$299 Android Gaming Tablet Reviewed 65
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."
Re:What's the market for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How's the Android emulation scene? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dolphin [slashdot.org] has made some significant progress. See this [youtube.com] for yourself.
Mind you, the real consoles cost a lot less than this tablet so it's still novelty.
Re:Nvidia's support of Tegra has been abysmal (Score:1, Interesting)
Bingo.
I don't see this device getting any tractioni without major gaming companies (eg EA) or Valve's Steam supporting it. By that time it will be obsolete.
Also, to repeat every single time someone mentions Android:
Nobody wants to develop on Android, it's a nightmare. If Google jettisons the Java-Dalvik and switches to straight C/C++/OBJC, then you'll see more developers willing to build software on it. But as it is, the entire Java-like parts of it cripple the devices, and damn near everyone just puts up with the Java bits enough so they can write native apps. For example Unity utilizes mostly C# , not Java. But for it to work on an Android device, there are entire kludges just to get past that part.
If you download an x86 Android image and then load Intel's ARM translator on it, you can run Unity Android games faster than an actual device, but the translator introduces latency and bugs, but is still faster than Bluestacks.
The end result is that there STILL IS NOT a usable development environment, and testing on Android is basically guesswork. It's not like Windows (which has a native x86 image that runs in a VM) or OSX/iOS devices (which run native on the x86 OS) where the simulator/emulator environments run at the same speed as the device they are supposed to be with some minor caveats (eg the simulated device doesn't run out of memory since the host OS can page out.) Meanwhile compiling x86 Android apps to test is not even an easy feat and isn't even supplied out of the box (It's supplied by Intel), and the performance characteristics are not reflective of the real devices.
Adding the nVidia option requires an entire new set of tests. There's three types of compressed openglES textures out there. In order to make a game work on the widest variety of hardware you need to neuter your app so that only uses one CPU core, and only uses uncompressed textures, OR supply three different compressed textures. None of the OpenGLES textures are supported by all hardware, and this becomes readily apparent when the textures are software-decompressed (Unity3D will use ATI's texture compression and PowerVR's texture compression... in the same game. Where as on iOS, they only use the PowerVR textures.)
The end result, really is that Android is not a viable games platform. It's like we learned nothing from the 8-bit console era.