As gamers, we’ve long been indebted to Nvidia. The California-based brand have been producing some of the finest GPUs since 1993, giving us a beautiful performance and consistently high-quality. But we’re about to fall even greater into their debt with the latest product about to hit the market, the
Shield.
Launching in the summer, the device looks all set to rival the likes of the PlayStation and Apple TV, with streaming services as well as the ability to play the latest games.
Running on Android, the Shield has been five years in the making and will be the first device able to stream video in 4K resolution, marking yet another step forward in home entertainment.
Unveiled at a press conference in San Francisco, the device will cost just $199 and be disc-less meaning all games will be downloaded. Which, of course, is incredibly convenient, particularly with the large amount of games in Google Play and GRID, the store in which games ranging from Batman:
Arkham Origins, to Crysis 3, to slots games in online casinos can be streamed, making it just about the jack of all trades.
We’re spending more and more time gaming online so it’s an exciting move for gamers around the world.
GRID is essentially designed to be the Netflix or Amazon Prime of the gaming world, with GeForce GTX supercomputers powering streaming activity, and they’re said to be twice as powerful as any other console on the market today.
Despite Sony also buying Gaikai, a cloud streaming service, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, believes his company are the only brand capable of doing it.
“We knew that if we didn’t do this, it wouldn’t get done,” He said, “Every division at Nvidia has worked on reducing the milliseconds between the moment a player touches the button to the moment that the input registers in the remote supercomputer and is finally rendered on screen.”
Set to hit the shelves in May in the United States and a little later in the year in Europe, GRID will start out offering 50 titles to users with more added each week, although they don’t have any first part titles in development which could be key when going up against the likes of PlayStation and Xbox.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the device fairs upon release, should it bring out its own games it could really go far, particularly with the cost much less than its rivals.
