NVIDIA Shield Review: At the Crossroads of PC and Mobile Gaming
by Brian Klug on July 31, 2013 12:14 AM ESTBattery Life
NVIDIA's Shield includes a 28.8Wh battery, which is large for a device its size but small compared to what you'd find in a 10-inch tablet for example. The good news is that it only has to power a 5-inch 720p display, which makes the choice of battery size quite nice. Since Shield is a fully functioning mobile device, we put it through our current battery life suite. Normally we'd start with our WiFi web browsing test, but given the target market for Shield I figured starting with our 3D rundown test made the most sense.
Here we have a loop of the Egypt HD benchmark, capped to 30 fps, running on all of the devices with their screens calibrated to 200 nits.
Shield manages just over 6 hours of use on a single charge, putting it up there with some of the best mobile devices we've put through this test. Being able to support 6 hours of locally rendered gaming without plugging in is pretty decent I'd say.
Video decode is also quite important, especially when you consider the use case where Shield acts as a remote display and controller for games rendered on your PC. In that case, the GPU is mostly powered down and only the video decode block is used to display what's being rendered on your PC. Our video playback test might be a good simulation of this use case. Our test remains unchanged from previous tablet reviews. Here I'm playing a 4Mbps H.264 High Profile 720p rip I made of the Harry Potter 8 Blu-ray. The full movie plays through and is looped until the battery dies. Once again, the displays are calibrated to 200 nits:
Tegra 4's video decode engine combined with a tiny 720p display and a 28.8Wh battery results in awesome battery life here - almost 19 hours on a single charge. If you can deal with the small screen, Shield might make for a good companion on long haul international flights just for video playback.
Finally we've got our standard web browsing battery life test:
We regularly load web pages at a fixed interval until the battery dies (all displays are calibrated to 200 nits as always). The differences between this test and our previous one boil down to the amount of network activity and CPU load.
On the network side, we've done a lot more to prevent aggressive browser caching of our web pages. Some caching is important otherwise you end up with a baseband/WiFi test, but it's clear what we had previously wasn't working. Brian made sure that despite the increased network load, the baseband/WiFi still have the opportunity to enter their idle states during the course of the benchmark.
We also increased CPU workload along two vectors: we decreased pause time between web page loads and we shifted to full desktop web pages, some of which are very js heavy. The end result is a CPU usage profile that mimics constant, heavy usage beyond just web browsing. Everything you do on your device ends up causing CPU usage peaks - opening applications, navigating around the OS and of course using apps themselves. Our 5th generation web browsing battery life test should map well to more types of mobile usage, not just idle content consumption of data from web pages.
Once again, excellent battery life from Shield.
NVIDIA ships Shield with a 10W (2.1A) power adapter, capable of completely charging Shield in 5.45 hours:
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chizow - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Thanks, I'll have to keep an eye out for some info from users/reviews about streaming functionality. I was specifically interested in Windows Media Extender functionality to playback encrypted/premium cable TV from a cable card tuner, and it looks like XBMC may do the trick. Just not sure if the Android version supports this, or if the Android version of XBMC runs on Shield (it should since it's full Android 4.2.1).This video indicates it may be possible to stream cable card content to XBMC, but it looks like Windows version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFTl3wYf04
SlitheryDee - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I'm pretty intrigued by this product. With the delay of tegra 4 and the presence of cheaper dedicated gaming systems with far more titles available to them, I have to think that this iteration was focused on ironing out the bugs in the design rather than setting the world on fire with sales. Just getting it out there, making people aware of it, and starting up the development of a decent number of games with the shield in mind would have to be enough to call the first run a success IMO. I don't know how Nvidia could have expected any more than that when thrusting a gamepad oriented android device into a touch-centric game world. I like that it was well executed, and I hope they go ahead with the next version with a (hopefully on time) tegra 5.et20 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Thanks for the review.It's a really nice surprise to see nvidia deliver such a well balanced and put together product.
Let's hope that it will spur availability of high quality games.
Hrel - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Frankly this is a nice little device that does a lot of things right. Perhaps I'll pick one up when they do a revision featuring Nvidia's newest mobile GPU. That is of course the downside to devices this integrated (mobile); no upgrade ability. Upgrade ability is really the primary thing that I think is stopping gaming from moving to mobile devices for real. Once the product cycles slow down, which they're already doing, we should see mobile gaming really start to catch on and devices like this actually start to sell well.For now, no 802.11ac = not even the POSSIBILITY of me purchasing.
dbx81 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
shield + chromecast seems like a good combo right away, doesn't it?rwei - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I'd rather have a SwitchbladeSuvorov Sulla - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I know Brian can't do it because he is writting an official review and all that jazz but I REALLY wanted to see someone using a SNES and a PSP emulator on this thing. I would be honestly interested if it works well.thesavvymage - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I cant speak for PSP as I've never tried it, but snes emulation with a ps3 controller works flawlessly on my Nexus 4. This thing is more powerful in every way, so it should be pretty amazing.nafhan - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
So... I'd be really interested in seeing a "battery life while streaming a PC game" test. I'm guessing something like the web browsing battery life -30%.Actually, a streaming video playback test might be interesting to see in general.
cmikeh2 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I think it will be well above that. With the web browsing test there's a lot of CPU activity but when doing the remote PC gaming all it is doing is play an H.264 video from the network. I see it as pretty much in the middle of the web browsing test and the H.264 test.