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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ddriver - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
What you mean by "rich colors" is OVER-SATURATION, not color accuracy but the full opposite of it. Most games actually prefer TN panels because of their fast refresh rates, and TN panels' color accuracy suks big time.aliquis - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Regardless it's fair to say most gamers use TN monitors and those are far from perfect but gamers have used them anyway due to speed or price.B3an - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
I know for a fact i can see a noticeable difference. In the same way i can easily see a difference between IPS and shitty TN panels. So YOU'RE fooling yourself if you actually believe that.inighthawki - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
And you're showing your foolishness by comparing color accuracy to color precision. The difference between TN and IPS panels typically stems from color depth. Most TN panels are 6 bit color with dithering, while IPS panels can be 8 bit, or 10 bit simulated, producing a higher range of visible color.Here we are talking about the ACCURACY of colors. i.e. that shade of blue appears as (10, 24, 237) instead of (11, 28, 233). While playing a game, this kind of thing is generally unnoticeable, because you do not have a reference image or render to define what it should look like in the first place. In rare cases when you have large swatches of deep vivid colors you might notice they are a bit undersaturated, but for the most part, the lighting and texture quality in even AAA titles do not produce this kind of photorealism.
ddriver - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
And in the end, it is all relative, since all humans perceive colors differently. This is not an issue for calibrating equipment, which itself can be calibrated, but the human eye is an analogue instrument and no calibration for its color reproduction currently exists.Color accuracy is vital only in one field - and that is content creation. I paid 7k for a "reference" screen and 4k for reference audio monitors, and exactly for that reason. But for content consumption it is irrelevant, considering most users don't even have pro-grade equipment and the content is going to be consumer on a wide range of devices, ranging from totally cr@ppy to above decent.
niva - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Seriously, the color accuracy being 1% or even 10% off will really mess up your gaming experience? Color accuracy is wildly irrelevant to anyone but professionals who work in image/print/video production industries.dstarr3 - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
I have to agree that color accuracy in gaming is a non-issue. In developing games, sure. But not in playing them. It's not like anyone is printing screenshots for work. Unless, again, you're a dev.ddriver - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Nah, I am not a moron, in fact I've been an artist in a AAA game studio for 6 years, so I know what I am talking about. You on the other hand might just be that, seeing your "foolproof" argumentation skills :Dmikegonzalez2k - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Most of these people probably aren't in the industry and hence wouldn't know such things. That is why they are consistently on here instead of working on actual projects. Especially those that comment daily. You have to wonder what they are doing with their life. I wouldn't pay them much attention. It isn't worth it.dcyli - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
HURR DURR, I PLAY GAMES FOR DA COLORS. DUURRR