Nvidia Announces Tegra 4, SHIELD Game/ TV/ Portable Console, Pure Android
A pretty impressive line up. This will swamp the airwaves this week so just giving y'all a heads up.
http://www.androidcentral.com/nvidia-announces-project-shield
http://www.androidcentral.com/nvidia-announces-project-shield
Comments
Between Shield, Ouya & any other cheaply made TV box running on Android and ONLY meant to play games,
it's an excellent way to get Android to the masses without those masses having to be tied to a crappy phone & locked-in mobile carrier contracts.
Maybe Apple should look into doing something like this.
It seems to have some nice functions:
[VIDEO]
For a second I thought the graphics were amazing:
[VIDEO]
but that's showing the device streaming a game from a PC with a GTX desktop card in it. It makes getting PC games on the TV easier and in some ways would work like an ?TV box. It could be a fiddly setup with the gaming PC in the other room though. How do you hit ctrl-alt-del?
As for the native game performance, it looks ok but Apple's A5X chip was faster than Tegra 3. A6X is already faster than that. You can see A6X vs Tegra 3 here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6426/ipad-4-gpu-performance-analyzed-powervr-sgx-554mp4-under-the-hood
The Tegra 3 is about 1/4 the speed of the A6X, so this Tegra 4 will be 50% faster than A6X as NVidia claims this Tegra 4 is 6x faster than Tegra 3. Look at the giant heatsink in it though:
[VIDEO]
I reckon the new Rogue 6 GPU will be much better and fit into phone form factors. I like the strategy though, I think this is the way gaming consoles will go and the big consoles will really start to struggle to sell because they want to block used games now while still charging $60 per game and they might cut backwards compatibility so the game library starts at zero again.
[VIDEO]
and here's NFS Most Wanted on iOS:
[VIDEO]
Set the top to about 1:07 and the bottom to 0:24 and play them together. The visuals on the PC version are of course nicer but it really offers a very similar experience. There's a demo of Rogue 6 here but they are saying the demo has about 1/10th the bandwidth of production versions:
[VIDEO]
Instancing and anti-aliasing in OpenGL ES 3 and doing compute on the GPU will push mobile graphics even further to have negligible practical difference between higher-end graphics.
Then you have companies like Ubitus launching cloud gaming over platforms like Google TV. Dedicated gaming systems just aren't as attractive as they were a couple years back.
http://www.ubitus.net/release/2013_release_20130107_1_english.html
Even NVidia:
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
To make that work, they have to get the costs right though. The providers need to balance subscribers to hardware really closely to avoid losing money and they need to keep a good selection of games at affordable prices. Apple seems to have an objection to allowing these kind of clients too. Probably due to the whole 30% cut. NVidia would offer the app free and games could be bought elsewhere. There needs to be a new type of agreement for this kind of app as Apple isn't providing the bandwidth for the purchased content. They are not really any different from 3rd party web browsers. Playing something like Dishonored on an iPad would be pretty cool.
Ubitus is using Nvidia Grid, or at least some of it...
Very similar to their GPU approach, just supply it to whoever wants to do the retail stuff.
Very smart guy, this Jen-Hsun Huang.
Thanks for comments, everyone... this looks interesting...!
I want to get an Nvidia GTX 680 SLI but having to get a PC and play all these massive PC games, I don't have time. I'd really love super-low-latency GTX690-class full graphics over cloud. It'll be here by end of 2015 easy.
Well, Apple could do for Nvidia Grid providers what they do for Hulu and Netflix, right? The 30% doesn't apply there... am i right?
I'm not sure how it works with streaming video. This article suggests it's the same deal:
http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/walmart-vudu-ipad/
I don't see how they could be taking a cut of a subscription though because it can be viewed anywhere.
Game streaming is a bit different because you pay for each title so they'd at least have to block in-app purchases entirely:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-28-technological-challenges-holding-up-onlive-ipad-app
They say technical issues so it could be to do with using non-standard APIs but the fact they say 'makes business sense' suggests it's to do with the cut as well. Apple probably isn't too impressed with how the touch overlays work with the PC games as well as the latency over wifi:
[VIDEO]
You can see some lag here:
but Netflix has to buffer videos at times too so they don't have to block it when it's available for Android. I think that's quite a good example of Google's freedom, even though it's a double-edged sword because there is that risk of allowing poorer quality software and there are other stricter examples like the XBox or Playstation where it makes sense to have really strict quality control. Apple plays it a little too safe sometimes for the platform they are offering because you almost expect to be able to do what you can do with a desktop OS.