CES 2103: Nvidia On Tegra 4, Project Shield Console, Cloud Gaming And More

By Prarthito Maity email: p.maity@mobilenapps.com | Jan 07, 2013 08:15 AM EST

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Nvidia, as it seems, is taking this year's CES by storm.

Per reports, the company has kicked off the event on a high by announcing a host of products and technologies for fans to look forward in the new year. A few of its products include the Project Shield handheld gaming system, world's fastest mobile processor - Tegra 4, and also an important insight into cloud gaming and its future.

To start with, Nvidia has unveiled a new brand new handheld gaming system called Project Shield that will be powered by the new Tegra 4 processor. The new handheld is said to play console-quality games while still providing a native mobile experience.

The device's processor is capable of providing an amazing 4K resolution video over HDMI to external displays, while including sophisticated sound processing that, per Nvidia, will rival Beats Audio-equipped laptops.

There is also a 33Wh battery that provides five to ten hours of continuous play time or, alternately, 24 hours of HD video playback. Project shield also features a 5-inch, 720p Retinal multitouch display with 294ppi pixel density, and, as expected, has a slot for micro-SD card expansion.

The Shield runs Android, with Nvidia insisting that it's the purest form of Android without a skin, and includes Google's apps for Gmail and the Play Store.

"In addition to supporting all of the games available to Android devices and the games in the Tegra Zone, the Shield also has the ability to stream games from a home Windows PC equipped with a GeForce GTX 650 (or higher) graphics card to the handheld device over Wi-Fi, letting users access their library of PC games, including games in the Steam library, while on the go," The Verge states.

However, Nvidia is yet to announce a price for Project Shield, but says that it will be arriving in the U.S. and Canada in the second quarter of this 2013.

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The company, apart from the Project Shield, has also announced its next-generation Tegra 4 processor for smartphones, tablets, and notebooks.

The Tegra 4, similar to its precursors, will come with a quad-core processor alongside an important fifth, low power, core meant to save battery life. Per company's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Tegra 4 is the world's fastest mobile processor, which surpasses everything currently available in the market.

However, the company will be looking to avoid the same blunders that it did with the previous Tegra 3 that failed to make an impact and find a way into most Qualcomm's Snapdragon devices. This happened not due to the lack of power, but because of poor battery life.

"Using the Tegra 4's increased power, Huang demoed some advancements in high-dynamic range (HDR) photography. An unnamed Windows RT tablet was used to create an HDR instantly by capturing two images at exactly the same time. Later, he showed a live HDR mode that could open to the door to HDR video,"The Verge wrote.

Nvidia is yet to reveal the clock speed of the Tegra 4's processor, although it says that it has 72 GPU cores. It has also been rumored that Tegra 4 is produced with a new 28nm manufacturing process that is also a step taken forward from Tegra 3's 40nm.

Nvidia also showed off the company's cloud gaming competence by announcing the updated Nvidia Grid, which is a step up from its predecessor - GeForce Grid. The Grid is said to be a rack-based server that has the ability to support up to 24 individual racks at a given time with a total 240 GPUs and 200 teraflops of processing power.

The company also boasted that this is equivalent to the processing capabilities of at least 700 Xbox 360s.

Nvidia, at the event, demonstrated cloud gaming clients for both Android tablets and the Xbox 360 that are powered by the Grid.

"By using the NVIDIA GRID Platform, our partners will allow gamers to play anywhere, anytime, without being tethered to a box," said Phil Eisler, general manager of cloud gaming at Nvidia. "The world's most exciting games can now be played as easily as you can stream a movie, right onto your TV or mobile device. No more discs to shuffle or files to download and install. Just click and play."

The system has the ability to pick up the progress of a game even if the gamer stops playing on a certain device and later chooses to switch to an entirely different device. As far as the company's partners are concerned, Nvidia announced that Agawi, Cloudunion, Cybercloud, G-cluster, Playcast, and Ubitus will be the first companies to test out this new Grid system.