Posted: 06 Mar 2015 10:00 AM PST
We'll only say this once. Your digital life should be about more than just great games.
Don't get us wrong. SHIELD is made to game. It's built to scoop up the best titles that Android and PC gaming have to offer and put them smack in the middle of your living room.
Grab SHIELD’s remote and prepare to be entertained. But la vida digital demands more than games. Photos. Movies. Music. Apps. You probably already enjoy them on your tablet. And you take them everywhere you go on your smartphone.
The common thread: Android. Just as PCs open up a deep pool of applications and entertainment, Android keeps our digital lives organized on the go, so you can pick up where you left off anywhere, on any device. We built SHIELD around Android TV so that you can bring that all home.
And because SHIELD is built for games – the most demanding consumer applications around – it can hustle through your personal multimedia collection. This is the first Android TV device that can stream 4K content.
"We think people using NVIDIA's SHIELD console will love watching YouTube in 4K, thanks to the work NVIDIA did to make its Tegra X1 processor support VP9 video decoding," says Heather Rivera, YouTube's director of product partnerships.
So it's ready to dip into a growing library of ultra-high definition video.
And we made it all easy to access, too. Control it with voice commands. Or from a familiar console-style controller. Or our dead simple remote. Or pick up your Android smartphone or tablet and beam content to your television, via GoogleCast.
SHIELD does all this, starting at $199.
More coverage of our announcements at GDC: Latest PhysX Source Code Now Available on GitHub, New NVIDIA Titan X GPU Powers Virtual Experience “Thief in the Shadows” at GDC, Why We’re Building SHIELD, the World’s First Android TV Console.
The post SHIELD: More Than Just Games appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
New Reality: NVIDIA Drives VR Demos Across GDC Show Floor
Posted: 05 Mar 2015 07:00 PM PST
Every show needs a star. And the Game Developers Conference's star is virtual reality.
And just as every star has a "man behind the curtain" helping to make the magic happen, that supporting role here is being played by NVIDIA's GeForce GTX processors.
Hand delivered: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang presented the first production version of TITAN X at this week’s GDC. Our GPUs are on stage this week behind a whole troupe of VR power players, including:
Crytek with Back to Dinosaur Island
Epic Games and WETA Digital with Thief in the Shadows
Epic Games with Showdown
Oculus with Back to Dinosaur Island, Thief in the Shadows, Showdown
Unity with Unity 5
Valve with Portal, Job Simulator, TheBluVR and the Gallery demos
The preparation for VR's GDC coming out party started months ago when NVIDIA began working with partners on their next-gen VR demos. To create content that's richer than the current state of the art in VR, they needed something faster than the world's fastest GPU, the NVIDIA GTX 980.
They needed a TITAN.
But that raised a problem. Our new TITAN X graphics card wasn't planned to launch until our big annual show, the GPU Technology Conference, which starts two weeks after GDC.
But after seeing what partners had in the works – with demos like Thief in the Shadows, which was simply not possible without the performance and massive frame buffer of TITAN X – it was clear that TITAN X couldn't wait.
So began the mad scramble to accelerate the launch of TITAN X.
The efforts culminated in our CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang making a surprise appearance and hand-delivering the most powerful GPU on the planet to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney at his GDC keynote.
Crytek’s VR demo let viewers get up close and personal with a tyrannosaurus rex. Along with TITAN X and a host of incredible GeForce-powered VR demos, NVIDIA also announced at GDC enhancements to its VR Direct software with new support for VR SLI and asynchronous time warp (ATW).
NVIDIA VR SLI gives game developers a new level of performance for next-gen VR content by harnessing the power of two GPUs. VR SLI enables developers to assign a specific GPU to each eye to scale performance and reduce latency. When combined with TITAN X, VR SLI unlocks an incredible level of graphics performance.
Smaug is quite a beast. So is the new Titan X. ©2014 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURES INC. Another new component of NVIDIA VR technology is support for asynchronous time warp (ATW), an innovative technique for reducing perceived latency by adjusting a rendered image based on head-tracking input. NVIDIA drivers provide application programming interfaces for GPU scheduling controls, which enable efficient implementation of ATW for a reduction in the latency user's perceive.
An alpha developer driver with VR SLI and ATW support is now in the hands of the partners that made headlines with stunning VR demos at GDC.
Read more tales of VR at GDC on the Epic Games blog, Oculus blog and our NVIDIA blog.
More coverage of our announcements at GDC: Latest PhysX Source Code Now Available on GitHub, New NVIDIA Titan X GPU Powers Virtual Experience “Thief in the Shadows” at GDC, Why We’re Building SHIELD, the World’s First Android TV Console, Bringing GameWorks Out of the Shadows with HBAO+.
The post New Reality: NVIDIA Drives VR Demos Across GDC Show Floor appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
