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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kron123456789 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Yes, you can use your Xbox360 controller with that tablet.LedHed - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
When is NVIDIA going to start putting competitive SSD's inside of their mobile devices?baii9 - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
Any comparison with a bay trail win8.1 tablet?nicolapeluchetti - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Am i the only one who doesn't see the point of a gaming tablet with only 2.5 hours of battery when playing games?The need of a tablet for gaming is more related to situations where you have to play for lots of time without charging. I know that you can dial down the graphics and save the battery, but then where are the difference from an iPAd Air (which also has many more games?). This is totally pointless for me, it could have been good if battery lasted 5-6 hours, like it is know it's pointless.hahmed330 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
If you run an ipad air full blast the batteries will last for 2.5 hours only... This is what they did.. If you run say dead trigger 2 or something like that the battery would last per say 4-5 hours.. That's pretty damn impressive by the way... I really hope this is successful as I would love play some really nice games..semi177 - Friday, August 1, 2014 - link
the comments on this site used to be good to read. now i just see bashing and misinformed comments. The admin should consider pushing down fanboy war threads much lower down and keep the useful ones on top.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, August 4, 2014 - link
Anybody know where the 32GB tablet is, or when it will release? not even nvidia shows it as available on their website, nor even mentions it.scbundy - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
So much for Charlie D's prediction that the Tegra K1 was going to be super hot, have a huge heatsink and use 50W.Azurael - Friday, August 8, 2014 - link
It's a bit of a disappointment in the display department, much like the Tegra Note 7 (which uses exactly the same display as the original Nexus 7 with a marginally better calibration as far as I can see) The stylus is great (in fact, I prefer it to the Wacom-developed screen in the Galaxy Notes) as is the SoC performance and value proposition - but if they want to appeal to people other than gamers (I would certainly have bought this), they've got to work on that LCD. I skipped the Nexus 5 and bought a G2 despite objecting to its size because the N5 LCD was a massive step backward in contrast from that in the Nexus 4 when calibrated. I bought a 2013 Nexus 7 to replace my 2012 Nexus 7 a few weeks ago because the LCD in the otherwise great Tegra Note is not a step forward. When will device manufacturers other than Apple realise that people do care about the LCD?sandy105 - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I have both the tegra note 7 and nexus 7 2012 .The one on nexus 7 has bonded fused display while the touch layer and screen are separated on tegra note7 making it very poor and VERY reflective.It also has muted colors and looks washed out.