NVIDIA Announces Portable Gaming Console - Project SHIELD | GamersNexus

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NVIDIA Announces Portable Gaming Console - Project SHIELD

By Steve Burke Published January 07, 2013 at 4:31 am

Hardware

Late last night, nVidia kicked off CES with a press conference discussing numerous graphics computing topics and advancements, but took everyone by surprise with its own handheld gaming system.

NVidia's Project Shield aims to fuse the computational power and programmatic freedom of Android devices with traditional gaming controlsets, offering a gaming alternative for Android users. The device is fitted with a TEGRA 4 single chip processor, which has four A15 CPU cores, 72 GeForce GPU cores, and Icera LTE i500 (a soft modem with low active power consumption that's capable of 3 LTE @ 100Mbps down, later 4 LTE). The controller resembles a standard console controller, but is fitted with a 5" retinal flip-up display, outputting 1280x720 resolution at 294 DPI.

Most notably, SHIELD can stream your gameplay between itself and a nearby gaming PC, where it utilizes the PC for rendering tasks and streams video. The company said:

"Most PC gamers own a fairly sizabl games library. But unlike music and video which can be streamed freely around the house, playing PC games requires sitting in front of a PC. Even if the picture could be streamed, where would it stream to and how would one interact with it? SHIELD elegantly solves both problems. With a 5” 1280x720 screen and a full sized controller, it is capable of not only displaying a PC game in its full glory, it lets you play it too. And because the rendering is done on the PC and the picture is streamed as video, you get GeForce GTX class graphics and long battery life. It’s kind of like having a GeForce GTX PC in the palm of your hand combined with the battery life of a Tegra device. "

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The device is expected to ship in Q2 of 2013. We will have further information on the device as the show goes on.

- Steve.

Last modified on January 07, 2013 at 4:31 am

Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.

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