Shame on you if you skipped Ryan's review of the new Shield, for those that have and are looking for a second opinion you can check out The Tech Report and other links below the fold. To quickly recap the controller is now optional but you can connect up to 4 simultaneously for group gaming, the built in 8" IPS display is capable of 1920×1200 and you can output video to an external monitor at 1080p. The 192 shader processors on the Tegra K1 SoC inside should have no problems with fast paced action at these resolutions and at launch there are almost a dozen games optimized for the K1. The focus on gaming performance is obvious but the inclusion of DirectStylus 2 for those who want to use the tablet for creating art adds an interesting extra feature to this tablet, especially if it will work with NVIDIA's ShadowPlay streaming technology as live broadcasts of artists drawing has become quite popular in some crowds. It will be very interesting to see this tablet compete against consoles and the soon to arrive Steamboxes.
"Just under a year since the release of the Shield Portable, Nvidia has announced a second member of the Shield family. As expected, it's the Shield Tablet, an Android slate with an emphasis on gaming. Like the Shield Portable before it, the Shield Tablet will sell direct from Nvidia, not from a partner company. The Shield Tablet extends Nvidia's Android gaming focus to a new form factor, making it one of the first tablets anywhere with a fairly pure gaming mission."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Tegra K1 Gaming is Near: NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet & Controller Preview @ Techgage
- NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Preview @ Hardware Canucks
- Nvidia officially reveals the Shield tablet @ Kitguru
- A newer kind of web tracking is almost impossible to stop @ engadget
- Handheld device allows anyone to instantly test drinks for date rape drugs @ ExtremeTech
- Intel announces 'self encrypting' solid state drives to fight data breaches @ The Inquirer
- GoTenna: How does this 'magic' work? @ The Register
- Asus RP-AC52 Wireless Range Extender review @ Bjorn3D
Mobile gaming is a joke and
Mobile gaming is a joke and afterthought. NVidia will not succeed in this market. They should focus on 20nm or lower cards and VR instead.
The Shield did not become a
The Shield did not become a tablet, it became the Shield Portable. There will be a new Shield portable in the future.
And if you think Mobile gaming is a joke you need to get out more…
So true, mobile gaming is
So true, mobile gaming is huge Mr. ignorant.
Nvidia will not do too shabby
Nvidia will not do too shabby with this SOC, but Nvidia tying this SOC to android only will be a great mistake. There is currently no competition with M$, and Intel for tablets that run full OSs, and K1 based devices would be much more successful if they were running a full Linux distro, and able to run the full featured open source graphics programs, and not Nvidia’s Android app toys. A low cost Graphics Tablet running Linux, and Gimp, and Blender(for mesh modeling, and light rendering tasks) would sale any device using the K1’s graphics ability alone. The K1 because it is able to run the desktop versions of OpenCL and openGL, should be able to run a full Linux distro just fine, and give the WINTEL based devices some competition for the graphics tablet market. Nvidia’s wanting a closed ecosystem around Android and Nvidia’s not so great android apps, is nothing more than Nvidia shooting itself in the foot, by not getting a full Linux tablet ecosystem going, and full OS, and Linux’s already available applications will sell more SOCs. If people wanted a closed ecosystem, Apple would be selling more tablets than phones, and Apple will eventually introduce a Full OSX based tablet, and Gimp and Blender run under OSX. Nvidia is a little bit too late to the closed app ecosystem market, and should get a full Linux version, that can also run the Android runtime/VM!