NVIDIA Announces SHIELD Game Console

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA held an event in San Francisco last night at GDC, where the company unveiled a new Android TV streamer, game console, and supercomputer, as NVIDIA's Jen Hsun Huang calls it, all wrapped up in a single, ultra-slim device called NVIDIA SHIELD. The SHIELD console is powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC with 3GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, Gig-E and 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO WiFi. It's also 4K Ultra-HD Ready with 4K playback and capture up to 60 fps (VP9, H265, H264) with encode/decode with full hardware processing. The company claims the console provides twice the performance of an Xbox 360. NVIDIA demo'ed the device with Android TV, streaming music and HD movies and browsing social media. The device can stream games from a GeForce powered PC to your television or from NVIDIA's GRID cloud gaming service, just like previous NVIDIA SHIELD devices. Native Android games will also run on the SHIELD console. NVIDIA's plan is to offer a wide array of native Android titles in the SHIELD store, as well as leverage the company's relationships with game developers to bring top titles to GRID. The device was shown playing Gearbox's Borderlands The Pre-Sequel, Doom 3 BFG Edition, Metal Gear Solid V, the Unreal Engine 4 Infiltrator demo and yes, even Crysis 3.

Comments

Re:It's interesting, but...

[TheGratefulNet]

interesting. I have not seen this but I heard about it.

a few years ago, I had an onsite interview (full day, quite exhausting) at nvidia and it was for a group that was doing the networking stuff for this whole architecture. they pitched the idea of network streaming from their own hosted supercomputer mainframes to users 'thin consoles'. lots of questions were asked of me about networking and optimization and even more about c++ corner cases (stuff that I rarely run into, but I guess they love 'gotcha!' programming questions, sigh).

I never got the job. it did look interesting, but they went with someone else.

maybe I don't feel so bad, if they really did botch the thing up. maybe they needed networking people more than they realized. of course, it was all young kids at the interview table and, of course, they 'know everything' (nvidia people do have a problem with ego; that came across pretty loud and clear during the interview).

perhaps they'll get it right in some followon product. its not a simple problem to solve, to be honest, but they sure do have enough money and manpower to throw at almost any problem.