NVIDIA Unveils GRID Servers, Tegra 4 SoC and Project SHIELD Mobile Gaming Device

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA made some bold moves at their CES 2013 press conference and announced a couple of potentially game changing products. GeForce GRID is a cloud gaming solution. It allows PC game content to be run and rendered in the cloud and then streamed to any device that can run the GRID receiver utility, like a Smart TV, tablet, or a smartphone. GeForce GRID server architecture combines an NVIDIA-designed server packed with GPUs with NVIDIA-developed software and virtualization layer. A rack of 20 GRID servers was shown, powered by 240 GPUs, capable of 200 TFLOPS and roughly equivalent to the performance of 720 Xbox 360 consoles. The biggest news to come out of NVIDIA's press conference, however, had to do with Tegra 4. Not only was the next-gen SoC officially unveiled, but a new portable gaming device based on Tegra 4, dubbed Project SHIELD, was also demoed. NVIDIA's Tegra 4 builds upon the success of the Tegra 3 by incorporating updated ARM15-based CPU cores with 72 custom GeForce GPU cores, which offer up to 6x the performance of Tegra 3. The A15 cores used in Tegra 4 are up to 2.6x faster than the A9-class cores used in Tegra 3. As a companion to the Tegra 4, NVIDIA also took the wraps off of their new Icera i500 programmable 4G LTE modem processor. Icera i500 features 8 custom, programmable processor cores and is approximately 40% smaller than many fixed function modems. The biggest surprise to come out of NVIDIA's press conference was Project SHIELD, a Tegra 4-powered mobile gaming device running Android that's sure to put Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo on high alert. Project SHIELD offers a pure Android experience without any skinning or other customizations, save for the SHIELD app environment, that can play any Android game. Project SHIELD has the ability to stream PC games from a GeForce GTX-equipped PC as well. The device is shaped much like an Xbox 360 game controller, but features a 5", flip-out capacitive touch display with a 720P resolution. The device can also stream to an HD TV via HDMI or a WiDi-like wireless dongle. In fact, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed Project SHIELD playing a 4K video on an LG 4K TV."

The 1980s called

[PPH]

They want their X Windows back.

more stupidity

[slashmydots]

I could have sworn there was another company that recently discovered that you cannot in fact stream 1920x1080 uncompressed over a standard internet connection and went bankrupt. Now Nvidia is trying to do it? So a server can render it, great. So a PC can receive and render it, great. How does the data get between the two? In a delayed, heavily compressed format with a 50+ ms delay, that's how. Totally pointless.

the best part of this, is the waiting

[alen]

geeks love to wait for crap and nvidia is the master of a paper launch

expect this to hit stores by august 31 to and in the mean time geeks will be creaming their shorts reading blog posts about how awesome this and watching unboxing videos made by the PR guys

Re:This is a game changer that we have been dreami

[drinkypoo]

This is the system of our wet dreams. For years we have talked about cloud gaming devices. And in theory internet speeds are fast enough to make this work.

Who is this "we"? I dream of having a handheld device that runs games. I want it to work where wireless coverage is spotty or nonexistent, without that a portable device is worse than useless, it's a rock I have to drag around because it's expensive.

depends on the game

[Arakageeta]

Maybe this isn't a solution for FPS games, but I would love to be able to play Civilization V from the cloud with all the graphic bells and whistles.