$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."
So? (Score:2)
Is it MARVELous this SHIELD?
Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
Hail HYDRA.
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Put your arms down, you look like a cheerleader.
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Put your arms down, you look like a cheerleader.
+1 This;
I thought chemical weapons/gas warfare were/are basically warcrimes nowadays, no?
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It's a pretty natural bit of elision if you think of it as spoken word: "Reviews are finally hitting, [that is, reviews] of the devices, this morning".
Was this dictated and not read?
Nvidia's support of Tegra has been abysmal (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's the real review from an owner of multiple Tegra products from the first generation onwards. You're welcome.
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Does that include the Tegra Note tablet? The only bug of relevance I've found is the GPS is garbage and updates for it have been steady, with it sitting at Kitkat, with the announced intention to upgrade it to L when that comes out.
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Does it have Play on it though?
With Google moving the upgrades to android into services through Play, this is relevant to me.
I'd buy this to replace my broken Nexus 7 if it had the standard software.
Amazon Appstore (Score:2)
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The last Shield had Play, and also has its own curated app showplace - that just links to the Play Store to actually buy the games.
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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 w
Apple Appsore needs more Apps (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody wants to develop on Android
iOS Active / 1.2 million+ apps (As of June 2014) vs Google Play Active / 1.3+ million apps (as of July 2014)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
You could not be more wrong
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I took the comment to mean that no one wants to (likes to) develop on Android, but do it while hating every moment of it because $$$.
Not wanting to doesn't imply that they don't.
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Based on the bugginess of every Tegra device to date and Nvidia's near-total lack of support, you're nuts if you even consider buying this. And that's the real review from an owner of multiple Tegra products from the first generation onwards. You're welcome.
That and they compare it to Apple's A7 chip, when the A8 (or A7x at least) is less than 2 months away and has likely improved itself.
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Well, unless someone sits and writes specific modules for each possible underlying instruction set, probably not.
Remember, Android is Java - sure, you CAN execute ARM (or in some hardware Intel) instructions - but those are always of the processor-specific modules. Go download the MoboPlayer app, which has specific modules to accelerate video for each type of device.
Can't see that happening for an emulator, especially when 99% of the time, the performance in Java would be fine anyway. Thus, you're really
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.
andry birds (Score:2)
So much hate here (Score:3)
You'd think Slashdot was populated only by AMD employees.
Seriously, though - the specs are really nice - I'm looking forward to seeing this in production.
Anybody have it? Can you play Civ V in Tablet mode (Score:2)
I don't care if it is streamed or run locally or whatever.
This is the only thing keeping me from buying a shield tablet, the other games I can easily see how they will work, and they are a "bonus" for me, I can and will run emulators on anything, so the seamless controller will be nice, but it keeps coming back to Civ.
I know Civ V (and eventually Civ Beyond Ear
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Idea - Add the game to Steam, then stream it from the tablet. Pretty sure you can do that with non-Steam games now, and in my experience it's pretty darn fast.
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Yeah, but I thing GP was looking to use a touchscreen interface with Civ. Not sure if you could get that with streaming.
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Fair point, haven't tried it on a touchscreen device.
Cellular cap (Score:2)
Add the game to Steam, then stream it from the tablet.
It'd work fine over Wi-Fi within a house. But how many megabytes per hour would it use over cellular?
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Probably a shit load, although I couldn't say if it would use more data than OP's current method.
Of course, if it did use more data, but the experience was better (ie no lag), the question becomes "would it be worth the tradeoff?"
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RT Tablets dont support steam ifaik.
Bummer.
Virtual machine maybe?
What's the market for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't get is what the market for this is. The gaming aspect of it seems to be based on streaming games from a PC, and buying a PC good enough to do that costs a fair bit of money assuming you don't already have one. Game streaming also requires wireless internet access, which means you're probably not going to be taking it out of your home. There's also the issue of what you're going to do with it outside of game streaming - if you want something that can browse the internet when you're away from home, you'd be better off with a 4G phone than a wifi-based tablet.
The real gaming crowd is going to stick to physical PCs because of the superior experience they offer. The casual gaming crowd, who want to play games specifically released for iOS/Android, have cheaper options for accessing those games. Who is the target market?
Re:What's the market for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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What if the ultimate goal of the design concept was not stream from a PC, but stream over the internet from a datacenter using many Tesla or other high-end nVidia GPU's in a datacenter? Think about it... the client hardware becomes thin (most importantly less expensive) and the heavy lifting is done on the server-side in the cloud. By the way, now the costs for hardware are passed onto the game publisher rather than the end-user. Transitioning from a end-user component designer to a complete game system solution provider may be very viable for nVidia's future. Gaming is where nVidia is strong, why doesn't this make sense to develop the IP for future markets and opportunities? After all, if Google or other large companies force a faster better stronger Internet fabric...we may actually see end to end latencies drop low enough and bandwidth to be high enough to do this well. Sounds like a smart plan to me.
Welcome to 3 years ago with OnLive and Gaikai.
The compression and latency make it a fucking terrible experience.
Latency and monthly caps (Score:3)
By the way, now the costs for hardware are passed onto the game publisher rather than the end-user.
Something like OnLive stops working so well once ISPs start charging per GB, at which point the end user has to pay both the ISP and the game publisher. What will the market bear? [slashdot.org] And I'm told such streaming fails for twitchier genres that rely on eye-blink reactions.
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People who don't live alone, and have to let others use their home theater at times, but still want to use the gaming PC that's in the theater.
There's more to it than just that (Score:3)
You have to want a better streaming experience than Valve's Steam already offers for free (and you can buy a Windows Tablet for the same price, and Valve is expected to support Android and iOS soon). You can use whatever system and whatever video card you want to stream the game to and from - even go wired ethernet to get around the inevitable problems you get streaming games over wireless.
If you go Shield, the tablet price is just the beginning: you have to have a mid-range GeForce card purchased in at le
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It's a good question. I really want a take-anywhere tablet in the 7-8" range, with 2GB RAM, at least 32GB onboard storage, micro SD support, LTE, a 1920x1200 or better display, and a stylus.
This actually has all that, but it sacrifices weight and battery life to provide terrific graphics performance - which I don't really care about at all. (I play games on Android, but mostly Kairosoft games and Final Fantasy, which are not particularly taxing.)
But it's by no means a bad device, and if Nvidia can refine
The Future Past (Score:4, Insightful)
The SHIELD Tablet... is able to showcase full OpenGL versions of games like Portal and Half-Life 2 running at 1080p
So, the future of gaming is... the past of gaming, but at higher resolution!
Seriously, you want to impress me, do it with a game that's not older than the current 2nd-term Presidency.
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So, the future of gaming is... the past of gaming, but at higher resolution!
When has that not been the case?
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Oh, it's probably about 50/50. After all, you can't have much of a past if you don't come up with new ideas now and again.
Otherwise the only games that would exist would be some variant of Pong and Conway's Game of Life.
Recent genre launches (Score:2)
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Various flavors of Survival Horror; from Alan Wake, that Slenderman game, Rust, etc. Then you have your mobile games (remember cell-phone games from 15 years ago? Yea, me either) like Angry Birds, Punch Quest, etc.
There's also CtOS Mobile, which allows mobile players to engage with console players, a fairly new concept.
Mass Effect 3 had some novel elements, such as the option to skip the action portions and basically turn the game into an interactive movie.
Oh, and Kerbal Space Program! Never played anything
Flappy Bird is Balloon Fight (Score:2)
Various flavors of Survival Horror; from Alan Wake, that Slenderman game, Rust, etc.
I haven't played them. What do they add on top of the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil/Silent Hill template?
Angry Birds
I played that back when it was called "Gorilla.bas".
There's also CtOS Mobile, which allows mobile players to engage with console players, a fairly new concept.
Apart from the fact that the whole concept of "console players" is an artifact of lockdown regimes, Pac-Man Vs. already did mobile vs. console.
Mass Effect 3 had some novel elements, such as the option to skip the action portions and basically turn the game into an interactive movie.
Isn't that what "FMV games" on Sega CD and 3DO did?
Also, 'annoyance games,' my term, in which I would classify crap like Flappy Bird and F*uck This Game, which seem designed to irritate the shit out of you.
Flappy Bird is a clone of Piou Piou, which is a clone of "Balloon Trip" in Balloon Fight, which is a clone of Joust. F*ck This Game is just WarioWare: each pl
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Various flavors of Survival Horror; from Alan Wake, that Slenderman game, Rust, etc.
I haven't played them. What do they add on top of the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil/Silent Hill template?
Play them, then you tell me.
Regarding Rust, I don't recall ever having to build and defend a house in any of the games you mentioned.
Oh, right, you're still obsessed with the concept that "not new genre == been there, done that." Nevermind that, even if a game fits an existing genre (like FPS), it can still have novel elements that make it uniquely different than previous iterations of said genre (like Minecraft).
Also, I noticed you didn't mention KSP - is that because you missed it, or you couldn't think o
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The fad has come and gone, but the Rock Band/Guitar Hero genre was pretty novel.
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the Rock Band/Guitar Hero genre was pretty novel.
They're also just Parappa with a plastic guitar.
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Parappa was nothing but a bunch of quicktime events strung together. Total rip off of 1990's arcade hits like Die Hard: Arcade and Hologram Time Traveler.
Rocksmith is... not that.
A "game" where you connect an actual musical instrument (instead of a plastic toy), and learn rather than play? Sounds pretty novel to me.
running at 1080p (Score:5, Funny)
Take that, Xbone.
too small... (Score:2)
Hype (Score:3)