Slashdot Mirror
$299 Android Gaming Tablet Reviewed
Vigile (99919) writes "Last week NVIDIA announced the SHIELD Tablet and SHIELD Controller, and reviews are finally appearing this morning. Based on the high performance Tegra K1 SoC that integrates 192 Kepler architecture CUDA cores, benchmarks reveal that that the SHIELD Tablet is basically unmatched by any other mobile device on the market when it comes to graphics performance — it is more than 2.5x the performance of the Apple A7 in some instances. With that power NVIDIA is able to showcase full OpenGL versions of games like Portal and Half-Life 2 running at 1080p locally on the 19:12 display or output to a TV in a "console mode." PC Perspective has impressions of that experience as well as using the NVIDIA Game Stream technology to play your PC games on the SHIELD Tablet and controller. To go even further down the rabbit hole, you can stream your PC games from your desktop to your tablet, output them to the TV in console mode, stream your game play to Twitch from the tablet while overlaying your image through the front facing camera AND record your sessions locally via ShadowPlay and using the Wi-Fi Direct powered controller to send and receive audio. It is incredibly impressive hardware but the question remains as to whether or not there is, or will be, a market for Android-based gaming devices, even those with the power and performance that NVIDIA has built."
Is it MARVELous this SHIELD?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hail HYDRA.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
It's a pretty natural bit of elision if you think of it as spoken word: "Reviews are finally hitting, [that is, reviews] of the devices, this morning".
Was this dictated and not read?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Based on the bugginess of every Tegra device to date and Nvidia's near-total lack of support, you're nuts if you even consider buying this.
And that's the real review from an owner of multiple Tegra products from the first generation onwards. You're welcome.
Three minutes of battery life with all 192 GPU cores running?
Do Android emulators take advantage of hardware acceleration well yet? Is there good later generation emulation support (N64 / GameCube / Etc)?
Yes, I need all the juice to play angry birds.
You'd think Slashdot was populated only by AMD employees.
Seriously, though - the specs are really nice - I'm looking forward to seeing this in production.
I just want a tablet that will run modern versions of Civilization (preferably in tablet mode, which is civilization's windows 8 killer feature).
I don't care if it is streamed or run locally or whatever.
This is the only thing keeping me from buying a shield tablet, the other games I can easily see how they will work, and they are a "bonus" for me, I can and will run emulators on anything, so the seamless controller will be nice, but it keeps coming back to Civ.
I know Civ V (and eventually Civ Beyond Earth) can be played on the Surfac, and that is literally the biggest draw for me, every other feature the surface has, I can work around. I will probably spend 500 hours playing Beyond Earth, and I would love for it to not require buying a 2 piece laptop from Microsoft.
What I don't get is what the market for this is. The gaming aspect of it seems to be based on streaming games from a PC, and buying a PC good enough to do that costs a fair bit of money assuming you don't already have one. Game streaming also requires wireless internet access, which means you're probably not going to be taking it out of your home. There's also the issue of what you're going to do with it outside of game streaming - if you want something that can browse the internet when you're away from home, you'd be better off with a 4G phone than a wifi-based tablet.
The real gaming crowd is going to stick to physical PCs because of the superior experience they offer. The casual gaming crowd, who want to play games specifically released for iOS/Android, have cheaper options for accessing those games. Who is the target market?
The SHIELD Tablet... is able to showcase full OpenGL versions of games like Portal and Half-Life 2 running at 1080p
So, the future of gaming is... the past of gaming, but at higher resolution!
Seriously, you want to impress me, do it with a game that's not older than the current 2nd-term Presidency.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I actually have been trying to figure this out my self. I've been using RDP on my Surface RT to play civ for quite some time now, it works but its not the best with lag response. I would love a way to stream civ reasonably but havnt had any luck...
Idea - Add the game to Steam, then stream it from the tablet. Pretty sure you can do that with non-Steam games now, and in my experience it's pretty darn fast.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"running at 1080p"
Take that, Xbone.
Yeah, but I thing GP was looking to use a touchscreen interface with Civ. Not sure if you could get that with streaming.
Fair point, haven't tried it on a touchscreen device.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Nobody wants to develop on Android
iOS Active / 1.2 million+ apps (As of June 2014) vs Google Play Active / 1.3+ million apps (as of July 2014)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
You could not be more wrong
It's nice it's a fast tablet, but IMHO it's just too damn small, it should be at least 10"...
I have an Asus tablet using a Tegra chipset and I never had a single problem with it.
So I don't know how this is supposed to catch on when the first I hear abouts its release is on slashdot. The Wii U, Ouya, and Windows Phone had a lot more hype. I suppose it increase their chances at a a profit assuming they don't make many of them.
You have to want a better streaming experience than Valve's Steam already offers for free (and you can buy a Windows Tablet for the same price, and Valve is expected to support Android and iOS soon). You can use whatever system and whatever video card you want to stream the game to and from - even go wired ethernet to get around the inevitable problems you get streaming games over wireless.
If you go Shield, the tablet price is just the beginning: you have to have a mid-range GeForce card purchased in at least the last 2 years ($120+ if you don't already have one), the controller + stand ($100), and of course a suitable dual-band router runs at least $70 (most people use the crap one that came with their internet install).
In all, you could be on the hook for anywhere from $400 all the way up to $600. That's getting DANGEROUSLY close to the same price as an entry-level gaming PC, so again the need just doesn't present itself there.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I imagine that most major label games will also be made available through Amazon Appstore in order to reach Kindle users.
Add the game to Steam, then stream it from the tablet.
It'd work fine over Wi-Fi within a house. But how many megabytes per hour would it use over cellular?
By the way, now the costs for hardware are passed onto the game publisher rather than the end-user.
Something like OnLive stops working so well once ISPs start charging per GB, at which point the end user has to pay both the ISP and the game publisher. What will the market bear? And I'm told such streaming fails for twitchier genres that rely on eye-blink reactions.
But what new genres have launched in the past decade and a half? I can't think of any since Parappa the Rapper in the PS1 era.
Various flavors of Survival Horror; from Alan Wake, that Slenderman game, Rust, etc.
I haven't played them. What do they add on top of the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil/Silent Hill template?
Angry Birds
I played that back when it was called "Gorilla.bas".
There's also CtOS Mobile, which allows mobile players to engage with console players, a fairly new concept.
Apart from the fact that the whole concept of "console players" is an artifact of lockdown regimes, Pac-Man Vs. already did mobile vs. console.
Mass Effect 3 had some novel elements, such as the option to skip the action portions and basically turn the game into an interactive movie.
Isn't that what "FMV games" on Sega CD and 3DO did?
Also, 'annoyance games,' my term, in which I would classify crap like Flappy Bird and F*uck This Game, which seem designed to irritate the shit out of you.
Flappy Bird is a clone of Piou Piou, which is a clone of "Balloon Trip" in Balloon Fight, which is a clone of Joust. F*ck This Game is just WarioWare: each player in a split screen plays a one-button microgame.
did not know about the SHIELD Tablet. thanks for posting the article.
RT Tablets dont support steam ifaik. If they did this would work perfectly. Civ 5 DOES HAVE windows 8 touch mode. They pretty much just blew the UI up by about 20%. It works well enough.
RT Tablets dont support steam ifaik.
Bummer.
Virtual machine maybe?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese