With 72 stream processors, PC game
streaming via Steam and decent controls for Android games, Nvidia's new
handheld console is a very curious device
The most surprising revelation from Nvidia
at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was undoubtedly Project Shield.
Unveiled by company founder Jen-Hsun Huang, Project Shield is a serious
departure for the semiconductor company: a handheld console.
For a company that specializes in mobile
processors and GPUs, there’s little else Huang could have whipped out on stage
to greater surprise. Far from a concept product, Project Shield is heading for
a retail release. To find out why, we cornered Nvidia’s Jason Paul, the man
given the task of convincing the world the company hasn’t lost its marbles It’s
based on Nvidia’s Tegra 4 system-on-chip; a pairing of four ARM Cortex-A15
cores with a single low-power companion core, plus 72 custom GPU stream
processors. Meanwhile, the 5in flip-up touchscreen screen offers a 1,280 x 720
resolution.
The
design of the console is centred on a desire to provides better control system
for Android
’The soul of Project Shield started with
two concepts,’ Paul explains. ’One was Tegra 4, and the other was ’let’s give
Android gamers the ergonomics and controls that they’re used to from the more
traditional console controllers”. So we really built the form factor of the
device around the controller.’
That design methodology really shows:
looking rather like a mutated Xbox controller with a smartphone screen bolted
to the top, it’s certainly a departure from the likes of the Sony PlayStation
Vita, or even the clamshell design of the Nintendo3DS. Squeezing everything required
to build a fully functional games console into such a small space wasn’t easy,
however.
’I don’t think I would be quite as able to
express the pain and agony of cramming all this into a device as well as our
engineering team! It was pretty challenging,’ Paul admits. ’To give you one
anecdote, we got a lot of the device designed and laid out, and then realized
we had these amazing speakers that were larger than the space we’d allocated in
the device. So we had to go back and redesign a bit of the area around the
speakers to cram in the bass-reflex, quad speaker audio.’
The
controls are designed to be immediately familiar to console gamers
But what prompted Nvidia to look at the
console market in the first place7 It’s a company far more at home selling
components to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), despite some small
experiments in direct retail marketing with selected GeForce graphics card
models. ’Project Shield really started out with some gamers inside Nvidia who
just wanted a better Android gaming experience,’ Paul recalls. ’I think they
saw the potential of Android as a gaming platform, but wanted better controls.
They wanted better audiovisuals and better battery life, so we saw an
opportunity to build a dedicated device that brought about a premium Android
gaming experience.
’We put together a collaboration between
our GeForce and our Tegra engineering teams to build the device. That started
around a year ago, with the initial conception of the device and the design,
and it took us maybe nine or ten months to make our first functional prototype
in November.’
Nvidia isn’t just targeting Android gamers
either. 'Shield is a way to extend your PC gaming experience. You still have
your core PC gaming experience, where you’re sitting in front of your PC and
getting a rich, immersive experience, but with Shield you can extend that
experience to any room in your house,’ enthuses Paul. 'You can sit on the couch
or on your bed and enjoy a PC game.’
Based
on Nvidia’s Tegra4chip, Project Shield aims to improve the Android gaming
experience
That streaming capability, which allows
almost any PC game to be played on the Shield via services such as Steam, owes
much to another of Nvidia’s surprise projects: the GeForce Grid cloud gaming
platform. 'The core streaming technology between what we’ll call PC game
streaming and Grid cloud gaming is the same,’ says Paul. 'We’re using our
GeForce GPUs and hardware built into them, an H.264encoderand software
technology that processes very fast, low-latency game streaming. It’s
fundamentally
the same technology. In the case of PC game
streaming, the PC in your house is effectively your cloud server, instead of a
remote Grid server in the cloud.’
Why now, however, other than having Shield
serve as a handy demonstration of Tegra4’s capabilities7'I think there were a
couple of other things that made this a great time,’ Paul explains.
'One was the pervasiveness of
high-bandwidth Wi-Fi in homes; for our streaming technology to be able to bring
the PC gaming experience to a mobile device, people need to have capable
routers and home Wi-Fi. Also, the streaming technology we use is dependent on
our current generation of Kepler GPUs.’ That’s one of the sticking points to
the seemingly promising Project Shield: as the streaming technology relies on
hardware and software technologies only available on Kepler-class GPUs, gamers
will need a GeForce GTX 650 or better to take advantage of it - and those with
AMD or Intel graphics need not apply at all. 'This will be a GeForce
technology,’ Paul admits, 'and not something that we intend to, or are really
easily able to, extend to other graphics hardware.’
For those who already have a Kepler-class
GPU, however, Project Shield offers a novel twist on gaming, and with access to
the thousands of Android games available, as well as PC games via streaming,
it’s likely to generate considerable interest. Sadly, UK gamers will have to
wait for it. 'We’re starting with North America, and we’ll then build
internationally,’ Paul explains-without offering a firm time scale for a UK
launch.
