NVIDIA CES 2013 Press Event: Live Blog

10:11PM PST - And we're done!

10:11PM PST - Ouya console will be one receive target for shield, wireless dongles will also be available

10:10PM PST - Television needs a receiver to get wireless display from Shield

10:08PM PST - Looks like we're done - no word on pricing/availability for Shield though

10:07PM PST - Shield + PC streaming: NVIDIA didn't get a console win - so what?

10:06PM PST - Steam Big Picture streaming to Shield

10:06PM PST - Ok we're about to see Steam running via Shield

10:05PM PST - Why is NVIDIA the one doing this? Shouldn't Microsoft have been the first to build a converged mobile/PC gaming device?

10:04PM PST - Now showing Assassin's Creed III

10:03PM PST - PC renders the next frame, sends it over to Shield, which sends it to the display

10:03PM PST - Controller commands from Shield are being sent to the PC

10:03PM PST - This is pretty cool

10:02PM PST - Basically private cloud gaming

10:02PM PST - Ok so they're encoding the frame buffer from the GTX 680, sending it to Shield, which is decoding it and sending it to the display

10:01PM PST - Piece of software in GFE that is taking what's rendered by GeForce GTX 680 and streaming it to shield

10:01PM PST - GeForce GTX 680 running in a PC

10:01PM PST - Ok here we go, browsing Shield PC games

10:00PM PST - Ok we have a Windows desktop on the TV

09:59PM PST - It's unclear if this is a cloud gaming demo or what

09:58PM PST - Demo is having technical difficulties

09:58PM PST - Any PC with a GeForce GTX inside will connect to Shield

09:57PM PST - Can pair Shield with a PC

09:56PM PST - Google Talk requests are coming in while Jen-Hsun is running the Shield demo

09:56PM PST - Talking about Steam Big Picture

09:55PM PST - Valve??

09:55PM PST - Oh interesting, now we're talking about PC gaming again

09:54PM PST - Agree with Brian on this one - looks like 720p render target, perhaps with AA

09:53PM PST - Two Shields playing networked

09:53PM PST - Running very smooth on Tegra 4/Shield

09:53PM PST - Looks like a mech game

09:52PM PST - Hawken, UE3.0 game, being demoed now

09:51PM PST - I wonder if NVIDIA is going to sell these directly or if they'll leverage their partners

09:51PM PST - "i think that that's pretty fantastic"

09:50PM PST - Ok this is definitely rendered at a lower resolution, not 4K

09:49PM PST - perhaps upscaling?

09:49PM PST - Jen-Hsun keeps saying that it's "driving a 4K display"

09:49PM PST - It's not clear but it sounds like Shield is rendering this game at 4K

09:48PM PST - All of these games are available on Android and optimized for the controller

09:48PM PST - Scrolling through games, makes Xbox-like boop sounds

09:48PM PST - Shield is an app

09:48PM PST - Now going into Shield mode

09:47PM PST - Tegra 4 can decode 4K video

09:47PM PST - Showing 4K video coming off of Shield

09:46PM PST - I wonder what version of Android

09:45PM PST - UI frame rate isn't perfect but this is likely early hardware

09:45PM PST - System seems responsive

09:45PM PST - running the play store

09:45PM PST - Connected over HDMI

09:45PM PST - Connected to LG 4K display

09:44PM PST - Did NVIDIA just build a portable Xbox RT before Microsoft?

09:43PM PST - (obviously)

09:43PM PST - Looks bigger than an Xbox 360 controller

09:43PM PST - Ergonomics look..interesting

09:42PM PST - 720p with multi-touch

09:42PM PST - 5-inch "retinal" display

09:41PM PST - Is "shield mode" an app on Android or its own OS?

09:41PM PST - Customizable tag, you can swap out the plates on the top of the device

09:41PM PST - HDMI, micro-USB, microSD slot, 3.5mm audio jack

09:41PM PST - Hit the Shield button, goes into Shield mode, hit it again it drops you back into Android

09:40PM PST - No skin, no changes, pure Android for Tegra 4

09:40PM PST - "Pure Android"

09:40PM PST - Ok it runs Android

09:40PM PST - Good job Epic :)

09:40PM PST - The Shield "video" is being rendered in 3D using the Unreal Engine 4

09:40PM PST - Two analog joysticks, 4 bumpers, d-pad

09:39PM PST - "console-grade" game controller

09:39PM PST - SNR better than an iPhone 5, on par with dedicated Jamboxes for audio from NV Shield

09:39PM PST - Twice the SNR of an HP laptop with beats audio?

09:39PM PST - Talking about the custom speakers in Shield

09:38PM PST - 24 hours of HD video playback

09:37PM PST - That's almost as much battery capacity as an iPad!

09:37PM PST - 5 - 10 hours of gameplay

09:37PM PST - 38Wh battery!!

09:37PM PST - There's a HUGE heatsink on Tegra 4

09:37PM PST - Shield will be the world's first Tegra 4 device

09:36PM PST - Jen-Hsun accidentally said Thor first

09:36PM PST - oh no! Project Shield

09:36PM PST - Project Thor

09:36PM PST - Will it run Windows RT or Android?

09:35PM PST - That's pretty cool

09:35PM PST - It's a handheld Tegra 4 made by NVIDIA

09:35PM PST - And integrated display

09:35PM PST - With integrated Tegra 4

09:35PM PST - Oh interesting it's a controller

09:34PM PST - No idea what the device is yet

09:34PM PST - Showing a video

09:34PM PST - "We asked ourselves: What if?"

09:34PM PST - "We are the only company...that has the processor technology, the systems technology...to build devices to enjoy games in a different way"

09:34PM PST - "There's a way for us to help these gamers enjoy these games even better than ever"

09:34PM PST - The PC games and the Android games will continue to flourish

09:33PM PST - "fastest OS growth in the history of mankind"

09:33PM PST - and Android

09:33PM PST - Windows

09:33PM PST - "two ecosystems that are growing incredibly fast"

09:32PM PST - Nvidia didn't tell us i500 LTE UE Category or 3GPP release, need to know these bits about i500 as well

09:32PM PST - "consoles, PCs, phones, tablets"

09:32PM PST - "gamers today play games on every platform"

09:32PM PST - Project Denver?

09:32PM PST - now talking about "something new"

09:32PM PST - Also not confirming with the 5th core is, we had heard it was a Cortex A9 originally

09:31PM PST - No GPU performance benchmarks?

09:31PM PST - Talking about different profiles for different cell geometry being loaded into the i500 thanks to the software defined radio (SDR) architecture

09:31PM PST - Talking about the flexibility of software defined radios

09:30PM PST - This is a big step for NVIDIA though, having a good baseband strategy is key

09:29PM PST - Not all of Qualcomm's baseband is fixed function though, everyone does some amount of software defined radio now

09:29PM PST - "40% the area of a conventional modem die"

09:28PM PST - This is all of the Icera stuff

09:27PM PST - Each of the 8 processors does 800 gigaops, 1.2 trillion ops/s total

09:27PM PST - Eight modem processors in it, programmable, run the entire modem stack (3G, 4G, interference algorithms, etc...)

09:27PM PST - Sounds like he's talking about Icera

09:27PM PST - Starting this month NVIDIA is sampling its first Icera modem - the i500

09:25PM PST - I want to see Tegra 4 GPU performance vs. iPad 4

09:25PM PST - Now talking about making GPUs more programmable

09:23PM PST - Framerate dropped significantly during the demo

09:23PM PST - Dead Trigger 2

09:23PM PST - Showing off a new FPS running on Tegra 4

09:22PM PST - Tegra Zone has been downloaded 6 million times

09:22PM PST - Talking about Tegra Zone

09:21PM PST - Now talking about Tegra 4 gaming

09:19PM PST - Computational photography is the future though, good to see NV embracing this early

09:18PM PST - You just decide to have HDR on permanently or off permanently

09:18PM PST - what comes out of the chip is HDR?

09:18PM PST - "every software application today just works" with Tegra 4 HDR

09:18PM PST - as well as HDR Burst

09:18PM PST - HDR video, HDR preview, one shot HDR - all in Tegra 4

09:17PM PST - Interesting to me that the reference demo is a tablet..

09:16PM PST - Capture speed seemed very quick for HDR

09:15PM PST - That's why the frame rate is so low

09:15PM PST - Wow yeah they are doing live preview with HDR on

09:15PM PST - But it's showing live HDR preview

09:15PM PST - preview frame rate looks atrocious

09:15PM PST - Tegra 4 reference tablet

09:15PM PST - Jen-Hsun is standing in front of a bright backdrop, they are going to take photos of him now using Tegra 4

09:13PM PST - Are we going to have to start measuring battery life when taking photos in our smartphone reviews?

09:13PM PST - "One Shot" HDR

09:13PM PST - Either way 0.2s/frame is pretty good for Tegra 4

09:13PM PST - Brian just looked it up - 1.6seconds to process HDR on an iPhone 5

09:12PM PST - Tegra 4 does it in 0.2s per frame

09:12PM PST - That doesn't sound right to us

09:12PM PST - ~2 seconds/frame is allegedly from the iPhone 5

09:12PM PST - Taking multiple exposures and combining them to produce a final HDR image

09:11PM PST - From time of the first photo to HDR output is ~2 seconds per frame

09:11PM PST - The engine uses all of the CPU and GPU cores and ISP (?) we do the necessary math so quickly that at the end of the shot you have HDR

09:10PM PST - We dump it into the computational photography engine sitting in system memory

09:10PM PST - One shot with high exposure, one with light exposure

09:10PM PST - Take two shots at once

09:10PM PST - Computational

09:10PM PST - NVIDIA Computation Photography Engine

09:10PM PST - Ah no

09:10PM PST - Hmm is NVIDIA going to virtualize the ISP?

09:10PM PST - Today's digital camera architecture: sensor > ISP > memory > CPU

09:08PM PST - Still showing us what HDR can do

09:08PM PST - Showing the benefits of HDR

09:08PM PST - Jen-Hsun is giving us a Camera 101

09:07PM PST - Image taken with an iPhone 5

09:07PM PST - Showing an NVIDIA employee standing against a tinted window

09:06PM PST - "in life, you only get one shot"

09:06PM PST - Looks like he's about to show HDR processing on Tegra 4

09:05PM PST - Now Jen-Hsun is going to show perf in another application

09:05PM PST - Something is very weird about these results

09:05PM PST - Cortex A15 should be way faster than Swift

09:04PM PST - Not showing a huge perf advantage over iPad 4 for some reason

09:03PM PST - Chrome for the Nexus 10 vs. Browser for the Tegra 4 tablet

09:03PM PST - Uhh...the two are running different browsers

09:03PM PST - 50 seconds for the Nexus 10

09:03PM PST - compared to...

09:03PM PST - to load 25 unique web pages

09:03PM PST - 27 seconds for Tegra 4

09:03PM PST - Tegra 4 is done

09:03PM PST - 20 vs 13

09:02PM PST - It's on #14 vs. #9

09:02PM PST - Tegra 4 is flying through it

09:02PM PST - The test begins

09:02PM PST - Web pages are loaded from a local server

09:02PM PST - Nexus 10 uses Exynos 5 Dual (5250): 2 x Cortex A15s running at 1.7GHz

09:02PM PST - will load 25 web pages

09:01PM PST - Two tablets, one Nexus 10 and one with Tegra 4

09:01PM PST - About to show Tegra 4 performance

09:01PM PST - NVIDIA's first 4G LTE modem (thank you Icera)

09:00PM PST - Unclear what architecture that fifth core is, it looks identical to the other A15s

09:00PM PST - We still have our fifth core

09:00PM PST - NVIDIA's die shots always look so pretty

08:59PM PST - The little chip on the right looks like the baseband perhaps

08:59PM PST - looks like a two chip solution, if this photo is accurate

08:59PM PST - 72 GPU cores, 4 x A15s, 4G LTE baseband

08:59PM PST - Introducing the Tegra 4

08:58PM PST - "All of these devices need to be powered by sophisticated mobile processors"

08:58PM PST - ...your LG TV, etc...

08:58PM PST - Everything will very likely become a connected computer: cell phone, tablet, car, etc...

08:57PM PST - Tegra 2 and 3 are on the screen now

08:57PM PST - ooh tegra!

08:56PM PST - Ok now that's done, wonder if we'll get anything new

08:56PM PST - First fully integrated system for NV

08:55PM PST - "cloud gaming is an industry that's about to come to fruition"

08:54PM PST - Announcing early partners for NVIDIA GRID

08:54PM PST - NVIDIA doesn't appear to have any console design wins this generation, wonder if NV GRID had anything to do with that

08:53PM PST - NV GRID lets you continue your save game across any device that supports NV GRID

08:52PM PST - Running NV GRID application on the ASUS Transformer Prime

08:52PM PST - Playing Trine 2, saving game, and moving over to a different device to resume the game

08:51PM PST - Maybe Tegra 4 will be an MWC thing?

08:50PM PST - So far this has been a rehash of NVIDIA's May 2012 announcements

08:50PM PST - UI and game are both rendered on the GRID

08:50PM PST - Showing an LG TV running off of the NVIDIA GRID, connected via Ethernet

08:49PM PST - VGX K1

08:49PM PST - http://www.nvidia.com/object/vgx-boards.html

08:49PM PST - 4 x GK107s on one card

08:49PM PST - That's using NVIDIA's VGX - its cloud video card

08:49PM PST - Ryan Smith tells us these are GK107 GPUs

08:48PM PST - GRID Gaming System: 20 servers per rack, 240 NVIDIA GPUs, 200 TFLOPS, ~720 Xbox 360s

08:48PM PST - I'm assuming you don't get end user control over detail settings

08:48PM PST - Curious to see how that scales with game complexity

08:47PM PST - Initially we'll be able to support 24 concurrent users on one computing node

08:47PM PST - A rack full of servers, packed full of GPUs

08:47PM PST - NVIDIA GRID

08:46PM PST - Introducing NVIDIA's First Fully Integrated Product

08:46PM PST - Took NVIDIA 5 years to create its cloud gaming solution

08:46PM PST - Talking about all of the effort that had to go into building a cloud gaming service

08:44PM PST - Talking about how all 3D games are rendered in real time at the client today, instead of being computed elsewhere and simply streamed to your client

08:43PM PST - Definitely setting up to talk about NVIDIA's Cloud Gaming strategy

08:43PM PST - Project Denver? Tegra 4 anyone?

08:42PM PST - Still waiting for the big reveal

08:40PM PST - Now talking about Cloud Computing

08:40PM PST - I spoke with NV about GFE a while ago, they seemed adamant that they don't care where your games came from (steam, physical media, stolen), just the executables

08:39PM PST - This is getting applause

08:39PM PST - If you have GFE installed, click optimums, you get a much better looking game

08:39PM PST - Jaggies galore

08:39PM PST - Comes up at 720p by default

08:39PM PST - GeForce GTX 680 out of the box experience

08:38PM PST - Showing standard out of box settings now

08:38PM PST - Now showing a video of Call of Duty before and after optimal GFE settings

08:37PM PST - When you launch the game, GFE automatically sets all of your game settings optimized for your PC

08:37PM PST - Use "expert gamers" to determine what the right settings should be, upload them to a cloud DB

08:37PM PST - Through heuristics, benchmarking and simulation, NV understands how all games perform on virtually all hardware

08:36PM PST - NVIDIA starts by understanding the profile of every single game

08:36PM PST - "Console Simplicity, PC Performance"

08:36PM PST - Seven years later: GeForce Experience

08:36PM PST - Came up with a game technology that would automatically setup game detail settings depending on your hardware

08:35PM PST - "we tried to characterize every single configuration of PCs around the world, understand every single setting of every single game"

08:35PM PST - "we went off and undertook an enormous project"

08:35PM PST - "this is technical, that's why they pay us the big bucks"

08:35PM PST - son replied: why can't you guys just set it for us?

08:34PM PST - "asked him how does it look? and he was already playing...I asked him, did you change the settings? I want to see it amped up"

08:34PM PST - "was so proud of it, took the first one home, took it to my son and said install it"

08:34PM PST - "about 7 years ago, we had just created this new GPU called G80"

08:33PM PST - Curious to see where this is all headed...

08:33PM PST - Jen-Hsun is talking about how PC game settings are a blessing and a curse

08:32PM PST - 0.5x - 15x the performance of an Xbox 360

08:32PM PST - High end PC today has 6 cores + 3250 GFLOPS GPU, low end has 2 cores + 125 GFLOPS GPU

08:32PM PST - "PC industry has a range of configurations based on price and when you bought it"

08:32PM PST - "game console is very stable (xbox 360 - 3 cores + 240 GFLOPS GPU)"

08:31PM PST - "as wonderful as the PC industry is though, it's awfully chaotic as well"

08:30PM PST - Free to play games now represent the fastest growing sector in PC gaming

08:30PM PST - MMOs do $13B a year in revenues

08:30PM PST - 2 weeks later, $1B dollars

08:29PM PST - Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 made half a billion dollars in 24 hours

08:29PM PST - talking about blockbuster PC titles still being huge events

08:29PM PST - "PC Gaming is Thriving"

08:29PM PST - setting the stage for NVIDIA's Cloud Gaming stuff

08:28PM PST - "it's impossible to enjoy the same video game on any device"

08:28PM PST - "video games, the largest industry of all today, can't benefit from this style of entertainment - untethered"

08:28PM PST - "the ironic part of it is that all of this has changed and it didn't include the single largest entertainment industry"

08:28PM PST - "everything has changed"

08:28PM PST - "In the course of just 10 years, everything has changed"

08:27PM PST - Interesting dialog coming from a company that not too long ago was mainly known for shipping PC GPUs

08:27PM PST - Now talking about the cloud and streaming video to all sorts of devices

08:27PM PST - Enjoy your content without being connected to the PC

08:27PM PST - er iPod then Kindle

08:27PM PST - Talking about how the iPod started this mobile revolution...iPod the Kindle

08:26PM PST - Jen Hsun is on stage

08:25PM PST - ...well, I thought we were ready

08:25PM PST - Here we go!

08:21PM PST - The event is about to start, they're telling us to take our seats