Shields up! Nvidia crams Tegra K1 into gaming slab to rival your PS3 Nvidia is touting a new 8-inch, Tegra K1-powered Android tablet as a gaming gadget for hardcore players. The graphics biz said its Shield slab was designed to offer punters high-end games performance on the move, with support for Android games and streaming PC titles when connected to desktops with Nvidia's GameStream tech. …
I might get the controller if it supports other tablets and works nice with other apps/software. I can already stream to a tablet using existing apps quite nicely... so not really keen on being tied into a format.
But if it's available on both, I can see the gaming tablet for those who won't also want other options.
The controller though is win win in most cases.
The controller is proprietary, according to Nvidia. I may be missing something with this, but I don't get it - it's a quite expensive tablet that largely plays Android games but will also stream from the PC. But if you were going to stream from the PC, wouldn't you want to stream straight into the back of a TV, rather than an 8" screen?
> The controller is proprietary, according to Nvidia
Yep, it uses Wifi Direct rather than Bluetooth, so is unlikely to work with anything else.
> But if you were going to stream from the PC, wouldn't you want to stream straight into the back
> of a TV
You can, at least in theory. The tablet has an HDMI port, and a mode that turns the internal screen off and uses the HDMI instead. The game controller has Android navigation keys, and you could connect a Bluetooth keyboard if you wanted to.
Not a gamer, but I'm still tempted to replace my Nexus 7 with the LTE version of this.
"You can, at least in theory. The tablet has an HDMI port, and a mode that turns the internal screen off and uses the HDMI instead"
Yeah, but that's what I mean - you're streaming from your PC, to a tablet, which you then connect to a TV via HDMI. Personally,that sounds like a waste of time - I'd rather either stream directly to the TV or just use the PC.
the controller is supposed to support PCs, but for me the "win" is that it works with the current Shield portable. Gives a lot better control options especially when patched into a TV and runnning "console mode" or running my desktop PC remotely.
the ability to "stream" not only games but to run your desktop remotely -even outside your home network- from a tiny portable is all kinds of fun. Don't need much speed to fire off an email that pretends you're home, and you'll never use a 3DS or Vita to do a quick edit to an Office doc (i have one of those tiny bluetooth keyboards) while out and about.
The problem is that apps such as the BBC's iPlayer and Sky Go do not let you save the TV programmes or films to SD cards - you have to save to the internal memory. With the amount of crap that Samsung force upon you (I know, I could root it) I regularly run out of space on my 16GB phone. It will be the same for this tablet. I would always suggest 32GB as a minimum.
bit of a chicken and egg hardware/software situation. good hardware, but non compelling software that's already running (effectively for free) on the phone in everyone's pocket. what's the hook? the game controller?
as much as this is a good thing from Nvidia, to my mind, to release a device right now they should just suck it up, say sorry to Intel, slap an x86 core in there with their graphics silicon so we can run our existing steam libraries.
I'm sure there will be a tipping point when ARM becomes de-facto for consumer hardware, but I feel it's a bit early. maybe this will be just another device adding to that snowball rolling down the hill to become the eventual avalanche that will see x86 relegated to datacentre racks, or maybe history?
To do this, Nvidia are obviously putting money on the line. They must have market analysts paid to do research and tell them what's what, but they also have a company head who's core mission seems to be to stick it to Intel. So i'll be interested to see how this plays out...
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