Gaming & GeForce Now

Gaming 

Using the Tegra X1's 256 shader cores you can play some Android games pretty nicely. But being an avid reader on a PC gaming related website I think most of you will agree that such games really isn't our cup of tea. Game streaming however is something the Shield can manage very well, and is a focus for Nvidia.
  

For gaming you can revert to three options, android games, streaming with GeForce now but also you could stream games from your PC with Nvidia GameStream. On a big screen HDTV or Ultra HDTV you'll likely not use Android games much, typically these are the games that work out best on a smart-phone with a small screen. There are plenty of games to choose from, available for purchase. 

Shield games

The biggest thing and likely reason for Nvidia to launch the Shield Android TV, was to bring its streaming technology in the living room. Now there are two options, through the HUB you can use your own PC and stream games stored from a remote PC; as long as the PC has a suitable Nvidia graphics card and matches other minimum specifications detailed by the firm.

 
However the real deal is GeForce Now, Nvidia's cloud game streaming service that serves games through the Nvidia Grid. Basically you start a game and then over the mighty interwebzzz a connection is made to the closest Nvidia cloud servers. Here your games are processed and rendered and then streamed back towards your telly through the Shield Android PC. Nvidia recently upgraded their cloud service and servers, it's all pascal based now so you can play games at a quality level that matches PC gaming. This will cost you roughly 10 euros a month. This opens up a library of somewhat older games though, the newer ones will need to be bought. Once bought you can use and install them in Steam on your PC as well. For Shield Android PC setup there is one potential bottleneck, that would be your internet connection as it needs to be reasonably fast. We're on a 300/30 Mbits connection here in the office and even then we had a couple of times that we could visually see the bit-range of the stream change (compression errors). This did improve over last years testing though. Lag, due to latency over the internet? Weirdly enough you'll hardly notice it and it is really responsive.So yeah the latency gap isn't at all bad. In fact gaming feels as responsive as on any console. Massive props to Nvidia for that. Again, you need a proper internet connection in order to stream at 1080p60 (10Mbps is the recommended minimum).
  

Above an example video recorded on the Shield 2017 demonstrating Hitman and Thief in 1080p. You'll notice that not everything goes perfect or offers stutter free rendering. The overall quality and framerates however are solid.

Nice to know is that the Shield also can be used to take screen-shots and even record videos and stream them onto the web to services like Twitch.