If you weren’t looking
forward to Nvidia’s portable Android gaming device, Project Shield, a
new demo from the company just might change your mind. Rather than just
getting stuck with the Android gaming market — which is going to have a lot of hardware competition soon — the Shield can also play streaming games from your PC. In the above video, a Nvidia representative demos Borderlands 2 streaming on, and being controlled from, the handheld device. As you’ll see shortly: it looks solid.
The demo has a few shots of the Shield displaying and controlling the
game, with the television synced up behind it. As far as these human
eyes can tell, the two video streams look to be on par with each other
in terms of latency, in that there doesn’t seem to be any. The Shield manages 60fps with Vsync, and the textures are set to high.
For a split second, you may have thought that — somehow, someway –Nvidia got Borderlands 2 running
natively on the Shield, but alas, this would-be-incredible feat is not
to be. Still, what Nvidia has accomplished — smooth streaming of a
current-gen game — is impressive enough. If you had to decide between
various Android gaming devices, the smooth streaming of current-gen PC
games could certainly be what gives Shield the advantage over its
competition.
If price weren’t an issue, would you choose an Android gaming
console, or would you choose an Android gaming console that can also log
into Steam and stream your favorite current-gen games? Seems like an
easy answer. If things actually work like this, Nvidia might have a
pretty interesting device on their hands, and gamers may be able to get
that much more use from their computers and Nvidia video cards.
