The NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Review
by Joshua Ho on July 29, 2014 9:00 AM ESTBattery Life
As always, battery life is one of the most important aspects of any mobile device, and is crucial to staying mobile. There’s not much introduction needed to this, as it’s rather well understood that more battery life is usually better. The Shield tablet features an integrated 19.75Wh battery.
This device is a tablet first and foremost, so WiFi browsing battery life is important. In this area, the tablet does well. However, it’s a bit strange how the device performs worse than the Nexus 7 (2013). The reason why I say this is that the Tegra K1 is on a far more power efficient process (28HPm), has broadly equivalent battery capacity to screen area scaling, and should have a more power efficient display due to the reduced gamut. However, it could be that Cortex A15 just isn’t as power efficient as Krait and the silicon backplane of the display isn’t as efficient as the one in the Nexus 7.
While normally web browsing tests are enough to cover the relatively low-compute use cases for smartphones, video playback is a significant use case for tablets. Here, we see that the gap between the Nexus 7 (2013) and the SHIELD Tablet narrows significantly, which can probably be attributed to the mostly display-bound nature of this test. Due to the much lower APL average of this test, we see that the Galaxy Tab S line does noticeably better in this test because their AMOLED displays mean that black-heavy content dramatically reduces power draw. This is because a black pixel in an AMOLED display is turned off and doesn't consume power, while an LCD display relies on a backlight so it isn't possible to turn off the backlight for a single pixel without turning off the entire display.
Of course, the Shield Tablet is also designed for gaming. Unfortunately, the Tegra K1 introduces quite a massive amount of dynamic range. While it’s fully possible for the Shield tablet to last 10 hours of continuous use on a single charge, running the GPU at full blast gives battery life similar to a gaming laptop. Realistically, if a game is made for Tegra K1 and truly stretches the GPU to the limit, battery life is only around two and a half hours, assuming display brightness is kept down to 200 nits. Of course, anything less intensive will do much better.
NVIDIA has also made it possible to cap the maximum frame rate and clock speed for better battery life. However, it’s quite clear in this test that the tablet isn’t capable of sustaining peak performance the way the Shield portable was, as the Shield portable sustained around 90% of the first run performance while the tablet sustained around 80% of its first run performance. The Shield Tablet also has noticeably higher skin temperatures, although this was a subjective observation.
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name99 - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
OK. I guess there are situations where that makes sense. Thx.6cef - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
if "closer to 6504k is better", then you should order the graph by the absolute magnitude of the difference between each devices white point and that ideal value.duh.
kyuu - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
+1kae - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
I'll echo the question of a few previous comments... What is the compatibility of the controller with other Android Devices and PC's supporting WiFi Direct? I'm still rocking the Xbox360 Wireless, but if I can ditch the stupid USB dongle and go direct, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Double the function if it also communicates with my N5, and I'm sold.Anyone know? The documentation only talks about how fast WiFi direct is, but not if NVidia is using some proprietary drivers, or if it will work with any device. My hope is the latter.
wintermute000 - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
it always beats me why the big two don't write decent cross platform drivers. Why on earth did Sony not write a good windows and/or android driver for dualshock for example. Easy money (how much can it possibly cost to write a joypad driver) to instantly create a new market.TheJian - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
proprietary, but nvidia is working with google to get it into AndroidL, so should start to work elsewhere soon, if not at least everything shield that comes along and K1 devices etc. A sale is a sale and you're not giving up a lot here, but mapping software (& community profile uploads for mapping to certain games) goes with it so maybe it would be giving away too much.victorson - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
"Although there are some compelling reasons to go with smaller color gamut." Could someone please help out and say what could those reasons be? I'm really curious, always thought there were no such reasons.UpSpin - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
Take a look at the color gamut of white LEDs. You'll see they're blue ones with a phosphor film to produce 'white' light:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#...
However the color reproduction is lacking, especially on cheap white LEDs (the ones you can buy on eBay for example) The more accurate colors you want (high CRI) the more difficult it becomes, they become more expensive and also less efficient. To reproduce all visible colors the best method is to use three separate LEDs, a blue, green and red one. Such a setup is highly inefficient however.
So all NVidia did was using cheap white LEDs to cut costs but also to enhance battery life at the cost of a poor CRI.
theNiZer - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
Great review, very helpfull !cashnmillions - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
Ok so the display isn't phenomenal. Like anyone can really tell the difference between a few pixels. It's an 8" tablet, it doesn't need resolution above 720p to look good. The GPU capabilities are phenomenal, I remember when the Snapdragon and Adreno destroyed the competition about a year ago, this destroys that. I think it's an awesome piece of hardware, I plan to get one, just kind of sucks that the controller is $60. I wonder if I can use an XBOX 360 controller with it like I can on my Nexus 7.