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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.
So a legitimate launch announcement of a new product in the tech space with a new processing engine on board is an advertisement? Then by rights virtually every news post of a new product across the web is an ad. Come on, that gets old. This post simply reports the news and the company's claims, it doesn't pass opinion or judgment on it, just reports the news.
On the other side of balance, I found this extremely exciting for many reasons and hadn't seen the release announcement anywhere until this morning. But then I guess that's the nice thing about the interweb. Opinion is varied, and we can use /. as an opinion platform to express to everyone interested in reading exactly how we feel. And it's all ok!
For what it's worth I like the look of it - smart consoles is an interesting industry at a very interesting stage in its development. I can't help but feel as an industry it's at the point where mobile phones got to just before they exploded and took over in areas and use-cases no-one in their right mind thought possible at the time.
Perhaps one day our TVs will just be really nice, high quality display-only devices, and the value will be in selling the access platform driven off devices like this... oh wait, I think we might be there already...
As you were!
This is actually the third "nVidia SHIELD" product. There's now a Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and this new Shield Console.
Dear Nvidia
I don't want a console. I have an ultra-fast system that plays games, has wide compatibility, can hook up to a TV wirelessles or via HDMI, can surf the web, run netflix, watch live TV, etc. It's called my PC and it's faster. I also have no interest in using joysticks to control anything ever.
Sincerely,
everyone
I think it may be a tough sell:
1. The Xbox One and PS4 are established gaming consoles with known names. This is new.
2. The Xbox One and PS4 have a big array of well known and popular titles available on it with interfaces designed specifically for use with a console remote. This game has very few, and lots of Android games not designed to work with a console remote. You need an internet connection to set up a game and to play, but you don't need a high speed connection during play to stream most of the content.
3. The Xbox One and PS4 have 500GB of storage - which is pathetic, considering how cheap a 2TB hard drive is these days. But 500GB sure beats 16GB.
4. The Xbox One and PS4 can play DVDs and Blu Rays. This can't. It can stream them, but the number of potential buyers with home media centers and their entire movie collection ripped for streaming is almost certainly much smaller than the number of potential buyers with DVDs and Blu Ray disks.
On the other hand:
1. This thing is cheaper.
2. If their game streaming service doesn't suck and the pricing is good, the game selection becomes way more attractive. It's still, so far, not as good as on one of the lead consoles. But I have to admit that spending, say, $10 or $15 per month to access to 30+ games looks more appealing than spending $50 or $60 per game even though the latter can be cheaper if you don't buy that many games over the life of the console.
3. Eventually I think most people - especially kids just entering the workforce now or in the next few years - may get out of the habit of buying DVDs and Blu Rays entirely and keep their entire movie collection in Vudu/Amazon Prime/Google Play/iTunes/whatever, in which case the lack of a drive is irrelevant. I have 300-odd DVDs (most purchased used), but I'm an old bastard.
Streaming over the internet is okay, but it's SO dependent on your connection quality (and your bandwidth limits). It can work, though, obviously.
Maybe it'll work in the future, but it's a pretty poor experience right now.
I have the original NVIDIA Shield, the one that looks like a 360 controller with a screen strapped to the top. Late last year they announced a free trial for their GRID cloud gaming service. One caveat was that their servers were all in San Jose, and if you're too far it warns you. I tried it from my home in Illinois, and it was predictably horrible with just a ~70ms ping. I tried it again from California and it was only slightly less horrible with a ~20ms ping.
Driving games become drunk-driving games. Another driver comes in and hits you? Good luck recovering. Forget that there's a turn at some point in the track? You'll never react to it in time. Things that require constant micro-adjustments like drifting are virtually impossible.
Fighting games become button-mashers because you can't react fast enough to block or counter-attack.
Seriously, these were launch titles! I assume 99% of testing happened with local-network latency. If I were the guy at NVIDIA who okayed go-live, I'd be deeply embarrassed.
The only thing I'd use it for right now might be a turn-based strategy games, or other things where latency really has no effect on gameplay.
Soon to be renamed to Hydra
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.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The company claims the console provides twice the performance of an Xbox 360.
This console is said to have twice the power of a console that was superceeded by it's next gen counterpart 16 months ago. I don't know that this is the strongest selling point for a console unless that was a typo and it was supposed to say Xbox One.