The Bit Phoenix Prodigym is compact and ready for anything. Click now to learn
more. Welcome to my full review of
NVIDIA's Shield handheld gaming device.
Now, it's not going to be a full review in the sense that I compare the battery
life to other smartphones and tablets or um you know give you empirical numbers
on how the GPU performs. This is more of a hands-on review as well as a direct
comparison to the Ghetto Shield, which was an Xbox 360 controller bolted to a
smartphone running Splashtop in order to simulate the Shield gaming experience
where you can run PC games over wireless to your handheld device. Let's start
with the overall usage experience. So, first things first, it feels extremely
solid in your hands. If anything, I'd say maybe a bit too solid. It can be
quite heavy if you're sitting with it in your lap or if you're laying on your stomach playing with it, then you're
you're not going to have any problems. But if you're laying on your back, uh
holding it above your head and trying to play with it that way, then you might
run into a little bit of difficulty with your with your arms getting fatigued
after, you know, 5 or 10 minutes and you might have to shift a little bit. With
that said, it really doesn't feel like they added the extra weight for no
apparent reason because it's got a nice beefy battery in it. you don't really
feel like, oh, the battery in this thing sucks. I'm playing with it, and I'm
running out of battery. No, what happens is you play with it, you plug it in, and it'll be ready to go next time around.
With that said, if you if you're not using the stock charger, which is a 2.1
amp charger, you're going to be wasting your time. A 1 amp charger doesn't even
charge this device fast enough to keep it charging while you're playing an
Android game on it. So, make sure you're using the default charger. It is a nice
compact 2.1 amp charger, so that's definitely a plus. In terms of
ergonomics, I found that with my hands, um, it seems like it's designed for
someone with slightly bigger hands than me. I do have really small hands. I wear
like women's small motorcycle gloves, but I was able to reach the ABXY buttons
and the D-pad without any difficulty, without shifting at all. The joysticks
are they're a bit of a stretch for me, but I can I can move them in all
directions without without too much of a challenge. I don't stand a chance of
reaching any of these middle buttons without shifting. And uh actually at the
back, the shoulder buttons as well as the triggers were fine as well. I didn't
notice any heat that really bothered me. So nothing really transferred through
the game pad itself. And the exhaust vent on the back moves the heat away
from your hands. In fact, it's a little bit warm right now, but really nothing unbearable. It's got mini HDMI as well
as charging and a headphone microphone combo jack if you're not already
familiar with the way that Shield works. And as far as the ergonomics or as well
as as far as the design of the game pad itself goes, it's excellent. Uh the
buttons here have a great tactile response. The joysticks feel really
good. The one exception is the D-pad which is kind of poopy. Um it's fine for
something like oh you know weapon switching or um you know functionality
that's not critical. Uh whereas if you
were you know doing um platforming on
it, yeah, it's it's really really not that special. The speakers are excellent
though. So, it's loud enough that you can easily use it in an environment
where there's a fair bit of ambient noise. And the screen is nice and IPS,
has great viewing angles, and looks outstanding. It's also got a great range
of brightness. And running a running a stock Android device was really
refreshing for me because I run an HTC1, which is using Sense um and I've never
actually used a stock Android device before. So, there you go. That's my
impressions overall of the Shield. I don't really see myself using the whole
uh tag thing here, but you you can if you want. Also, oh yes, this is an
accessory that I sort of recommend picking up. This is their carry case,
which has a nice hard shell to it, so it's going to protect it if you're
traveling around with it. It's got a little, you know, plug at the back that
allows you to charge the device even when it's inside. Comes with a little
wrist strap, and the overall feel is is very rugged. There's little carrying
pouches up here on the top. The one reason why I wouldn't recommend picking
it up, because otherwise I really, really would. It's quite nice, is that I
didn't find myself traveling with Shield much, by the time you've got the case
and the Shield, it's quite bulky and quite heavy. So, I found myself using it
at home more than out and about. When I was out and about, though, it was kind
of cool because you get some uh you get kind of a couple double takes. It's
like, "Oh, what what is he playing on?" I personally do believe that devices
like this are the future of mobile gaming with an open platform versus, you
know, oh well, when we decide to release a new console, there will be a whole new
slew of games. We will re-release everything or we won't re-release everything and you will like it. Um,
having something that behaves more like a PC where we can get hardware upgrades
as they come. We can play the entire back library of games and expect new
games to come. This is the future. But right now, the game library is
relatively small. However, that brings us to the game streaming experience.
NVIDIA's whole claim to fame with this device, other than the fact that you can
run any Android game pretty much. I was running GTA Vice City on it, which has a
lot of warnings when you install it. Oh, don't run anything else at the same time. Turn the graphic details down if
it's not running correctly. It ran like a dream on this thing. No difficulty
whatsoever. It's my first time playing it, too, so I've spent a fair bit of time on that. But anyway, the game
streaming is how they are planning to augment the slightly smaller subset of
Android games that do have full controller support and will work just
fine. And in my experience, man, is it awesome. Now, we did do the whole ghetto
shield thing where we were using Splashtop and we did show that it can be
done. Um, but I think what you guys are going to see with some of the slow
motion footage I'm going to be showing you is that NVIDIA Shield really does
deliver a nearly latencyfree experience.
So, we took this slow motion footage at 480 frames per second, which means if
you really felt like it, you could slow down the footage and you could find out
exactly how many milliseconds of extra
delay the wireless connection is adding.
Um, but what's really going to stand out more than anything else is how close it
is to the gaming grade 120 Hz monitor behind it. And now we're going to shift
over to our Ghetto Shield with Splashtop that not only is not running as high
resolution. So it's 640x480 instead of 1280 by 720. Although it still looks
great on a 4 4.7 in screen. Like let's be really clear about that. It still
looks fine. Uh so it's lower resolution. You obviously get less battery life cuz
you're using your phone. You obviously have to like bolt it to something in order to have it be a great experience.
And there's all these things, but the latency is not even close. We found we
could play games with the Ghetto Shield, but it's uh easy to play games with the
proper Shield. Not only that, but the experience of getting Shield running is
much more seamless. With the Ghetto Shield, you have to manually configure
your desktop resolution. It'll only work with games that are able to run in full
screen windowed mode. And there's a bunch of caveats like that. With the
Shield, you press the big NVIDIA button in the middle, which brings up your
Tegra optimized games, your Shield Store, and aha, your PC games. It
launches Steam. It changes the resolution for you, gives you a bunch of
clues as to to what gestures you can use, and then boom, it gives you a games
list. So, we used Borderlands 2 and Crisis to validate that things were
working correctly. Crisis was the one that being an older title, it streamed
great, it looked great, but you can really tell the HUD elements aren't
optimized for it. There's a lot of key bindings that are designed for mouse and
keyboard, so there wasn't really a corresponding button that made any
sense. Um, it's not Yeah. So, it wasn't
perfect, but it looked great and it was very playable. Not having auto aim when
you're relying on using a controller is definitely a disadvantage. Um, but
Borderlands 2 was a fantastic experience. And this, I think, really
makes my point about how well how the
experience differs from something where you're manually setting things up every
time. You can be anywhere in your house and running this and not really thinking
about what's going on in your PC unless someone happens to be on it. It should
be noted that your PC does display video while you're gaming on the Shield, but
it doesn't play audio. So, it only pushes audio to the Shield instead of
just your speakers being blaring anytime you're anywhere else in your house
gaming on the device. Now, wireless, you
can't just use any old run-of-the-mill $29.99 Best Buy special wireless router.
It's not going to work. You want to get a decent wireless router. You can check
out the list of recommended ones on NVIDIA.com. We found that there were
routers that worked just fine even from a a floor away um such as the EA4500
that was not on the list, but you need a strong concurrent dualband router. So
that is 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz at the same
time because the wireless solution on the NVIDIA Shield is excellent and
that's part of what makes the technology work so well. So I think that pretty
much wraps it up for everything I wanted to say about it. Is it a recommended buy
at $299? Hard to say because much like
any other console, it depends on the game library. So if you look at that
Android library and you go, "Yeah, sure. That's worth it to me. I'm I'm game."
Then great. That's that's perfect for you. If you look at that library and you
go, "That's not good enough, but oh, I have a PC library that I can use to
augment it. I think I'll use this a lot around my house." Then then that might
be good enough for you, too. If you don't have an Android device at all, I
actually found I'd used it a lot just for watching videos on Netflix or even
replying to emails when I'm just out and about and it happened to be the closest
thing to me. I mean, the touchcreen is excellent. Uh there are some there are a
few sort of UI things that are weird like apps that are expecting to be
running on a phone when they're running on a low resolution device and are
optimized for portrait and don't really switch to landscape very well. Some of those were kind of funny. I'm like using
it like this. But overall, it was it was
a good usage experience. Um, other than
other than that UI weirdness, would I recommend it for 300? You know what?
It's your call. But I understand why it costs 300. It has the latest Tegra 4
processor, which is extremely fast. It really does feel like a very buttery
smooth Android experience. everything you're doing, whether it's graphics or
the CPU itself, and you look at how much something like a phone costs. This is
everything a phone is and more in some ways, except it doesn't happen to have a
wireless connection for mobile data. That's the only real difference here.
You know, like no camera on the back and stuff like that. But there's a lot of engineering that went into building this
thing and it's expensive to make. I think 300 is reasonable in terms of the
hardware. And I think I've rambled quite enough. Leave a like if you like this
video. Leave a dislike if you disliked it. and leave a comment. Let me know, do
you think the future of mobile gaming is portable devices like this that run on
an open platform? Even if maybe NVIDIA Shield isn't the one, maybe it's
something that's a little bit more pocketable. I don't know. You tell me.