chances are you're spending a good amount of your time indoors and based on
the fact that both YouTube and Netflix had to cut their stream quality to keep
up with demand it seems like a lot of that time is being spent watching videos
online like right
now given that then it seems like now is
a perfect time to investigate NVIDIA's claims about last year's new Shield TV
because it has an awesome feature called AI upscaling which NVIDIA Claims can
take lower quality content let's say 1080P and with the power of machine
learning upscale said content to look like native
4K sounds like a load of hor to me but
Jake assures me that it's actually really really cool so let's
proceed both the shield TV and shield TV
pro feature NVIDIA's updated teger X1 plus 16 nanometer processor a fully
fledged Android TV experience and support for 4K HDR video across
basically every platform you can imagine along with C control on supported
devices meaning that you can use your TV remote to control it and other than
looks the only difference between the two of them is their RAM and storage
configs along with support for running a Plex Media Server which is kind of like
your own self-hosted private Netflix and support for NVIDIA share for capturing
gameplay and streaming to Twitch it's also worth noting that the decreased RAM
on the base model Shield means that it's unable to play some of the AAA games
which were ported over to Android which NVIDIA had dubbed Advanced Android
gaming or as I call it on the subject of
gaming you might have noticed the lack of a shield game controller and the
seemingly downgraded specs the biggest
reason for it seems to be that this time around NVIDIA is back to pushing the
Android TV aspect of the shield hard
with gaming falling to quite literally the 13th section on the product page
remember guys this is a product from NVIDIA I guess it kind of makes sense
though I mean I already have a switch and a gaming PC so for me my shield is a
streaming device first and a game console two or three times a year when
family comes over this shift also makes it more price competitive without
affecting the user experience much since why would you use this when basically
any Bluetooth controller that you already own is going to work just fine
with a shield so with that in mind the focus of our review is going to be
around media streaming starting with the
remote I cannot say that I've seen a remote quite like this one before it's
bit heavier than your average remote but
I will say the Triangular feel does give it a surprisingly comfortable hand feel
the buttons feel pretty nice actually and thanks to the inclusion of an
accelerometer the remote can actually sense when you pick it up and turn on
the adjustable backlighting neat the rest of the design is really nothing
special honestly aside from the gigantic Netflix button on the bottom which
honestly I found kind of annoying because it's so easy to accidentally
press the good news is that you can use the button remapper app to change what
any of these buttons do there's also a buzzer inside the remote to make it
easier to find in case you lose it every remote should have this Fe feature once
it's on the setup procedure is brain dead easy pair your Android phone or
iPhone sign your life away a few times and get greeted by the Android TV home
screen with recommended content oozing from every one of its pores honestly
that's about my only complaint about Android TV and then by extension The
Shield experience it's a little pushy that is what 1 2 three four five that is
five rows dedicated to just YouTube what
even is this for for you can click left on each row because nobody cares about
trending and get rid of it now we can
finally take a look at what might be the coolest feature of this device NVIDIA's
proprietary AI upscaling uses a combination of traditional upscaling
where the image is simply stretched to fit the resolution combined with the
power of a highly trained neural network to provide an experience that's close to
if you were actually watching content that's native to whatever resolution
you're upscaling to so in my case that's 4K so Jake's provided a couple of clips
for us to try out to see just how good this AI upscaling is conveniently NVIDIA
actually provides a handy dandy little hotkey that you can press to see a side
by side of what basic versus AI enhanced
upscaling looks like this is a 1080p clip but if we hold this button we can
actually see a before and after and there's certain things that I would say
do not work as well you end up with a little bit of weird shimmering and
background vocus sometimes but
man textures the way they manag to improve especially things like hair and
environmental textures is absolutely
mindblowing uh there's a little bit that we're going to look at
later that's quite impressive little bit
less so on him just cuz he's so close that there's not a lot of extra detail
to pull out of it but this wood here actually here is pretty impressive
too this is way more than just a sharpening filter look at that wood
Stone hair actually these little berries
here look markedly better with the AI up scaling versus without things that are
moving really fast it seems to have a bit more wow the difference in these
mountains here is night and day this too
I feel like I got to sit a little bit further back here sorry guys I'm just going to be completely out of the frame
here right now it's being fed with a 20 megabit 10 80P stream it is a great
movie by the way Knives Out definitely worth a watch
anyway in live action the effect is
definitely more subtle but it's
noticeable as I swipe across things like the textures of clothing hair so a lot
of the same things that were better in the animation are also better here it's
not overdone though that's the problem with Cheapo like I guess non aai
upscaling is that it tends to just kind of sharpen everything whereas here you
can really tell that it's being applied
strategically like it doesn't sharpen this thing in the background here it
only sharpens what you need to
sharpen like the stubble here that's the detail that really stands out to the eye
when you're sitting back at couch distance I don't know what else to say
other than that NVIDIA's new AI upscaling Tech is not just another silly
marketing gimmick with AI slapped on it
it really does work and I guess that's
just kind of the the theme like why would you spend $200 on a shield they
just work you know whether it's Jake daily driving these two for the last
month at home or the fact that I've been daily driving this thing since it came
out in 2017 once you clean up the home screen and get your apps installed it's
just kind of a Flawless experience it updates automatically it's easy for Less
Tech literate people to use cuz CU they don't have to learn how to cast from their phone and of The Limited times
that Jake tried NVIDIA game stream apparently it worked perfectly I don't
know I don't really use it anymore with my 2017 model but uh cuz I've got a
gaming PC there now but there you have it and probably the biggest standout he
says is that the issues with his old chomecast or Xbox One or actually I've
had these issues with my PC before too where certain video codecs will just
buffer for no reason or content will be slow to initially load the shield TV
have had 5 years to get to the point where they just freaking work and here
we are NVIDIA's got support nailed down for pretty much every streaming service
and video Codec that you can think of and for a media streaming box I really
don't think there's much more that we can ask for so if you're in the market
for something of this nature and you've got the extra cash to spend compared to
a Roku or a chomecast a shield TV is
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