Speaking of TV boxes for gaming:
Tonight at a press conference scheduled to coincide with GDC 2015, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang annouced the latest addition to its Shield line of products. Called simply “Shield,” Nvidia’s new device is a set-top box powered by Nvidia’s Tegra X1 processor, using Google’s Android OS and the search giant’s new TV platform, Android TV. Shield supports 4K content encoded with H.265, and can stream local content from Nvidia-powered PCs at 1080p60. Shield also supports the company’s game-streaming initiative, Grid.
nVidia was hyping this announcement as ‘5 years in the making’, and the dude strolls out on stage and basically gives the same intro as Steve Jobs did when he unveiled the very first iPhone. ‘This is a moment we’ve been waiting for for years. Today, we’re going to announce 3 products …’ And I’m getting excited, thinking that Nvidia’s about to unleash something we’ve never seen before. And then they proceed to announce the Ouya 2.0. Really, nVidia?
I don’t think the Grid service on this thing does anything that the Shield Portable and Tablet don’t already do. And unless you have a 4k TV, you can get media streaming sticks in boxes of Cracker Jacks these days. So, what’s left? Playing last-gen console ports natively at 30fps.
Honestly, I don’t understand the draw of this thing, or who exactly it’s for. If you want to get in on the Grid streaming service, get a Shield portable. You can load a crapton of emulators on it and take it on the go, then hook it up via HDMI when you get home. Hell, they’ve even got a dock for it which makes the latter process easy.
Edited 2015-03-04 22:26 UTC
If it’s possible to boot a regular Linux distro on it it might be useful as a cheap AArch64 dev box.
I have a Shield (the original) and it’s a pretty comfortable device. It’s great for running emulators too as it’s CPU and GPU are quite powerful.
But making games for those devices and taking advantage of the hardware is too expensive..
This might change in the future with Vulkan though.
“can stream local content from Nvidia-powered PCs at 1080p60”
Doesn’t anybody ever think this is the wrong way to do things? Why not just serve the file over samba/nfs … surely that set top box should be powerful enough to decode the stream.
I stream 1080P content on my Nexus Player using XBMC (kodi) from my Linux fileserver running Samba. Why on earth would I need an NVidia graphics card on my PC to do this?
I imagine that to watch videos on this device it can do it from a Samba/DLNA server fine as you picture it.
This is for gaming….
Gefore 600(?) cards and up have a MP4 encoder chip on the card that the system can then stream video games to another device and play remotely. It works a lot like VNC but the card is doing all the heavy lifting then pushing it on your network.
Valve has a Steam console coming out in November for $49.99 called Steam Link that runs on an ARM SoC. It will stream games too for you to play them remotely. and I imagine it will have some video playing apps too.
AMD is using Splashtop to do something similiar but Valve choose to go with Nvidia’s solution exclusively. I have heard GameStream from Nvidia is better than Splashtop but never with my own eyes. I have used my Raspberry Pi with Limelight to stream desktop games to my TV and play them.
Edited 2015-03-05 16:22 UTC