NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Reviewed: Gaming and Possibly the Ultimate 4K Streamer

Earlier this week, NVIDIA officially launched its SHIELD Android TV set-top device, with far more horsepower than something like Roku or Apple TV, but on par with an average game console, and at a more affordable price tag of $199. MojoKid writes: What's interesting, however, is that it's powered by NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC which features a Maxwell-derived GPU and eight CPU cores; four ARM A57 cores and four A53s. The A57 cores are 64-bit, out-of-order designs, with multi-issue pipelines, while the A53s are simpler, in-order, highly-efficient designs. Which cores are used will depend on the particular workload being executed at the time. Tegra X1 also packs a 256-core Maxwell-derived GPU with the same programming capabilities and API support as NVIDIA's latest desktop GPUs. In standard Android benchmarks, the SHIELD pretty much slays any current high-end tablet or smartphone processor in graphics, but is about on par with the octal-core Samsung Exynos in terms of standard compute workloads but handily beating and octal-core Qualcomm Snapdragon. What's also interesting about the SHIELD Android TV is that it's not only an Android TV-capable device with movie and music streaming services like Netflix etc., but it also plays any game on Google Play and with serious horsepower behind it. The SHIELD Android TV is also the first device certified for Netflix's Ultra HD 4K streaming service.

Comments

Ouya 2

[kamapuaa]

This looks like a bigger, beefed-up version of an Ouya. Android hard-core gaming isn't a thing - it's an interesting device but why would anybody want it? Wait 3 months and just get the UHD Roku, or continue using your TV's Netflix.

Re:Ouya 2

[OrangeTide]

Well Ouya is about 2 years old now. And used a processor that came out 3 years ago (Tegra 3). Tegra 3 is only a Cortex-A9 and a very old GPU architecture (related to the old nForce series, about 10 years old).

The Tegra X1 is 3 generations later (skipping over Tegra 4 and Tegra K1). And uses the Maxwell architecture copied from the desktop graphics, obviously scaled down to fit in the thermal limits and performance requirements of a mobile chip.

The performance difference between Tegra 3 and Tegra X1 is massive. Part of that is just having die shrinks and adding more transistors, and part of that is the improvements in architecture on the memory controller, internal buses and GPU.

Remember, Ouya is another company, not related to NVIDIA. And Ouya does not included TegraZone, which offers some games that hard-core gamers would appreciate more than the typical Android fair. And there is of course GRID streaming, which is popular among hard core gamers to be able to practice away from their desktop PC.

Don't believe any promises of features to come

[frovingslosh]

I bought an expensive EVGA Nvidia Tegra 7 tablet based on promises that it would be receiving Andriod 5 (Lillipop) "real soon now". Turns out that even the KitKat "upgrade" was incredibly buggy and I'm still on Jellybean. Nvidia promised Android 5 for 2014. Then it slipped to February 2015. Then, when February 2015 came and went, Nvidia became completely unresponsive on the Android 5 upgrade.

I bought this tablet based on the promise of Android 5 from what I thought was a capable and well respected name in the industry. I didn't want to buy a Google Nexus tablet and reward Google for their short sighted lack of memory expansion and gouging the consumer for a small increment of internal memory. But at this point I expect that it is the last Nvidia product that I will ever buy.

No matter how reasonable promises of upgrades seem, believe half of what Nvidia tells you about current products and nothing about what they promise will be available soon in the future for the device, or expect to be treated the way past Nvidia customers have been.

Not good for Kodi/HTPC device

[Wag]

Pretty useless for Kodi because it can't bitstream lossless audio (runs on a closed ecosystem and requires licensing to do so). Also can't handle 23.97 output (converts to 24fps) so there's judder. There are lots of other cheaper devices which can do the job better.

As far as Netflix 4k streaming goes, you need HDMI 2.0/HDCP 2.2 support, and if you have that you almost certainly have Netflix 4k streaming built into your 4k TV already.

Re:Just curious

[OrangeTide]

Don't buy the $50 microphone/remote and it can't spy on you.

Although I suppose your new internet-enabled refrigerator could have a microphone hidden inside it and you probably wouldn't every know.

Re:Great for linux desktop and gaming

[John Allsup]

If you don't have an SSD, consider having a ramdisk /tmp via tmpfs, and a nice -19 background process that runs on boot and copies all the often used files from /bin, /ilb, /usr/bin and /usr/lib to the same file in /tmp before deleting it. This forces just about anything you are about to run into the cache, and once you get to the sage of having 16GB RAM (like one of my HP boxes), it is a while before those files get forced out of cache. In the case of my second hand HP Z800 with 48GB of RAM, it takes a while for that to happen. (Of course pre-caching say 4GB of data of a spinning HDD takes time, but making it a nice -19 process means that you can use the machine at HDD speed when it's booted, and after a while it speeds up with all the binaries cached in memory). I wrote a 20 line bash script to do this.

Does NVIDIA pay the Microsoft Android © Tax?

[nickweller]

Microsoft Has Hijacked Android In A Hostile Takeover