The set-top box races just got a whole lot more interesting. NVIDIA has announced a new one that is likely to drain your bank accounts. The new NVIDIA Shield set-box brings all the benefits of the Shield portable and Shield tablet to your big screen TV. The box runs on Android, Android TV to be more precise, and offers up full access to the Play Store as well as the Shield Store.
This thing packs in the Tegra X1 processor. 3GB of RAM, 16GB on board storage, a Micro SD card slot, two UBS 3.0 ports, HDMI out, Gigabit Ethernet (yes, hard-wired internet option), 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1/BLE, IR Receiver and can push out 4K video at 60Hz. It will offer a simple little remote with voice search abilities. The remote also offers up a headphone jack to plug-in and blast full volume without irritating the neighbors, or the wife. It is very Amazon Fire esque with a slight Playstation homage of sorts.
That is the media remote side of things, the new Shield also uses the current Shield controller in order to do some gaming action. Like the Shield Tablet and Shield portable, the new Shield set-top box gives you access to GRID, which is NVIDIA game streaming service. Assuming your network and PC can handle it, you can also stream your games from your desktop.
To put the Shields power into perspective, CEO Jen-Hsun states it is about twice the performance of an XBOX 360 at half the output power. Yes, it can run Crysism while at 30 FPS, it still runs Crysis.
Can you run Crysis on Android? Yes, with NVIDIA SHIELD! Built on Android TV to deliver 4K video, movie, music, apps and AAA-class games.
— NVIDIA (@nvidia) March 4, 2015
As mentioned above, Shield will come with access to NVIDIA’s GRID game streaming service at launch. Currently the service offers up 50 titles, but NVIDIA says it will be pushing 100 by the end of the year. Toss in the nearly unlimited list of titles from the Play Store, the Shield store and from your own PC and you have one hell of a small gaming machine. Basically this is the Android TV gaming machine many of us have been dreaming of.
Will it drain your bank account? Absolutely not. NVIDIA will be launching the Shield in May for $199 and include the media remote and gaming controller. So, ya, start saving.
Source: NVIDIA, 9to5Google
Stream was here, and is still going at the time of the posting. Currently they are just playing some games on the SHIELD. There was a YouTube stream running too from IGN, and it looks like it still might be, that can be found here. I just backed up the stream to watch earlier content.
