Lol, harsh.
I'm actually coming round to the Shield a bit; at least, to the game streaming part of it. I just recently bought a Wii U and playing Mario on the "gamepad" on the sofa or in bed is excellent; having that with any Steam game would actually be very good. They don't need a Tegra 4 for that, though, as the Wii U demonstrates- it just has a tiny Broadcom chip running the show. I'd rather they had a form factor a bit closer to the Wii U pad, and a lower power SoC (single core A9 and a hardware h264 decode block should be fine).
I own a shield, what qualifications do you know that the rest of the world doesn't to designate the Shield as a terrible device? Sounds like pure opinion, maaannn.
Also 720P at 7" is plenty retina (PPI) as far as being to pixel for regular use.
Especially for the benefits of Better battery life from less pixels, cheaper price for display, and better 3d performance due to less res.
Again, use some common sense and get over it. NVIDIA has every right to fill segments that are not currently being filled by their OEM partners.
Do you know if a 560ti will be able to stream games onto my shield? Hm.. anybody have some information on how and where I can get info on the streaming portion of it?
EDIT: Found out I have to have a kepler GPU 600 series and UP only.
Actually that is not true at all. Shield has sold out at Newegg, and has been almost universally praised by the people who purchased it. Even Brian Klug at Anandtech gave it a glowing review. So no need to keep trolling about it.
And no, you are not using common sense. Your position is that NVIDIA should not build their own devices even in segments that are not being currently filled by their OEM partners, as if it would be better to fill those segments with absolutely nothing while wasting R&D efforts. That makes no sense at all.
Nvidia are? I do believe IS is what was suppose to be used here.
You really think that just because no-one is making a tablet at precisely that size with a Tegra 4, that makes this a good idea? Do you not think that people cross shop between 10" tablets and 7" tablets?
And? If there is no 7" tablet with Tegra 4 out how is nVidia competing with other OEMs?
Tegra 3 production has been ramping down over the last two quarters, and Tegra 3 has been on the market for more than 1.5 years. Sorry, that is not a convincing argument (and neither is the argument about consumers cross-shopping between a 7" T4 stylus tablet and a 10" T4 convertible tablet).
The idea that someone looking to buy a tablet won't consider both 10" and 7" devices is just laughable.
I also refuse the Shield, because it promotes supporting nVidia and the Tegra4 SoC. What this means, is that games that come out supporting Tegra4 and the gamepad, will probably only work with the Shield gamepad, and the graphical effects will be gimped on other non-nVidia devices.
Ok, what's wrong with that? I would buy the tegra 4 so that I can get a better experience on it. You don't buy a gtx titan expecting to play at gtx 650 settings...
Tegras are generally paper tigers. Competing GPUs are equally as capable, but are artificially prevent from running graphical effects they are capable of, thanks to nVidia's check book.
So what if it is faster than let's say Adreno 320...There is a good reason why Candy Crush is so popular and it ain't because it has Crysis graphics.
It doesn't matter which mobile GPU is actually faster, developers are withholding graphical effects from other equally capable GPUs because nVidia is paying them to.
That's the entire point of "THD" and "Tegra Enhanced".
they aren't "holding out" they can't afford to do a lot of optimizations for chips that aren't paying them
if qualcomm pays them as much as nvidia does, I'm sure they would optimize it better, and that's how it should be, it's called capitalism.
It's not about "optimization".
It's about coding specific graphical features to only be available on Tegra GPUs, even when competing GPUs are capable of running them.
Here's an analogy for you - Imagine a brand-new shooter came out with amazing weather effects - true fog, rain that sizzles when it hits the ground - but these effects are only available on nVidia Kepler GPUs. Not because of any technical reason, an AMD Tahiti GPU is more than technically capable of these effects, but only because nVidia paid this developer to disallow the effects when the game is run on an AMD card. Instead you get fog and rain from 2005, or no fog or rain at all.
But, if you spoof the game to thinking it's running on a Kepler, the AMD GPU will run the effects with no speed penalty, and they look just as good.
This is where we're at with mobile gaming - it's an insult, it's disgusting and it's typical nVidia. They need to stop being rewarded for this behavior.
Incorrect. That's how it is, but how it should be is everybody supports the standards, and every GPU that's capable of the graphical effects, gets to display them.