During the opening keynote of NVIDIA's GTC 2014 conference, company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that Valve had ported the ever-popular "Portal" game to the NVIDIA SHIELD handheld gaming platform.
The game appeared to run smoothly on the portable device, and is a worthy addition to the catalog of local games that can be run on the SHIELD.
Additionally, while the cake may still be a lie, portable gaming systems apparently are not as Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that all GTC attendees will be getting a free SHIELD.
Stay tuned to PC Perspective for more information on all the opening keynote announcements and their implications for the future of computing!
GPU Technology Conference 2014 resources:
Keep up with GTC 2014 throughout the week by following the NVIDIA blog (blogs.nvidia.com) and the GTC tag on PC Perspective!
The disappointment @ GTC when
The disappointment @ GTC when the last announcement expected to be Maxwell ended up being the pimping of Shield. PRICELESS!
More people were exciting thinking Gabe Newell was going to take the stand than hearing about Portal coming to Shield lol.
heheh, yeah there was a
heheh, yeah there was a strange lack of information on Maxwell (I was expecting him to say Maxwell when he named Pascal instead), yet NV did announce Pascal. I wasn't expecting shipping hardware but some kind of desktop Maxwell lineup higher than 750 Ti.
Given Pascal is really just
Given Pascal is really just Volta with an actual semi-sample product over a child like drawing of last year, not much else was revealed that we didn’t already know. NVLink aside, the lack of Maxwell details says a lot. Publicly announced 5 years ago and probably equally, if not longer, in development. Nvidia wouldn’t just not talk about it if they were intending on releasing it any time soon. Plus it’s a huge deal given the Unified Memory that Maxwell is expected to bring which goes hand-in-hand with Volta/Pascal.
Unless there is some other big press event that Nvidia usually entertains before the Fall, I can’t see how they are releasing it within 6 months.
When Valve develops a Steam
When Valve develops a Steam OS for tablets, then that will get my attention even more than this announcment. I hope that Valve is evaluating the K1, both ARM refrence SKU, and Custom ARM ISA based Denver SKU, as a SOC to bring Steam OS onto a tablet form factor. Any OEM using this SKU in a tablet that comes with a full linux distro, will have a lot of graphics design/gaming design students as willing buyers. Tablets that are able to run the full desktop OpenGL, OpenCL, versions are currently limited to x86 based products, and Intel’s x86 products will not have the graphics power that the K1 has in an affordable price point. The current improvments in OpenGL ES are good to hear about, as is the focus on OpenGL as a whole, but having a mobile SKU outside of the x86 market, with full desktop OpenGL is really encouraging, and coming with a desktop GPU Microarchitecture based graphics is big for any ARM ISA based device. I hope that AMD will have some competition for the ARMv8 ISA based mobile market also, and one that is friendly to full Linux, as well as the full version of OpenGL.