NVIDIA has upgraded their SHIELD Tablet software to version 2.1. This release increments Android Lollipop to 5.0.1, updates a bit of bundled software, improves localization support, and adds OpenGL 4.5. The updated landed on December 23rd, alongside their Grid Tuesday release.
The new graphics API is interesting, but its usefulness is a bit questionable. Google does not really support OpenGL on the platform, although they do not prevent companies (like NVIDIA) from providing their own SDKs. This could be a bit increase in performance for apps that are optimized for the SHIELD Tablet and possibly the Nexus 9, especially since its main features increase performance and security. On the other hand, this should increase the potential for NVIDIA's first-party releases and ports.
If you have the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet, then this is might be week-old news. If not, the update was released on December 23rd.
Still waiting on that port of
Still waiting on that port of the original Half-Life lol. Maybe with support for Open GL it can finally be done.
For sure Nvidia will not be
For sure Nvidia will not be using DX on this for a graphics API, and Shield’s OS is Linux based, so will the drivers be cross compiled to x86, and run on other Linux kernel based OSs like Steam OS, is Nvidia using OpenGL entirely on this product, or does it have some proprietary graphics API extensions that can transferred over for any Linux Kernel based OS. Do you plan to review/benchmark this device with the updated OS, and especially any games that take advantage of OpenGL 4.5, or can benefit from having OpenGL 4.5’s tweaked API, even on games not initially targeting the OpenGL 4.5 API’s full feature set, usually graphics API updates come with some reworked legacy functions/API calls that improve the gaming experience for all games.