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I thought we was having a discussion about throttling, battery life, streaming and if NVidia are lying or telling the truth about Portal and Half Life. I don’t see how all those points are “frankly laughable”. They are directly related to a topic on shield.
I would probably get one if i had a Nvidia GPU in my PC
The drive to an Nvidia-produced gaming tablet
Graphics company Nvidia has spent the last 10 years diversifying business away from the core desktop and laptop GeForce gaming brand known to most enthusiasts. Augmented with other processors such as Quadro, Tesla and Tegra, and therefore also playing in the automotive, embedded, high-performance computing, server, smartphone and workstation spaces, Nvidia has sensibly taken its core competencies into a multitude of related areas.
But while there has been significant traction for the system-on-a-chip (SoC) Tegra processor released in 2008 - harnessing ARM CPU cores and GeForce graphics - subsequent iterations have lost impetus and are found in fewer devices. Take the Tegra 4 as an example. Announced in early 2013 and shipping in devices about a year ago, it is found in fewer handsets and tablets than the Tegra 2 or 3. Competitors such as Qualcomm and a band of Taiwanese manufacturers have eroded Tegra's attractiveness in the eyes of tablet and smartphone makers; Google, we must remember, changed over from Nvidia to Qualcomm for the second-generation Nexus 7 tablet.
Common practice has dictated that mobile SoCs are sold to partners who construct tablets and smartphones available to end users or telecoms companies. Nvidia, somewhat surprisingly, changed this philosophy by releasing a branded tablet to the market in September of last year. Known as the Tegra Note 7 and powered by the Tegra 4 SoC, this tablet, sold at retail, was the company's first real foray of selling a consumer device directly to the customer. We'll come to why this is important a a little later.
Nvidia has a well-established roadmap for these mobile SoCs, with Tegra K1 replacing Tegra 4 and, looking to next year, Tegra 6 (Erista) pulling in an Nvidia-designed ARM 64-bit CPU core (Project Denver) alongside graphics from the latest Maxwell family. The current K1 SoC is interesting insofar as it uses an energy-efficient, reduced-core implementation of the desktop Kepler core - powering cards such as the GeForce GTX 760, 770 and 780 - allied to a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU. Nvidia reckons the graphics component of the K1 SoC is, by some distance, the best available.
The time is right for a gaming tablet
Wouldn't it make a lot of sense if, after trialling selling directly to retailers, Nvidia produced a gaming tablet based on the potent K1 architecture? Such a tablet could take advantage of the lessons learned from, say, the Shield and enable real product differentiation from the sea of other, powerful tablets already on the market.
The Santa Clara-based company is doing exactly this with the release of the Shield Tablet. Ready to roll at your favourite retailers on July 29 in the United States, August 14 in Europe and a month or two later for the rest of the world, Nvidia is using a combination of know-how from the original Shield handheld, experience built by selling directly, and gaming-specific features that, it hopes, will entice owners of GeForce GTX graphics cards to invest in what can legitimately be termed as the world's first true gaming tablet.
Shield Tablet - look, feel, and hardware
Nvidia isn't the first company to shoehorn in the Tegra K1 SoC into a tablet; that honour goes to partner Xiaomi with the Mi, launched in May 2014. Appearance-wise, Shield Tablet looks much like the Mi - both tablets sport an 8in IPS panel, are about 9mm thick and weigh in at under 400g. It is reasonable to assume that Nvidia took a lot of what it learned when working with Xiaomi and used it for the Shield Tablet.
But the drive towards a gaming-optimised tablet ensures Shield takes a different tack. Replacing the lush 2,048x1,536-pixel screen of the Mi is a 1,920x1,200 panel that, Nvidia says, maps more closely to the full-HD resolution - 1,920x1,080 - that gamers are expected to use. A lower-resolution screen implies lower costs of production, mind, but we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the screen at a briefing event last week; it's crisp, clear and reminds us of the same-resolution screen present on the 2013 version of the Google Nexus 7 tablet.
Nvidia says the tablet body has been specifically engineered to tolerate higher TDPs required to keep the Tegra K1 graphics humming along at a top speed of 950MHz, and is 'up to 2x more efficient at cooling than other tablets on the market today.' This is achieved by using better heatsinks and more attention to cooling than present on competing models, we were informed, but do know the Shield Tablet remains a passively-cooled solution. The demonstration units were well-built and put together, consistent with the quality exhibited by rival tablets. The soft-touch back became no more than warm during gaming sessions.
Two versions of the Shield Tablet are available - a 16GB model with baked-in WiFi (dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n) retailing for £239 and a £299 model equipped with 32GB of memory and combined WiFi and Cat 4 LTE. We're not fans of the exchange-rate conversion; the entry-level Shield should cost £219, based on the strong pound. It's also a shame that 802.11ac isn't supported from the get-go.
Should the storage quotient not be enough, a microSD slot accepts 128GB cards, too. Bluetooth 4.0 LE, GPS and a 9-axis sensor are pretty standard fare these days. A front-facing 5MP snapper is joined by another on the rear. Both have the ability to shoot in HDR, with the necessary computation done on the GPU.
It makes implicit sense to have a couple of forward-facing speakers on a gaming tablet. They make a reasonable fist of conveying action and, from our limited time, have a bass heft that belies the tablet's lack of size. There's also a 3.5mm jack for headphones and room for a pressure-sensitive stylus. Rounding off the ports, mini-HDMI (v1.4a) can output to a TV or monitor at up to 4K30 while micro-USB is the usual charging conduit.
If you were able to prise away the top you'd find the Tegra K1 32-bit SoC inside. Nvidia clocks the four ARM Cortex-A15 cores in at a maximum 2.2GHz alongside, in typical Tegra fashion, a companion core for light-load work. GPU grunt is handled by the 192-core Kepler-class graphics that push out up to 365GFLOPS when running at a full chat 950MHz. Whatever gaming code can run on your GeForce GTX Titan can technically also run on the Tegra K1. Specifically for mobile gaming, Open GLES 3.1 and OpenGL 4.4 are both supported.
Benchmarks are nebulous at the best of times, but Nvidia claims GPU across-the-board performance leadership in games, showing it to be between 2-4x faster than the graphics in the iPad Air and Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 tablets. The real comparison will be against the next-generation mobile GPUs from these companies, as Imagination Technologies has already detailed the similar-specification GX6650, likely to be used in the next iteration of Apple products, and Qualcomm is talking up the capabilities of the Adreno 420 GPU.
A 19.75WHr battery is good for 80 hours of music playback, approximately 10 hours of video playback and a 'few' hours of hardcore gaming. The battery is smaller than the often-referenced Xiaomi Mi's and 20 per cent larger than the one in the Google Nexus 7.
It's a tablet with a really nippy GPU and competent CPU, but so is the Xiaomi Mi and a roster of other high-end tablets. How, then, is it a true gaming device? The answer is a combination of additional hardware, software and Nvidia technologies.
Available separately for about £50 is the Shield controller. Put the tablet and controller together and you have an updated version of the original Shield, albeit now with more flexibility. You can game on the Shield Tablet on its own by using the touchscreen or with the controller for some proper console-like thrills and spills. Much like the tablet, the controller is well-built and comfortable to hold. It's reminiscent of the Xbox One pad, which is no bad thing, and connects to the Shield via a protocol called WiFi Direct, used instead of Bluetooth due to its low-latency connection. Nvidia has a proprietary software stack, meaning it cannot be used with other tablets. Up to four controllers can be paired with a single Shield Tablet. From the demonstrations we saw, pairing is straightforward and intuitive. Even games that have no native controller support can be mapped over using a feature aptly called Gamepad Mapper.
The best compliment we can pay to the controller and tablet union is that it feels like a corded connection. We noticed no perceivable lag three feet away from the tablet and 10 feet away from the Shield hooked up to a large-screen TV. There are over 400 Android games optimised for either touch or controller input. Gaming, you may be interested to know, is big business on the Android platform - over 90 per cent of Play store revenue is derived from either gaming app or in-game purchases.
Nvidia is also retailing a smart cover, priced at £25. There's not much more to say other than it works just as intended. It is likely that, in Europe at least, there will be bundling of the tablet, controller and smart cover, or a combination of two products out of three. The price of bundling remains unknown.
Gaming on Shield
Software - Android gaming
Shield Tablet ships with Android 4.4 and, going by recent experiences with the first-generation Shield, will receive regular over-the-air updates. Forgetting the gaming nature for a moment, it feels like any other modern tablet when whizzing around the Internet or using familiar apps. The powerful SoC makes short work of regular tablet tasks, but this insight can be intimated from the specifications alone.
What's far more interesting is how it performs when in a gaming state, and it accomplishes this in one of two ways. Gaming centres around the hub you see on the first page. Supported Android games are plentiful - over 400 at the last count - but the innate problem is that very few are tuned for the graphics horsepower in the Shield Tablet. Angry Birds or Candy Crush isn't going to look any better on Shield than on a £70 tablet, frankly. Nvidia will likely say Tegra K1's power is best visualised by seeing the Epic Unreal 4 engine demo running in real-time, which it does rather nicely, but there are few compelling reasons to single-out the Shield Tablet from an Android point of view.
Nvidia foresees this chicken-and-egg problem by bundling in a K1-optimised version of Trine 2 (it looks very lush) as well as exclusives for Half-Life 2 and Portal already available for the original Shield. Will Android developers code specifically for the Shield Tablet, to tease out the last bit of performance, or will they wait until rival hardware has caught up? We'd wager on the latter, so while Android games can look very, very good on the Shield, it is, for now, not the key selling point. Compare this with the admittedly-fixed ecosystem on Apple, where games tend to look and play better even though hardware may not be as potent.
Software - PC games
To its credit, Nvidia has stuck with the first-generation Shield and improved it, quite significantly, with a number of over-the-air updates. The latest iteration of GameStream technology, which enables WiFi-based streaming of PC games from a GeForce GTX-powered PC, now supports over 120 titles at 1080p60, up from 24 and 720p30 at launch. The same advancements are already rolled into Shield Tablet, working in exactly the same way it does on the handheld gaming device.
The fact that it can GameStream titles is, in our opinion, the Shield Tablet's biggest draw; something the competition cannot do. Sure, the Tegra K1 SoC is very impressive from a GPU standpoint yet it is already available on other tablets and will continue to proliferate as design wins are secured. GameStream, on the other hand, is to remain a Shield-exclusive technology, thus helping convince PC GeForce GTX gamers to go for this tablet above all others.
Using the Shield Tablet as a conduit for playing the latest PC games on a 50in TV via what is known as console mode is a definite plus, potentially mitigating the need for a dedicated console in the living room. This streaming, much like the device itself, is mature and works well enough for it to be almost seamless. More nascent is GameStream support from the cloud - driven by Nvidia Grid technology - where game processing takes place remotely and is beamed via WiFi or LTE to your device. Playing Titanfall, at high-quality settings, on the train has a certain geeky appeal.
For both Android and PC games (and the desktop too) Nvidia supports recording, uploading and live streaming to Twitch, using the technology present in the GPU portion of the SoC architecture, making it the world's first gamecasting tablet, if that's your thing.
What does the Shield Tablet need to do to win gamers over?
GPU heavyweight Nvidia is using key homegrown technologies to position the Shield Tablet as the go-to mobile device for your gaming needs. Able to play the latest Android games and stream PC titles from your desktop computer or laptop, our first impressions remain the same after a few days of reflection, that is, we see it more as a desktop gamers' companion device than anything else. There are cheaper tablets that provide the same mobile Android experience; there are a raft of other tablets that play the vast majority of present Android games just as well, but there are none that can stream games from your PC to a big screen.
Shield Tablet, we feel, will really find its stride as Android develops into a better gaming platform and developers begin optimising for best-in-class mobile graphics. The next generation of Android, codenamed L, is to ship with a number of Android Extension Packs (AEPs) whose job it is to help close the gap in the way games are coded on the mobile and desktop platforms. We believe the Shield Tablet is going to be the first of many Nvidia gaming-centric offerings focussing on the burgeoning, lucrative mobile gaming market.
Nvidia's combination of hardware and software means it has a tablet like no other. Primed for the enthusiast who already owns a GeForce GTX PC, enabling them to stream content to their device and to a TV, the next iteration has the potential to be even better. Conjecturing somewhat, Project Denver 64-bit CPU, Maxwell graphics (just look at what they did for the desktop in terms of efficiency) and G-Sync compatibility for silky-smooth gaming at 30-60fps opens up the possibility of proper gaming on a tablet... and it is sensible to assume that Android will be better tuned for gaming in year's time.
The frenetic pace of tablet innovation is underscored by how quickly the GPU has developed in the last five years. It's sobering to think that Unreal Engine 4 Reflections demo runs on Android with a more than reasonable approximation of a Windows machine: this fanless tablet has more theoretical horsepower than a PlayStation 3.
For now, though, Shield Tablet marries Nvidia gaming know-how to arguably the most powerful mobile GPU and a proven CPU. That's a heady trio for the £239 asking price. Is it too much when the iPad mini 2 Retina is not much more and the Nexus 7 is widely available for substantially less? Only time will tell.
We come away feeling that Shield Tablet is one of those products you don't really need, but if you are in the market for a tablet and are a PC gamer to boot, then, on paper, it's the best out there. Performance numbers coming next week.
Decided to do 10 runs on 3Dmark on Tegra Note 7. I was using Ice Storm Unlimited.
CPU o/c to 2.1GHZ
GPU o/c to 708mhz
Run
1 - 17874
2 - 17779
3 - 17582
4 - 17926
5 - 17646
6 - 17834
7 - 17694
8 - 17959
9 - 17845
10 - 17848
Obviously I don't know how the Shield tablet will fare, being a gaming device I hope and expect that any throttling won't impact noticeably on game performance. I am very much looking forward to getting the new Shield from Overclockers soon.
When I read the review those numbers didn’t stand out to me as anything special but the extremely poor battery life did stand out. Less then 3 hours is not suitable for a gaming tablet. When people shop for tablets they don't tend to care about the GPU they do care about the battery life.
