You are missing the point.
A) You can play in bed.
B) You can connect an HDMI to the device and play on your couch and watch it on your ginormous flat screen TV. Saving you the trouble of dragging your gaming rig to the living room for Steam Big Picture.
I dunno, this makes a lot more sense to me as a mass market device than Ouya does. Not a huge amount of sense, depending on the cost, but some. If it functions well as a streaming-to-TV gaming device, that alone is something quite interesting. Add in the possility for Wii-U style semi-portable PC gaming and you’ve definitely got a proposition. A lot’s going to depend on the quality/reliability of the streaming and the ergnonomics and build quality of the controller, though. If it gets laptop hot after 30 minutes that’s not going to be good.
As for point B, how does this work? Your powerful desktop rig will stream a lag-free 1080p resolution feed over wifi to the device, and the device will then process it and dump it onto it’s own HDMI cable to your television?
Yeah. How high fidelity it will be remains to be seen. I sure don’t know how lag free it will be. As it’s local, I’d wager it should be better than something like OnLive was.
At what month exactly did your son stop thinking that whatever you were doing on your device was the most important thing in the world? I’d love to play games while looking after my boy, but he just tottles over to me and waves his hands all over the screen/controller/keyboard.
Lag should obviously be better than OnLive since Wi-Fi latency should be miniscule, but bandwidth could be a factor for a lot of people. I have cheap Wi-Fi hardware set up here (and I’m sure a lot of other people do as well), and it seems to max out at about 600 kilobytes per second, which is well below what a good modern broadband connection will get you.
If they figure out a way to let the streaming from home PC work over the internet anywhere, that would be a complete gamechanger as far as I am concerned. Even streaming at home only is cool though.
Good article about it on eurogamer:
Nvidia also hinted heavily that in the future we should expect to see the streaming experience strike out from the home, presumably owing to the LTE modem contained in the new Tegra 4 processor (though previously we’d been led to believe that LTE would end up in a separate Tegra 4 revision). Previously, Gaikai’s David Perry had ruled out streaming gameplay over existing 3G networks, suggesting that the latencies were just not good enough for decent response, citing the new 4G standard as the best platform for mobile cloud gaming. Obviously performance here in terms of Nvidia’s set-up is going to be dictated not just by the network, but also by the upstream connection at the user’s home where the GTX PC is situated. UK fibre upload speeds are around the 8mbs level - serviceable enough but not completely ideal. Clearly though, sub-1mbps ADSL would be a complete write-off.
Who needs fucking onlive when I can play games I already own from my own PC remotely.
Shitty Wi-fi routers are shitty.
I used netgear for a long while, and boy did they stink…changed to d-link, never looked back.
Is it just me or is Shield pig-dog ugly?
It looks like a cross between the Nokia N-gage and an old Xbox controller.
Still, I’m impressed that they went with Android since it’s by far the best mobile OS right now.
Well it’s also an independent high end “pure Android” device. A lot of people purchase iPod Touches primarily for games – they are great little machines especially with the crazy low game prices. There aren’t any Touch-like devices in the Android ecosystem (high end with no monthly plan required) except maybe the Nexus 7?
I agree it looks kinda weird. If it’s actually really ergonomic I’d be fine with that though.
At the very least all these Android consoles should get developers implementing proper joystick support in all their games. It’s really spotty now.
I find that it’s mostly about:
a) Whatever else he’s doing
b) Being able to maintain eye contact
If he’s playing with his toys and he has a reasonable chance of looking up and me looking back at him, he’s content. If I don’t look back at him, he tends to come to me to get attention or see what I’m doing that’s cooler than him or somesuch. At that point the stuff on the screen grabs his attention and we have to go through multiple rounds of “There’s someone on the front, but when I look at the back, there’s nothing there. Where did they go?” and “Maybe if I flip the screen over fast enough, I can catch them going wherever it is they go!”
This, BTW, makes skyping with the grandparents hilarious, as he’s constantly trying to “find grandpa” by closing the machine and terminating the skype session.
Everything about nvidia looks like that, so it fits in. their branding / logos / demo stuff etc…
I hope nvidia has some luck with this. A “android console” is a obvious idea, and is nice that a company that can put weight on it is working on it.
But nvidia is a hardware company, and hardware companies are normally very bad at understanding the soft part of the industry.
This thing looks likes some pre-alpha prototype made up by some junior engineer overnight.
Just lame.
Ugh I hate console controller thumb sticks. Why not use a trackball and simple WASD setup? It’s the most natural way to play FPS games.
Keep in mind, in theory I love this sucker, but you are definitely in the minority here me thinks.
Not exactly optimal for a handheld controller…
Nvidia graphics card required to stream PC games.
Yup. It’s a feature that’s as much about selling Videocards as it is about selling the Shield.
Well yeah. I wouldn’t put together a real product with people like me as the demographic to support it, but someone said “Who would use this?” I would. And I’ll use it for much cheaper when its price gets slashed because it’s a horrible consumer product idea, really. :)