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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ol1bit - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link
I know this is old, but my tf201 with a tegra 3 still plays games great! Uninstalling facebook really helped overall speed!UpSpin - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
The Tegra K1 is lacking an on-chip modem, thus it will always be less efficient than Qualcomm processors, which means we'll probably never see this SoC in a smartphone.I think we'll see much more Tegra producs with the K1, because it's really an impressive SoC. But NVidia seems to care less about the typical consumer tablets, more about their own console ecosystem (Shield) and most importantly embedded systems (cars), where NVidia has some huge partners and the Tegra gets widely used. (Tesla, Mercedes, VW, Audi, ...). There they can make more money most probably and don't have to give their IP away for free more or less to remain competive against companies like Mediatek.
fivefeet8 - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
The Snapdragon 805 is also in the same boat without an on-chip modem.Knowname - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
who cares about the display? I get mine on Tuesday (preordered from Amaizon and picked no rush shipping fo da bling xD) and 90% of the time I'll be using it to play steam games on my TV.happycamperjack - Wednesday, September 3, 2014 - link
Just got it. The screen is actually pretty good! Much better than I expected. Great contrast, black level, colors. It's more than good enough for a tablet. I got the original Nexus 7. This is much much much better than that! It looks similar to me to the new Nexus 7.sherlockwing - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
No Video playback battery life test?JoshHo - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
It was definitely planned but there wasn't enough time to finish that test. I'll update the review once I have those results.ams23 - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Josh, how about some additional tests using the battery saver mode? Limiting fps to 30fps and reducing CPU clock operating frequencies should dramatically extend the gaming battery life with very graphically intensive benchmarks.On a side note, I should point out that not only does Tegra K1 have much higher Onscreen performance in GFXBench T-Rex HD test (which is the test used for battery lifetime and a minimum value long term performance data point) compared to most other ultra mobile GPU's, but is also renders with significantly higher [FP32] precision too. According to Oleg at B3D forum, Kishonti uses low precision FP16 shaders in the T-Rex test by default. Mobile Kepler and other modern day PC and console GPU architectures are designed for FP32 precision and not mixed or lower precision.
mkozakewich - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
This! It's horrible to complain about the extra dynamic range like it's a bad thing, and then NOT test the battery-saving features.Limit the CPU such that it runs like the Shield portable, then set the framerate to 30 Hz and run the gaming battery tests again.
(On my Surface Pro, for example, I'll set everything to the lowest possible, about 800 MHz, and I'll get a couple more hours out of it while playing games. High-Performance mode is for when you're plugged in.)
JoshHo - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Those are definitely planned as well, there were some issues with meeting deadlines so battery life testing had to be cut down somewhat.