Hands On with NVIDIA’s Project Shield

NVIDIA is an American company known for manufacturing graphic processing units and are based in California. Founded in 1993, the company is one of the leading manufacturers of general processing units. The company along with their rival AMD Graphics Technology is ruling the GPU market. The company’s prime line is named ‘GeForce’ which is a direct competition to ‘Radeon’ which is a product from AMD. NVIDIA is not just into GPU, they provide processing functionalities to scientists and researchers to work on high-performance applications. The company has now entered the mobile market as well.

The project Shield:

Project Shield is NVIDIA’s pilot project in creating their range of mobile devices. Once the device was released, it does look like an impressive work put in by the company to come up with an impeccable device. When you hold the Shield it reminds of Microsoft’s gaming device, the Xbox 360 or even the Dreamcast controller. Though the device is big, it is comfortable to hold. It weighs less than a pound which makes it easy to carry around.

The Shield is compatible with most Android games and the controller can work on all devices available in the TegraZone. The demonstration units have a primitive version of Hawken, Rochard and Real Boxing for Android comes pre-installed. All the three games can be played without any problems on the device. Orchard and Real Boxing especially proved the Tegra 4 has the ability to provide some superb graphics in the Android games.

The company also showed how the device can be streamed from a personal computer. You can also hook up the device to a HDTV – you get a similar experience as you get in a PC. There will be very little or some difference depending on the game you play.

NVIDIA Shield has a setback. It gets really hard to concentrate on a single screen at a time when you play a game. This will not be a problem when you play games on a device within 5 inches. There are a few games that have a spectator mode when they are played on HDTV. A player has to look into eth 5-inch retinal display to learn more about the game.

Though the NVIDIA Shield look very much alike an Xbox 60, there is a huge difference. The joy sticks are not staggered, they are placed one beside the other. The overall layout especially when it comes to buttons is the same. This comes in handy to play the games that have Xbox 360’s controller as a default controller for controller inputs. The company has said more work has to go into the buttons to make them more user-friendly. However, there are no major issues for now.

The stand-out feature in the device is its compatibility towards PC games. You can stream games from your PC to the 5-inch device. This will only work if your PC has the same Wi-Fi network as the Project Shield. The PC you use should also have the GeForce GTX graphic processor installed.

The company has not disclosed the price of their device yet. The price is going to play an important role in the success of the device. There are a slew of devices like Nexus 7 from Google, iPads from Apple, Kindle Fire from Amazon that provides a different gaming world. NVIDIA says the name will be changed when the device hits the market. The company promises a unique experience as the device combines the features of a tablet with that of a gaming console. Though it seems an attractive bundle, the company is going to face a huge challenge in prompting users to get Project Shield instead of tablets or other gaming devices.