At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Nvidia unveiled the SHIELD — the world’s 4K Android TV console. The set-top box is powered by the company’s latest Tegra X1 mobile superchip, and features an H.265 decoder that can playback 4K videos at 60Hz with 10-bit video processing. The company boasts that the 256-core Maxwell GPU inside the Tegra X1 is twice as fast as the Xbox 360 while consuming anywhere between 1/5th to 1/20th of the power. The console also comes with a small remote that looks a lot like the one that Google ships with its Nexus Player, and also features a dedicated voice search button. Nvidia is also bundling a game controller with the SHIELD that can last up to 40 hours on a single charge.
Since the device runs on Android TV, it will also be capable of doing everything that a Nexus Player (and other Android TVs) are able to do, including playing back movies, streaming videos from YouTube, and more. The sleek console will come with support for Nvidia’s new game-streaming service called GRID. The service is capable of streaming games at up to 1080p resolution and at 60FPS. While 720p streaming will remain free, streaming games in 1080p resolution will require a subscription to it. The service also comes with its own library of games that you can expand by buying more games. SHIELD will also be coming with its own game store and will feature more than 50 titles when it launches later this year. This includes popular games like Crysis, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Portal, Doom 3 BFG Edition and more. For the hardware and features that the SHIELD packs, Nvidia has priced the console at an extremely attractive $199, which will also include a game controller bundled in. The console will be making its way to the United States in May this year.
