NVIDIA's Shield portable gaming system is easily the most anticipated product to come out of CES. Today, we finally got a chance to go hands-on with an early build of the device, and got a few hands-on videos in the process. Let's break down the videos first.
Did you miss NVIDIA's Tegra 4 unveiling last night? No worries, friends – you can now watch the whole event in its entirety right here. That's all sorts of babble about video cards, video games, the Tegra 4, Dead Trigger 2, and, of course, Project SHIELD in all of its handheld glory.
NVIDIA's jaw-dropping Tegra 4 and Project Shield demos showed off a lot of impressive hardware, but any gamer will tell you: it's all about the games themselves. To that end, they've revealed a few of the games currently in development and set to take advantage of both the Tegra 4 and Shield's console-style controls. We've already seen Madfinger's Dead Trigger 2, but on the shiny new Shield website, there are brief glimpses of other titles.
Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin
First up is Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin. This is the first time we've seen the game, but based on the screenshot, it seems to be a Devil May Cry-type fantasy hack-and-slash action title. This one should make good use of the controller.
If you've been following PC gaming, you know that Valve has big plans for its Steam platform. NVIDIA wants to leverage the new "Big Picture" mode (a TV user interface, designed to make a gaming PC work more like a game console) with the brand-spanking new Project Thor Shield mobile gaming device. At the CES press conference, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off the Shield Hardware streaming live PC games from a local machine running a high-end GTX 680 graphics card.
The interface allows for launching both individual games and Steam itself, in a solution that doesn't look like it was built around Steam specifically.
After about 45 minutes of casual sexism and awkward pauses, NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang dropped the bomb. Project Shield is a handheld gaming console running pure, unmodified Android (Jelly Bean). At its core is the newly-announced Tegra 4 ARM chip, but that's not all.
Update: Official video of Project Shield:
The device looks like a standard wireless controller with a flip-up screen. Around the back are I/O ports, and there's no proprietary nonsense here. HDMI, USB, microSD, and an audio jack. This isn't just a render, either – the device was shown off on stage. Jen-Hsun Huang used Project Shield to push a 4K video over HDMI to a 4K TV as well.
Okay, so sure, OnLive still exists, but given its financial woes and general instability, it's unlikely that the company will be investing in any new hardware or infrastructure. This is a shame, because NVIDIA just dropped some sweet-looking server racks on us at CES. While it bears more than a little resemblance to the GeForce GRID program, the NVIDIA GRID features the ability to support 24 concurrent users on a single node.
In addition to providing businesses with huge, server-side processing power, the company is also touting a fully-integrated video game streaming system that includes an Android client.
It's CES 2013, and NVIDIA has just kicked it off in a way that only NVIDIA can: by announcing the world's first quad-core A15 CPU – the Tegra 4. It uses the same 4-PLUS-1 setup as the Tegra 3, which has the fifth "battery saving" core, but supercharges it in basically every way imaginable. For starters, it features 72 GPU cores. That's a lot of cores.
Past that, it's the first Tegra processor to have an onboard 4G LTE modem (finally!).
Update by Artem: We had originally incorrectly specified that the Tegra 4 SoC has an LTE modem built-in.
Android Police is live at NVIDIA's 2013 CES press conference at the Palms Hotel, primed and ready for what we can only assume will include the announcement of the next generation of Tegra mobile processors. Check out the ScribbeLive widget below for our coverage as it happens, starting at 7:45PM PST (that's 10:45PM EST).
Even though ExZeus 2 was announced for this summer, it’s not until this weekend that it finally came to Google Play. The reasons behind the delay of the sequel to ExZeus Arcade (which is currently rated 4.2/5) are unknown, but it’s worth noting that for now the game is only compatible with NVIDIA Tegra devices. Other versions are scheduled to be released by the end of the year.
So, what’s ExZeus 2 all about? To put it bluntly - shooting, shooting, and some more shooting. Yes, you won’t exactly be using your gray cells for this one, but if you’re looking for some mindless fun, it may be worth giving it a chance.
- Mel D.
- Matt B.
We'll be in touch shortly.
It's time to wrap up our NVIDIA Tegra holiday giveaways here at Android Police, and we've saved what we think is the best for last. We really like the One X (color may not be white as shown below, just FYI), and by relation, we also really like the One X+. So we're giving away one of each today, courtesy of NVIDIA, both with a little deal-sweetener right in the box, in the form of a $25 AMEX gift card.
What's so special about Tegra 3?



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