Nvidia’s latest Shield is an Android top box that makes use of the company’s latest Tegra chip. The device streams games over a platform called GRID, it can stream games from your PC and also supports Twitch streaming at the same time. Here are our Nvidia Shield set-top box hands on impressions.
However, the question is: Is this device any good? And the answer is: Kind of.
Having recently used the device it’s safe to say that it’s a pretty nifty peace of hardware. However, being a streaming device it’s uncertain how it will perform after its official release.
Nvidia’s Shield is powerful, small and looks similar to other set-top boxes we’ve used. The Shield box will be very familiar if you’ve ever used the Fire TV from Amazon. The device offers a lot of apps and digital content from Netflix and Hulu to Google Play and YouTube. The Shield features voice search and a microphone is built right in the gamepad.
But I’m sure you don’t care as much about Android TV as you do about the game streaming, so let’s get to that.
Does the game streaming actually work? Well, yes, it really does. But will game streaming work right in your home? We can’t tell you for sure at this time. The fact is that this feature depends on your internet connection as well as how well the servers from Nvidia will perform after the official release.
This is what we played on the device:
A match in Ultra Street Fighter IV streamed from Nvidia’s GRID
Around five minutes of Dying Light, also streamed from GRID
A very short section from Doom 3: BFG Edition played locally
Let’s start with the most relevant game from the list. Doom 3 looks and feels exactly as Doom 3 should feel and the only difference is that the game now plays on Android and its graphics are a little nicer. The game performs really smooth and it’s very pretty. However, whether Doom 3 is exciting or not depends solely on you and what kinds of games you like to play. What we can confirm is that the game actually runs on Shield and, supposedly the new device can also play Crysis 3 locally. We weren’t able to play the game, however, mainly because Crytek didn’t want the press to test the game for now. Nevertheless, we did get a look at Crysis 3 on the Shield and we can say that what we saw was indeed Crysis 3 and actually played like the game, albeit somewhat laggy.
When we played Ultra Street Fighter IV and Dying Light we didn’t sense any lag. To be fair, we only played the games for a short period of time and game streaming should be tested at home to see exactly how well it performs.
We’ll make a full review of the device when it launches but for now we can say that it definitely looks promising. It’s safe to say that if this $200 machine will perform great after its official release, it will become a serious competition for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. But to pay this kind of money just to stream video content doesn’t seem like a great idea. There are great set-top boxes out there that cost less than half its price.
Image source: Photo 1
