Gaming & GeForce Now
Gaming & GeForce Now
We mentioned it already, basically there are two ways to game on the unit, using the Tegra X1's 256 shader cores and Android games, or stream games. The last one is a big focus for Nvidia.
Shield games
For gaming you can revert to two options, streaming and then there's rendering your game with the built-in GPU, here you are limited in many ways. On a big screen HDTV or Ultra HDTV you'll likely not use Shield 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.
GeForce Now
No, 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 here there are two options, through the HUB you can use your own PC and stream games stored from a remote PC in I believe it maxes out at 720p (could be 1080p these days though); as long as the PC has a suitable Nvidia graphics card and matches other minimum specifications detailed by the firm.
Before we continue please have a look at the video above I recorded showing GeForce Now streaming and quality in action, and I am VERY SORRY for my driving skills :-)
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.
You can understand it already, next to the 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 200/20 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. Overall though, the quality is fairly good. My main worry was lag, due to latency over the internet. I mean, you are playing the game, controlling it with your Shield controller, that movement and action data is sent to the cloud, processed, rendered and returned over that same connection. Weirdly enough, 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).
The games are available to buy or are part of a monthly subscription package (the first three months are free upon sign-up). The collection of games that can be streamed is growing and getting more impressive. There are roughly 50 games on the platform at present, with most being offered as part of the 10 bucks monthly subscription fee. Names like The Witcher 3, MotoGP 15 and F1 2015 are in there as well. Interesting fact, if you actually buy a game you will also get the Steam or GOG download key for the PC version (where applicable).
