Add Nvidia to the list of companies that want to rule your living room.
At the Game Developer’s Conference Tuesday night, the company announced the Nvidia Shield console, an Android-based set-top box built for gamers. It’s due out in May for $199.
The Shield, which is capable of 4K playback and will ship with a game controller that Nvidia claims has a 40-hour battery life, will be powered by the company’s flagship Tegra X1 mobile chip. In showcasing the power of that chip, though, the company didn’t compare it to modern consoles from Microsoft and Sony, but instead baselined it against the 10-year-old Xbox 360, saying Tegra X1 offered twice the visual performance.
The curious comparison was just one of the head-scratching moments of the lengthy presentation. While Nvidia positioned the Shield as a revolutionary system powered by a revolutionary cloud streaming service called Grid, it conveniently ignored the slew of other Android set-top boxes on the market.
Grid, the cloud-based streaming service, is an expansion of an existing service from the company which is presently available to owners of the Shield handheld gaming system or Shield gaming tablet. (Give the company credit for one thing: It’s remarkably consistent with its naming structure, even if that may cause consumer confusion.)
Grid, which operates similar to Sony’s PlayStation Now, lets players stream top-tier titles in 1080p at an impressive 60 frames per second. The initial catalog will consist of 50 games, all of which are either mobile titles or fairly dated PC games (including Doom 3: BFG Edition and Half-Life 2: Episode
1).
“100 million people have enjoyed games in that console generation,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Several billion people should enjoy them. The question is, how do we get several billion people to enjoy the 1,000-plus games that were created for this generation?”
Charge them for it, apparently. The service will offer a subscription model with two tiers. Basic will offer access to the Grid’s collection of existing titles, as well as monthly additions. Users who pay for the premium service will have the opportunity to purchase and play newer games.
Yes. You’ll have to pay a premium to pay full price for a new PC game.
In addition to its work as a game system, Shield will also act as a smart TV peripheral, letting people stream movies, music and apps from the Google Play service, primarily via voice control.
That’s all well and good, but the announcement of those features followed a 10-minute presentation by Huang that seemed to underscore why smart TVs themselves were the future of the home entertainment industry, rather than peripheral devices.
“Smart TVs will be the way we enjoy TV in the future,” he said, seemingly discussing TVs that have the intelligence built in during the manufacturing process. “These smart TV devices, with applications, will replace dedicated device over time.”
source: yahoo.com
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