The original 2013 Nvidia Shield was a weird, hybrid handheld game system: a game controller with a 5-inch screen bonded to it. It played Android games using its Tegra 4 processor, or it could stream PC games from Nvidia graphics-equipped PCs, either locally or long-distance. It was bulky but intriguing, and with it Nvidia made a statement on where Android and PC gaming could go once some imagination was thrown in.
The new incarnation of the Shield amps up its gaming capabilities but houses them in a more traditional tablet housing (last year's Shield is still around, too; it's not going anywhere). The $299 Nvidia Shield Tablet, which runs £240 in the UK (availability in Australia is yet to be revealed) is the first product to pack the company's powerful Tegra K1 system-on-a-chip, though it will hardly be the last.
In addition to keeping the PC game-streaming functionality, it can be connected to a TV for big-screen gaming or be propped up on a table while using an optional wireless controller. Or, you can just use the Shield Tablet like an 8-inch Android Lollipop 5.0 tablet: download apps from Google Play, watch Netflix, or pop out its side stylus and paint or use Evernote.
Can a gaming tablet also be a TV-connected microconsole? The Shield Tablet shows it can, but keep some of your expectations in check: the bonus capabilities of this device are impressive, but serious PC and Android gamers are the ones most likely to be interested. For others, the Shield Tablet is best considered as a really good 8-inch tablet, with a few perks.V
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Design
The Nvidia Shield Tablet looks a bit like a Nexus device: matte black, clean and relatively compact. It's mostly made of plastic, however, which I noticed when I pressed down on the front-facing speakers; the material flexed. Those speakers are nice and loud, though, perfect for some tabletop gaming. The word "Shield," embossed on the back in glossy letters, is the only hint you're holding a tablet with any connection to gaming technology. That's a major change from the original Shield, which was full of chrome and funky detail.
The Shield Tablet weighs 13.7 ounces (388g) and is 0.36 inch (9mm) thick: it's not the lightest or thinnest, but you certainly don't feel like you're sacrificing size for graphics. It's as compact as any other 8-inch tablet, for the most part.
What else can I say? The Shield Tablet design doesn't scream "gaming," but it's clean and inoffensive, and it resembles the Nexus 7 tablet. It almost feels like an unofficial Nexus 8.V
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The Tegra K1: High-end graphics on a tablet, indeed
The Nvidia Shield Tablet is the first tablet to show off the Tegra K1, a far more powerful graphics processor than last year's Tegra 4 had. The Tegra K1 offers benchmark performance that -- according to Nvidia, at least -- blows far past tablets like the iPad Air or Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4. The Tegra K1 processor has a 192-core Kepler GPU plus a 2.2GHz quad-core A15 processor and 2GB of RAM.
In our tests, that performance shows off in gaming graphics: not only do some of the few available K1-optimized games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal deliver graphics worthy of the PS3 or the Xbox 360, but games streamed via Nvidia Gamestream from a PC or over Nvidia's Grid streamed-game beta service look good enough to pass as console experiences, too.
On 3DMark, we got an eye-popping score of 30,421, which was more than double what competing tablets have racked up. That's great news, and certainly puts the Shield Tablet on a theoretical high ground for gaming on tablets.
But what can show off these graphics? Again, Nvidia has only gathered an unimpressively small stable of Shield Tablet-optimized games thus far, and the future lineup of games looks bleak. There might be many more games to come, but how many developers will really line up to make Google Play Shield Tablet games? More Tegra K1 devices need to exist to justify that effort.
