Nvidia shows updated Shield gaming handheld short before release
Nvidia showed an updated / upgraded revision of the Shield portable gaming device at the Computex trade show Tuesday, and said it will start shipping the device later this month to customers who pre-ordered it. It has the same basic design as the system unveiled at the International CES in January, with its 5-inch flip-out display, but Nvidia has worked on the controls and materials to make the device feel more solid, said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
“The basic architecture is the same. Some of the industrial design was enhanced, it feels more solid. You can really fight it, it feels very rigid,” he said.
Shield is based on Nvidia’s new Tegra 4 processor and runs the Android OS. It marks Nvidia’s entry into the portable gaming market, where it will have to compete with Nintendo and Sony, as well as with tablet and smartphone makers. It’s a new business for Nvidia and the company is taking the introduction slowly in order to make sure it does it right, Huang said. It won’t sell the product internationally until it gets the sales and support model nailed down in the U.S reports TechHive.
Last month, Nvidia said Shield would be available for pre-order on May 20, priced at $349. The pre-orders have been “very limited,” Huang said, but he said it’s because Nvidia didn’t want to market Shield heavily until it knew it could manufacture and deliver it.
“Later this month we’ll go very broad” with the marketing, he said. The company will start to ship the device to customers who preordered it at around the same time. Huang showed the updated Shield, which he said is the final production version, to a group of reporters in a meeting room away from the Computex show floor.
Separately, he demonstrated a prototype system that lets gamers stream games from a top-end gaming PC to a TV somewhere else in the house.
He showed a state of the art game running on a PC with Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. A TV wouldn’t have the GPU power to render such a game, but still people might want to play the game on a screen in another room in the house.The technology he showed converts the game into an H.264 video stream and transmits it via Wi-Fi from the PC to the other room, where a separate, standalone Tegra device decodes the video so that the game can be played on the TV. “The remote graphics needs to be very fast and the latency very low. There needs to be a software receiver that’s also very low latency, managing the quality of service between the PC and the TV,” Huang said.
In the demonstration here, the game looked to be playing smoothly on the TV, just like it did on the PC across the room where it was being streamed from.
A player could save the game on the TV, then pick it up in the same spot on their PC or on a Shield device, he said. It was only a demonstration, and Huang didn’t say when the remote streaming system might be offered in product form. Nvidia has also worked with Valve, the company that operates the Steam games store, to make it work better on portable devices, he said.
It’s all part of a plan to usher in the “multi screen world,” according to Huang. With an application processor, Android and the cloud, all screens—be they TVs, laptops or the display in the back of a car—will be able to play video games, music and movies, he said.
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Senior Member
Posts: 6837
Joined: 2003-07-23
It's a nice piece of tech, but the price is too high in an already crowded market. Plus, why would anyone want this over a Vita or 3DS?
Senior Member
Posts: 4874
Joined: 2008-12-09
Does anyone actually want one of these things? It's like a 1st generation 3g videophone made by NEC lol. Remember that giant clamshell piece of rubbish they sold when 3g launched.
http://www.liquidsilver.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/e808.jpg
No, I think it's really stupid. Then again, we are in a forum where most of us drop $300 on a graphics card and call it mid-high range.
Senior Member
Posts: 5454
Joined: 2005-08-05
Maybe because there are so few games for the vita and 3DS offers nothing new?
An open and powerfull android gaming console with good options for streaming could be appealing. Hell, it's cheaper than an OpenPandora but can do much more.
Senior Member
Posts: 6837
Joined: 2003-07-23
Maybe because there are so few games for the vita and 3DS offers nothing new?
An open and powerfull android gaming console with good options for streaming could be appealing. Hell, it's cheaper than an OpenPandora but can do much more.
It's going to be competing with smartphones and tablets.
Senior Member
Posts: 312
Joined: 2009-03-17
Does anyone actually want one of these things? It's like a 1st generation 3g videophone made by NEC lol. Remember that giant clamshell piece of rubbish they sold when 3g launched.
http://www.liquidsilver.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/e808.jpg