The company also hopes to offer a download key for the PC gaming platform Steam with every game sold on the service, so players won’t be tied to playing their games on the Shield. The console is disc-less and games will be available for download on to the device (although with only 20 gigabytes of storage in the launch model, users will likely need an external hard drive before long). This, according to Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, provides around twice the power of the Xbox 360 at an eighth of the power consumption of Microsoft’s console. It utilises Nvidia’s powerful Tegra X1 processor, which has a 256-core GPU and 64bit CPU. The system, which was unveiled at a press conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, will launch in America in May for $199 (and in Europe later in the year).
Shield is tied to its user’s Google account, taps into Android’s app store ecosystem and will offer video game and film recommendations based on an individual’s browsing history. Nvidia claims that the Shield, which has been in development for five years, will be the first device able to stream video in 4K resolution – a feature that neither that the Xbox One nor PlayStation 4 offer. Part set-top box, part video-game machine, the device will be able to stream movies and television programmes on demand, as well as playing games. Nvidia, a major manufacturer of PC graphics technologies, will enter the home console market this summer with the launch of its Android-based entertainment system, Shield.