NVIDIA streamed a long event last night as part of their Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 announcements. NVIDIA announced an expansion to their SHIELD line of gaming hardware and the commercial availability of their GRID service.
NVIDIA has had their SHIELD portable and SHIELD tablet out for a couple of years now and with last night’s announcement, they are adding an Android TV console to the line-up. The Android TV console gives an emphasis to gaming along with the ability to view shows and movies.
The SHIELD console leverages the NVIDIA GRID service and its own NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor and 3GB of RAM to provide a smooth gaming experience. You can play PC and Android games with PC-quality graphics up to 1080p at 60 fps.
The console costs $199 and will ship in May. Additional accessories include a controller, remote, and stand. For more details, see shield.nvidia.com/console.
In addition to the Android TV console being announced, NVIDIA also announced that their GRID service will split to two forms in May. GRID will offer game streaming at 720p and 30 fps while GRID Plus streams games at 1080p and 60 fps. Backed by Amazon AWS, the service is going commercial to allow streaming games without any lengthy install process. There will be at least 50 titles available on GRID at launch with new games added weekly.
For more info, see shield.nvidia.com/grid-game-streaming
NVIDIA also introduced the Titan X GPU.