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Portables (Games) Games

Nvidia Releases Tegra 4 Powered SHIELD Handheld 81

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the slices-and-dices dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today, Nvidia officially releases the SHIELD. After an unexpected delay last month, the company dropped the price of its hotly-anticipated handheld gaming system from $350 to just $300. Sporting a 5-inch 720p touchscreen attached to an XBox-style controller, the SHIELD is the first serious Android-based handheld gaming device. The SHIELD is also the first major device top ship with Nvidia's new Tegra 4 SoC. But the potentially killer feature of the SHIELD is its ability to steam heavy-duty PC games from your desktop right into your hands. Right now the selection of PC games is pretty scarce, with just 21 titles to choose from so far, though Nvidia promises more to come. Tom's Hardware just posted an exhaustive review of the Nvidia SHIELD, which includes demos of both Android gaming and PC streaming, display and battery testing, plus the usual bevy of performance tests versus the Tegra 3-based Nexus 7 (2012), the new Nexus 7 carrying a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, the iPhone 5, and a Wintel tablet with the Atom Z2760. Tegra 4 presents nearly four times the performance of Tegra 3, and leaves most of its competition in the dust. However, it also means that Nvidia is now the only ARM competitor without an OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation on the horizon, making Nvidia's new position as top dog quite uncertain."
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Nvidia Releases Tegra 4 Powered SHIELD Handheld More

Nvidia Releases Tegra 4 Powered SHIELD Handheld

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  • steam? (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by bcong ( 1125705 )
    ... its ability to steam heavy-duty PC games from your desktop right into your hands... very cool that it can sublimate PC games, but what about my PS3 and XBox games? I want those in gas form as well.

    • Sony's working on letting the PS Vita do this with PS4 games, however I understand that they're reluctant to turn games into vapour as it undermines the DRM restrictions against inhalation and/or respiration without the appropriate written consent.

  • OpenGL (Score:5, Informative)

    by blackraven14250 ( 902843 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:07AM (#44435477)

    However, it also means that Nvidia is now the only ARM competitor without an OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation on the horizon, making Nvidia's new position as top dog quite uncertain.

    Tegra 5 is supposed to be OpenGL 4.3, so I wouldn't be concerned about them not having an OpenGL ES 3.0 chip.

    • Tegra 5 has OpenGL ES 3.0 as well, but this is a review of a Tegra 4 device. Tegra 5 will not be released for some time yet

      • Yeah, except if they're worried about "[NVidia's] position as top dog" being "quite uncertain" because there's no OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation "on the horizon", they're just wrong - it is on the horizon, in less than a year. By the time they come out with Tegra 5, there probably won't even be a hell of a lot using OpenGL ES 3.0, since barely anything out now has it, and developers tend not to target platforms that just don't exist in the wild.

  • Got my hands on one at PDXLAN (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Psyberian ( 240815 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:13AM (#44435551)

    Got hands one at PDXLAN in Portland a few weeks ago. What can I say but holy crap, I gotta have one. It's a like an oversized dreamcast controller with a LCD screen. It's streaming seemed flawless. We ran Borderlands and a few other games without issue. They were stating a pretty insane battery life, but that will be left to see what it really is. The screen was beautiful, it has a large number of games, and more coming. It was also running steam if I remember correctly. I know this isn't much of are review, but more of just saying, this thing rocks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      And how in the hell is that portable?

      Are you wearing MC hammer pants?

      • Yep, but that's not a shield in my pocket, I'm just happy to see you.

        So your saying netbook isn't portable? Portable doesn't mean pocketsize.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

          I don't carry my netbook everywhere. I like to game on the go. I leave the netbook in the car.

      • I remember when any computer with a handle and weighing less than 40 pounds was portable, even if you had to plug it into the wall. (later they started semi-jokingly calling them luggables).

    • Re:Got my hands on one at PDXLAN (Score:4, Insightful)

      by HaZardman27 ( 1521119 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:29AM (#44435761)
      I would recommend reading some of the reviews. It looks like the streaming feature is great, if you have a high-end wireless router and are within one room's distance from that router.

      • Re:Got my hands on one at PDXLAN (Score:4, Interesting)

        by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:31AM (#44435773)

        If that is the case, why not just play on the PC?
        If it can't at least be usable at the Mcdonalds down the road or the starbucks a block further it seems totally useless.

        • If the gaming PC is also the home theater PC, and your wife/girlfriend is watching something, this could be useful. This assumes the streaming PC can be used for other things while streaming the game.

          • It cannot, even if you have multiple displays. If the game it is streaming loses focus, it quits streaming. Tom's review mentions this.

            • On the other hand, if your gaming PC is connected to the living room TV (probably not a terribly common setup, I'll admit) and that TV is being used for something else, this could function like the Wii U gamepad's off-TV feature.

    • Re:Got my hands on one at PDXLAN (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dpidcoe ( 2606549 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:39AM (#44435859)
      There was an nvidia booth at maker faire in san mateo this year, and they had one there. I was attending with a friend who was a game developer, so we went to check it out. I was thoroughly unimpressed, not because there was anything wrong with the system (it played games as far as I could tell), but because all of our technical questions were met with blank stares. Eventually they told us to come back in an hour because the one technical guy was off getting lunch or something. Apparently nvidia sent a booth full of marketing people to an event specifically for engineers and technical people.
    • The battery is huge! An Iphone 5 has a 5.45Wh battery. With that battery the iPhone would easily survive over a week.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I tried it at PAX East. They didn't have streaming from PCs set up, so we could just play Tegra games. Was not impressed, the Tegra games were all mobiley: simplistic, stupid, and by no means mind-blowingly pretty for a handheld. The streaming is the only thing I could see myself caring about, but it wouldn't be terribly useful for my own use case, and certainly not $300 useful.

  • Let's talk important features. Can it run standard Android apps, such as NES.emu and ePSXe emulators? I already own a GameKlip [thegameklip.com] for my Galaxy S4, but a standalone emulation device like this would be great for everyone that loves classic games.
    • Based on the comments at Anandtech, I bought a GameKlip this morning. It seems like the better option for emulation than this device if you already have a PS3 controller and an android phone or tablet, and I have no use for streaming games to this instead of playing them on the big-screen.

  • Looking through the benchmarks, at a little more than double the resolution, the Nexus 7 gives a little less than half the framerate of this dedicated gaming machine. That should make it fantastic for general use, and makes the price seem attractive vs. the Allwinner imports.

  • Europe is screwed. no ETA on when it will be available, would love to have one to control my parrot drone.

    Guess I'll have to get one from ebay/amazon if they every pop up there.

  • It's quite interesting that the Shield requires active cooling. Seems like the Tegra 4 Soc runs extreemly hot. There are customer complaints of over heating for the Toshiba Excite:
    http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Excite-AT15LE-A32-PDA0EU-00101Y-10-1-Inch/product-reviews/B00D78Q2NQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending&tag=at055-20 [amazon.com]
    Also, there are rumours that smartphone OEMs avoided Tegra 4 because of heat and battery consumption issues.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nhat11 ( 1608159 )

      Yea I can imagine if the user is doing some high end gaming that it needs some type of cooling.

      • Not really. The Snapdragon 800 has a faster GPU and runs happily without any active cooling

  • 15 Pages? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Lucas123 ( 935744 )
    Really, Tom?
  • Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.

    • Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.

      I suspect that they didn't exactly make heroic efforts for ATI/AMD customers; but my understanding is that their GPU requirement(Nvidia only, GTX 650 or higher) corresponds to the introduction of "NVENC", an feature that provides on-chip hardware encoding to h.264, with access to the framebuffer. If you want low-latency streaming, you more or less need something similar to that capability (grabbing the finished frame back over PCIe and encoding it on the CPU definitely isn't going to help your latency)...

      Th

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.

      Who in total are still miniscule compared to the number running Intel graphics (Intel is the #1

  • Kudos!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by JestersGrind ( 2549938 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:43AM (#44435927)
    Kudos to Nick Fury and his team on this device. When is HYDRA coming out with their device?
  • According to Anandtech [anandtech.com] only 74.8 GFLOPS - comparable to an iPad 4. Other sources say 96 GFLOPS, but only when in power-hungry overclock mode: image [radikal.ru]. The real winner for Q4 2013 will be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 - 129 GFLOPS. That leaves Tegra 4 completely in the dust.

    The main reason the Tegra 4 is in no tablet/phone, is because Tegra 3 real performance and power usage was worse than advertised/marketed, and therefore the tablet/phone makers did not trust Tegra 4 would be a good bet. Another (smaller) re

    • According to Anandtech benchmarks it easily beats the iPad 4: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7190/nvidia-shield-review-tegra-4-crossroads-pc-mobile-gaming/4 [anandtech.com]
      It also beats Snapdragon 800 in CPU (but not GPU). In fairness, it has to be said that Tegra 4 needs to be actively colled, while Snapdragon 800 does not.

      • Thanks for the link. Release date of iPad 4 is December 2012 (!) and has a much higher resolution to handle. Snapdragon 800 was designed for use in a (high-end) phone. The active cooling suggests Tegra 4 is not fit for mobile devices - I still think the reason for this device is to dump their unsold processor tech.

        I have to say I would welcome mini-computers in the range 15 - 30W. For notebooks this Tegra 4 would be interesting.
    • GFLOPS by themselves are a pretty meaningless way of assessing any processor. If it's bottlenecked by memory bandwidth in common usage, then it's no good. For example, the PowerPC G4 beat any Intel chips at launch in terms of FPU throughput numbers and Apple was happy to shout about this, neglecting to mention that it was only really true if your workload was almost 100% fused multiply adds and your data fitted into L2 cache. In a modern GPU, the performance of the compiler, the threading model and the m

  • Individually, I know you can display Shield games on your TV, and I know Shield can stream Steam games from your PC.

    Can it do both at once? That seems to be an important question.

    • You could just run a cheap HDMI or DVI-to-HDMI cable from your PC to your HDTV. For older PCs or netbooks that don't have HDMI out, you could do the same with VGA and audio. And if your TV is old too, Sewell Direct sells very affordable VGA to composite converters.

      • Not everyone has their PC near their TV, or a wireless gaming controller for their PC that will work. That is the appeal of a Steam Box, or Shield in this case.

  • Is it just me or this thing is the most beautiful thing ever seen ??? Apple will reach this level in ... never!

  • Because you know they pretend they report to Nick Fury.

  • Wait until it's in the bargin bin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @12:42PM (#44437469) Homepage
    It won't have a long life at all so why pay a premium for this turd?

  • Soo, Wii U / PSP / Vita kind of thing for PC, by nVidia...
    Even Sony's Vita, with wonderful screen and dozens of decent games struggles at two times lower price, it's astonishing how arrogant or clueless nVidia is.
    What is the advantage of this thing? Cheapo crappo games? No thanks.

  • Mainly if that Screen doesn't go back farther. I picked up one of my gamepads to see how it would be if I had a screen at the same place, and i have to bed the gamepad down to see a screen like that. Really uncomfortable to play like that. But i see form pictures the buttons and pads are more flat then normal gamepads.

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