Today, during their Made To Game event, Nvidia unveiled the latest in their Shield lineup, the all-new Android TV powered gaming console, simply named the Shield.
NVIDIA SHIELD GAMING BOXThe Shield Box is powered by Android TV, but unlike other Android TV boxes it features full 4K video support. That is no doubt thanks to the inclusion of Nvidia’s latest Tegra X1 SoC, which features their Maxwell GPU architecture.
It will connect to your TV via HDMI 2.0, while it features Gigabit Ethernet, 16GB of internal storage, with a MicroSD expansion slot, and two USB 3.0 ports. You get all of that, plus their Shield game controller and a handy remote, both of which feature a microphone for voice searching in Android TV, for $199, making it the cheapest of all the ‘next-generation’ game consoles, but the most expensive Android TV box yet.
Nvidia says they plan on launching the Shield in May.
GAMES
But, of course a game console needs games, and Nvidia does not expect anyone to fork out $200 just to play all the already available Android games on their TV. So, with the Shield, they’re also launching their own store which will link to Google Play, and will feature over 50 launch titles, including Gearbox Software’s Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Id Tech’s Doom 1, 2 and 3, Crytek’s Crysis 3, Capcom’s Resident Evil 5, Konami’s Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, and many more.
NVIDIA GRID
To bring even more titles to the Shield and virtually any other device, Nvidia has unveiled their plans to officially launch their Nvidia Grid game streaming service, which offers Netflix-like cloud streaming of video games at 1080p, 60FPS.
At launch of the service it will feature a variety of games including Rocksteady’s upcoming Batman Arkham Knight, CD Project RED’s Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes and Capcom’s Resident Evil Revelations 2.
They demoed the service running all the above mentioned titles, as well as Grid 2, and the Unreal Engine 4 tech demo The Infiltrator, which was used to demonstrate the services console-beating graphics processing capabilities.