The NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Review
by Joshua Ho on July 29, 2014 9:00 AM ESTNAND Performance
While NAND performance used to receive relatively little attention, it's now clear that some devices can ship with internal storage poor enough to severely degrade the user experience. Even if storage performance is acceptable, improvements in this area can significantly improve user experience. In the case of this device, it seems that we're looking at a SanDisk iNAND eMMC 4.3 solution.
In NAND performance, the Shield Tablet does well against its peers, although random write speed is a bit on the low side. While no particular slight against NVIDIA, it’s a bit disappointing how NAND performance in tablets seems to be lagging behind the smartphone space, although not entirely surprising due to stronger cost constraints.
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surbringer - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Have you tried to run PPSSPP on it ?kyuu - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
I can run PPSSPP on my Venue 8 Pro, and the K1 in this tablet is certainly much more powerful GPU-wise than Bay Trail. Shouldn't be an issue.Johnny_k - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Correction: you now can use Gamestream outside your house, (even over lte on the lte tablet version)Remotely access your PC to play your games away from your home.
http://shield.nvidia.com/play-pc-games/
Note that it is in beta
RoninX - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
I'd love to see Anandtech do a real-world test on how well Gamestream works with the Shield outside the home.chizow - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Yes, unfortunate AT did not cover this at all, as I also recently found out GameStream remote was in beta. This is really the killer-app for Shield until Android gaming takes off (if it ever does). I would consider buying one of these if Remote GameStream worked decently well, but I'll probably hold off on either a Shield Portable 2 (with TK1) or a good GeForce bundle with Maxwell.ams23 - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
I am impressed that Shield tablet has even higher graphics performance in GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex HD Offscreen than the actively cooled Surface Pro 2 and Surface Pro 3: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph8296/65868...Note that thermal throttling behavior on Shield tablet is extremely good. There was virtually no throttling until after 115 runs (!) with the GFXBench 3.0 T-Rex HD benchmark: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8296/TRexRunDownG...
I suspect that the 3dmark Unlimited scores are CPU-limited to some extent. Shield tablet already achieves > 200 fps on game test 1 and > 100 fps on game test 2, so this particular test is not very stressful (relatively speaking) for this GPU.
The web browsing battery life is pretty good all things considered, especially compared to iPad Mini Retina and iPad Air (which have 23% and 64% more battery capacity, respectively than Shield tablet). The Shield tablet has CPU and browser performance that is at least 2x faster than Nexus 7 2013 variant, so the web browsing efficiency is actually quite good in comparison.
UpSpin - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
agreed, those results are impressive and a huge step forward, for both NVidia and all the others.Considering that the Shield uses the ancient quad core 32-bit Cortex A15 variant of the Tegra K1 and NVidia also has a custom dual core 64-bit variant of the K1 I think we can expect a further CPU boost once this 64-bit SoC reaches customers.
jospoortvliet - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
The A15r3 is not exactly ancient but I agree that Denver is something to look forward to 😎Anonymous Blowhard - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
>Games like Saints Row 3 played as if running on a consoleSo, 720p30, Low Detail? ;)
Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Zing! :D