Nvidia is calling its Tegra 4 chipset the world’s fastest mobile processor, and the company was excited enough by the product to build a device to show it off. Project Shield is a wireless gaming device that plays both Android and PC games.
“I think there’s been a lot of boundaries around consoles … you buy into a certain console and you’re kind of locked there, and we felt the need to be opened up a little,” said Doug MacMillan, Nvidia’s marketing director for Tegra. “I think we felt there was a hole. Gamers want that gaming experience to be unleashed a little bit. … So Shield is wide open – you’ve got any Android game, any Steam and PC games, it’s really what gamers want.”
MacMillan said the Tegra 4 chip is made for gamers because of its 72-core graphics processing unit. “With that much GPU proessing power it enables amazing things in texures, shading, HDR gaming in terms of light effects and that kind of stuff, lots of real-time physics rendering on mobile devices,” he said.
Project Shield doubles as a full-fledged Android device, capable of performing the same functions as an Android tablet. At CES 2013, Nvidia engineer Aaron Gilroy demonstrated the device for RCR.
