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."
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.
Sony's working on letting the PS Vita do this with PS4 games, however I understand that they're reluctant to turn games into vapour as it undermines the DRM restrictions against inhalation and/or respiration without the appropriate written consent.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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
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.
According to Anandtech benchmarks it easily beats the iPad 4: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7190/nvidia-shield-review-tegra-4-crossroads-pc-mobile-gaming/4
It also beats Snapdragon 800 in CPU (but not GPU). In fairness, it has to be said that Tegra 4 needs to be actively colled, while Snapdragon 800 does not.
Is this what's known as "vaporware"?
It won't have a long life at all so why pay a premium for this turd?
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.