Nvidia has made some ambitious claims about its new Shield gaming device. This third Shield device (preceded by the Shield Tablet and the original Shield, now called the Shield Portable) packs a Tegra X1 processor and can handle 1080p60 gaming streamed through Nvidia's Grid cloud service. I got some hands-on time with the Shield at Nvidia's event on Tuesday.
In person, even behind a plastic case, the Shield is extremely small. It's not quite as tiny as the Amazon Fire TV or the Sony PlayStation TV, but it's still a slim little piece of black metal. With its angular design and prominent glowing green logo, it looks like something the original Xbox might have spawned.
The Shield Controller seems entirely unchanged from the version Nvidia launched with the Shield Tablet. It's still a chunky Xbox 360-like controller that uses Wi-Fi rather than Bluetooth for a low-latency connection with the Shield. It feels sturdy and responsive, and the headphone jack is still a useful feature.
I started by trying a game played natively on the Shield itself. Nvidia showed off several ports of recent PC games it claimed the Shield's Tegra X1 processor could handle. I loaded Doom 3 BFG Edition, the 2012 enhanced version of Id's 2004 Doom 3. It's a two-year-old port of an 11-year-old game, but it's still a technically impressive demonstration of graphics. It looked smooth and responsive in 1080p on the Shield, with all of the lighting and particle effects the game had in the PC version.
The Tegra X1 seems to have a lot of power, but Nvidia made much bolder claims about its ability to handle streaming games from its Grid service. The speed to play a game on a system is one thing, but saying your device can play a 1080p game at 60 frames per second over the Internet is downright brazen.
I loaded Dying Light at 1080p60 over Nvidia Grid on the Shield, and it played really well. The game was smooth at 1080p through the Shield, and the controls felt very responsive. I only played the game for a few minutes, but it felt very close to playing it locally on my PlayStation 4. The Shield was connected to the Internet over Ethernet, not Wi-Fi, so it didn't give a good sense of whether it will stream games well in a normal user setup. Still, it's a sign that Grid can offer a solid gaming experience if you're willing to use a wired connection.
The Nvidia Shield shows a lot of potential, and at first glance it seems that it can live up to the bold claims Nvidia has made about it. We won't know what it's really capable of until we get the final version in the lab in the coming months, but this $199 microconsole will be worth watching when it comes out in May.