Nvidia Shield Thoughts

Nvidia, a company that I hold in high regard has announced the Shield, the third and most likely final piece to the Shield family. Joining the Shield Portable and the Shield Tablet, the Shield set top box will be coming to living rooms near you! This new beast boasts a Tegra X1 Processor with a 256 core Maxwell GPU as well as 3GB of ram and 16GB of internal storage which can be upgraded via MicroSD. When it comes to set top boxes it easily beats out the likes of Apple TV, Roku, fire TV, etc, many have been going as far as saying that the Shield will be a competitor for the Xbox One & PS4 consoles.  I won’t bore you with flops, but the Shield is said to be 2x more powerful than the Xbox 360 & PS3 and is currently said to be able to put out half the power of the Xbone & PS4.

So what & what don’t I like about this promising new device? Well it runs on android so you know it will have a nice and open OS, with such powerful hardware to back it up it already has a list of console tier games ready to be released to stream on it. This brings me to the first point that I don’t like, streaming. In order to get the most out of it you must have internet capable of streaming the content to your device, if you want to be able to play games at 1080p 60FPS through the grid streaming service your internet is going to have to be able to handle it or else that feature will be out of the question for you.

The 3GB of RAM & 16GB of built in storage are also a point of complaint for me, I currently have the Samsung Galaxy Tab S which has those same specs. 3GB of RAM may be limiting for a device that is capable of so much and we all know that 16GB of storage is small in this day and age. I can’t complain too much as the Shield only costs $199 USD (so it will be a bit more for us Canadians *Sigh*) but at that price point if it can keep up with this generation of consoles, well let’s just say Microsoft and Sony might be in a bit of trouble. (To be honest, I don’t think they have much to worry about)

Now something I haven’t seen people talking about, later this year the Steam machines will be rolling out & considering the integration the Shield will have with Steam, individuals should be considering if this will put a damper on the sales of those devices, or maybe people will hold out on buying this and opt for the more powerful Steam machines? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what will happen. Even though this device intrigues me, I will be opting to buy a PS4 (for the exclusives of course) and the newly announced Steam Link streaming box for my room so that I can finally put my gaming rig to use without people staring at what I’m doing in my living room. 

JUST LOOK HOW THIN IT IS!