In a text book example of “out of left field” Nvidia, the video card creator Juggernaut, has announced that they are getting into the video game platform market. Dubbed Project Shield, it will bridge the gap between PC and Console gaming.
Powered by the newest portable chip, the Tegra 4, it will allow gamers to have console quality content in a portable platform. The brand new custom chip, which combines a 72 core Nvidia GPU and A15 arm quad core processor, allows immense graphical power that doesn’t demand a lot on your battery. The results? Hours of console quality gaming that can be run off a large cellphone battery.
The main drive behind the development of Project Shield was getting high quality games into your hands. The device runs off a vanilla Android OS which gives gamers access to all Google Play games, but the real reason to pick this sucker up is it’s ability to stream your PC games to the device. If you have an Nvidia GTX 650 or higher graphics card, you can play any of your PC games to your device. With a pretty beefy retina display attached to the controller you will get some stunning clarity in your hands.
Not much else to report, check out the full release HERE on Nvidias official site. To see an extensive gallery and some of the footage from the Press Event check out our friends over at The Verge
My initial thoughts? I am pretty intrigued. I always love seeing new technology so when I get this press release I was excited. There has been a pretty strong push lately with getting the PC out of the computer room. With stuff like STEAMS Big Picture and 1:1 desktop display streaming to iDevices it seems like there is a market for changing how we consume PC games. As for the the handheld portion itself, it seems dubious. There are a couple of gaming devices out now that will attach to an Android phone (Check out some humorous commercials for the MOGA HERE and HERE) and it seems like there is a strong market with getting a controller on an Android.