $99,
(NFL/MLB/NBA)Jerseys $25,
http://www.sport3trade.net/
http://www.sport3trade.net/