The NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Review: A Premium 4K Set Top Box
by Ganesh T S on May 28, 2015 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Media Streamer
- Home Theater
- TV
- 4K
- Shield
- NVIDIA
Gaming - NVIDIA's Trump Card
NVIDIA's Tegra lineup has traditionally differentiated itself from a host of other ARM-based SoCs in the target market with the in-house GPU. In the Tegra X1, we have a GPU based on the Maxwell family, and as benchmarks showed, the performance is very good. Broadly speaking, next to 4K Netflix support, NVIDIA considers gaming capabilities to be the trump card for the SHIELD when compared to other OTT STBs.
With that said, you’re not going to be seeing a lot of official talk from NVIDIA about gaming on the SHIELD Android TV today, and that’s for two reasons. First and foremost is simply because not all of the pieces are ready. The commercial GRID service does not launch until next month, and while SHIELD can access the current beta service, it goes without saying that half of what we write on GRID will be made obsolete in 5 weeks anyhow. Meanwhile some of NVIDIA’s well-promoted AA and AAA games are ready – games like The Talos Principle and Doom 3: BFG – while other games like Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Crysis 3 are not here.
The second reason meanwhile is that given the SHIELD’s launch amidst Google I/O, NVIDIA is also making the conscientious decision to focus on those features that are most relevant to the Google I/O crowd and the contents of Google’s presentation. With the device’s announcement at GDC 2015, NVIDIA played to gaming amidst a gaming crowd, while for the device’s launch they’re playing to everything that’s amazing about Android TV, the Android TV ecosystem, and 4K TV.
The point being that NVIDIA hasn’t forgotten about gaming, but the SHIELD Android TV’s gaming capabilities aren’t what NVIDIA is focusing on first. Expect to hear a lot more about gaming later in June once the GRID commercial service is up and running.
As for today’s launch, while gaming isn’t in the forefront, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. As we briefly mentioned earlier several high-profile games are already available, so we’ve still had a chance to look at what NVIDIA’s latest SHIELD can offer for gaming.
A big part of NVIDIA’s long-term gaming plans for the SHIELD family of devices involves working with game developers to ensure that Android gaming grows beyond the casual, free-to-play titles that are currently popular. As a product of these dev-relation efforts, a number of games are going to be introduced in the Play Store to bring out the gaming prowess of the Tegra X1. We had the chance to play around with a few such as The Talos Principle, Hotline Miami, Luftrausers, Doom 3 : BFG Edition, War Thunder and family-friendly casual games such as JUJU.
The above screenshot shows the level of graphics that provides for smooth playable frame rates in the SHIELD. Based on what I've seen, I don't believe the internal rendering resolution is 1080p in The Talos Principle, but I suspect it's not too far off.
With NVIDIA carrying over the SHIELD gamepad from last year's SHIELD Tablet launch, playing games on the SHIELD Android TV works about as well as you'd expect for a second-generation effort. The performance of the set top box is still closer to the last-generation consoles than the current-generation consoles, and graphics quality matches up accordingly. NVIDIA is well aware that they can't compete with the game consoles for first-run AAA games, so their focus here is going to be on a sort of best-of-the-best approach of bringing older, well received games to the console and a user base NVIDIA believes is distinct from the traditional game console crowd.
Shifting gears for a bit, we also have the matter of casual games. From a technical standpoint, it goes without saying that casual games such as JuJu do not pose much of a challenge for the SHIELD.
In addition to the above, NVIDIA has indicated that more than 20 new titles are coming exclusively to NVIDIA SHIELD in the coming months.
We also recorded power consumption at the wall while playing the above two games on a 4Kp60 display. In both cases the SHIELD consumed around 19.4 W on an average, considerably more than the power consumed in the media playback process.
Finally, one of the interesting features is the ability to live-stream to Twitch or record game-play using the SoC's hardware encoder. We tested the latter feature out. The resultant recordings were placed under /sdcard/Movies/Game Recordings. Irrespective of the playing resolution, the recording is always a 2 Mbps 854x480 video at 30 fps (encoded in H.264). The audio is a 128 kbps 2-channel AAC stream. The sample we recorded has been uploaded to YouTube and embedded below. Full MediaInfo details are available in the YouTube description.
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BrokenCrayons - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
Tablets with Windows 8.1 are very nice, inexpensive devices that can play videos and do a lot of other useful things, including running the usual library of x86 Windows software. While I think it's nice that nv is working on stuff like this, it just doesn't compete at all in flexibility with even something like a HP Stream desktop (the cute little blue tupperware-looking PC they sell for about the same price as this thing). Okay, okay, so you can display stuff on a 4k screen, but those aren't common and a lot of people, myself included, don't even own an external screen and would never consider buying one because they don't want to be stuck in one place passively consuming pre-recorded media. That seems like such an obsolete concept.Yojimbo - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
You either have a lot of extra money or live alone. What happens to the TV when you take the tablet away? Why pay for a screen, camera, battery, and shock resistance, etc., or deal with power throttling when you don't have to? Any tablet that can do what the Shield TV can do is going to cost a lot more than the Shield TV. Plus the Shield TV doesn't look like someone left a tablet lying around. This is selling for $200 with a controller. The Shield Tablet cost $300 without a controller and with less I/O connectivity.savagemike - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
It also won't toast bread - which my toaster does just fine. So I too don't see the point.TheJian - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
Not sure why this can't replace your HTPC when you can load OTHER players that can do the things you call shortcomings of the built-in player (like kodi, VLC, Powerdvd's android app). It seems to me you should be able to get around any shortcomings with other apps.I see you said VLC doesn't work that well on shield right now (what do you mean by this comment ?), but what about running something like powerdvd from the PC as noted to get around issues? The android app will accept streaming from local PC's running PowerDVD which plays everything this won't I think. Most people even pondering an HTPC already have a full PC in another room on the network so any shortcomings here should be covered by that I'd guess (including playing blurays etc).
Why wasn't the Intel device shown in more stuff? IE, gfxbench, pcmark, Basemark 2? IE why not thrown in the surface 3 for these which you already have the scores for?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9219/the-surface-3-r...
Saves me from bouncing back and forth to see how badly Intel got killed ;) You had surface 3 pro scores too as shown, why leave them out? Manhattan offscreen 1080p shows Surface 3 pro at 29fps, why not include it when you already have those scores? You had PCmark scores for Surface3 pro also shown above. Are the work portions completely different? Are the other pcmark tests not able to run on surface 3 pro? Photo editing/video playback etc PCMark benchmarks don't work on them? You had all the gfxbench scores for both surface3 pro and regular also. I don't get why you put them in for some stuff, but exclude listing those in other tests when you had the data.
daggre - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
1. It's too expensive. It needs to be $99 like the Apple TV was before they dropped the price to $69. I know that's a huge drop and it may not be possible with the current specs (yet) but it won't ever be successful if it's more than $100.2. It needs to play all Android games, and then play Android TV games really really well. It may already do this but it wasn't clear from the article. Any games nVidia makes should be for Android TV in general (i.e. "Controllers instead of touch") but should really shine on Shield. If anyone plays a game on a different Android TV they should say to themselves "I wish I had bought a Shield" so then those games become both guides to other developers of what their Android TV games should be like, but also become advertisements to gamers on any Android device that the game they are playing on their phone/tablet/other Android TV hardware would be a better experience on the Shield.
In the end, if they don't have really good 3rd party support this will fail. Only Apple is capable of pulling a success out of the air (Apple TV) without 3rd party offerings, and even they had to open up to Netflix, Hulu, HBO and the sports channels.
malooka - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
The Matricom MX2 Midnight is about 79.00 You can get a fly mote (like a Wii remote) it has two partitions one side for internet and gaming and the other side for KODI They have a newer versioin out but I like my model which is a little cheaper. The xbmx which is now KODI is the streaming side. I love this box. You can find it on amazon. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_sc_7_14?url=s...bernstein - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
Seems a bit like a missed opportunity...- no HD bitstreaming, no legacy hardware decoding...
- pairing a GTX960 class GPU (8 SMM instead of two) with an octo-core A57 might feasible for a $300-350 price point. Especially if it could dualboot steam os...
hifiaudio2 - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
It is being said that Nvidia is considering a Codec pack to add HD audio passthrough, VC-1, Mpeg2, etc in hardware.It was also said that Mpeg2 hardware is already on the device, but currently only activated when installing a program like the forthcoming Silicondust HDHomerun DVR program that just had a Kickstarter and will come out in a few months (alpha testing to start in June for the Kickstarter backers).
Go the the Nvidia forums and voice your opinion for the Codec to be released!!!
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/836487/sh...
douglord - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
GGames - You say this has 10-bit color output and HDR capability. Do any consumer grade dGPUs have that (along with the HDMI 2.0a and HDCP needs). I'm really concerned about this for my next PC build. Any thought on how to build a UHD Blueray capable 4k HTPC?ganeshts - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
GTX 960 is your only option right now.Wait for a few more months.. other options should start coming out