Nvidia sheild

LukeyKid wrote: »

I was just wondering does anyone have an nvidia sheild they look pretty cool and i was really thinking about buy the new one when it released just wanting to no if the first one was good ?

and if anyone wants to read a small bit about it.

http://hexus.net/gaming/news/android/68973-nvidia-shield-2-hardware-spec-seen-benchmark-results/

That link is for the yet-to-be-released Shield 2 (or whatever Nvidia will call it).

I haven't used a Shield 1, don't plan on it, but I have watched plenty of videos on it, so I know about it.
You will need at least a 802.11n or ac wireless router (a/b/g routers are simply too slow). You will need of course an Nvidia Geforce GPU in your desktop system, preferably a 600/700 series (won't work with AMD Radeon). I'd recommend a 660 or 760 minimum because not only does your computer have to render the graphics like you would normally, it also has to encode them into a video stream on the fly. The 700 series cards have a dedicated chip just for that, so there's minimal performance loss there. If you do get a Shield 1, what I'd recommend on doing to maximise performance on the PC side is to set your PC's resolution 720p, since that's the resolution the Shield 1 has. There's no point in having your desktop at 1080p, rendering your game at 1080p, but then down-grading the resolution during the video stream encoding stage to 720p.
Also note that the Shield is not compatible with all PC games. Given that it's a controller setup, it wouldn't be ideal for some types of games such as the Total War series for example or an MMORPG, since you're restricted to just a few buttons.
Also, if you're playing a PC game on the Shield, your gaming PC CANNOT be used for anything else. You can't have the gaming PC stream Arkham City to your Shield and also be playing a Blu-ray movie for example.
On the plus side, the Shield runs Android, so if your gaming pc is otherwise occupied, you can run Android OS games.