The Shield’s battery lasted nearly the whole day with 8 hours of mixed usage while being connected to wifi and using social media and using average brightness, battery will drain faster if you’re streaming from your PC as well. Playing Tegra 4 optimized games will drain the battery even more faster depending on how long you play. The battery recharge rate also borders below average taking a good three to four hours for a full recharge. Use it as a media device, it performs quite delightfully which means you can watch your favorite episode of friends from the comfort of your bed without the need to adjust the angle. That being said, Android runs pretty slick. Optimized apps load up quicker and I didn’t experience any performance bumps when switching from game to game.
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The Gaming Experience
Shield Hub has a lot of games on the library, I enjoyed playing some Sonic and a few classic arcade games. Interestingly games like Voxel Run also detect the Nvidia Gamepad schematic which you can map to your convenience through the Gamepad Mapper and you can share or download mapped profiles as files. Android’s open system means that you can get a larger scheme of games through emulation so if you want to enjoy a bit of Pokemon SNES you can do it, if you wish.
For what it’s worth, NVIDIA seems to try and bridge the gap between console and PC to a certain point and it’s taken a pretty big gamble because of it. For some it can be a device that either does it all or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do very well and here’s why I have a mixed opinion on the device. While it played out fine running android games from Shield HUB and getting some nifty android titles to run with, I was more interested for the PC streaming to work. Pc streaming is the one unique reason why you should get the Shield Portable which allows it to stream games from a PC within the same local network where the games are optimized to run in the GeForce Experience PC program. So non GTX users and those with older GPU’have pretty much lucked out. Gamestream works well with almost little noticeable latency if you’re on the same network, again depending on the kind of router you run. Some routers do have gamestream ready specifications. Remote streaming still needs to work out it’s kinks as it’s a beta functionality. Keeping in mind PC streaming means it mirrors the game to run on your PC. Hook it up via HDMI and the Shield’s Console mode lets you display 1080p video of your gamestream on a 5″ screen. Which raises the following question why would anyone who prefers playing on a PC with a keyboard/mouse or gamepad setup switch to a smaller screen.
I had several problems connecting the review unit to sync up with my MSI GTX 970 and it worked only after some tinkering with the router. When it did eventually work, it was a real joy to play Civilization: Beyond Earth on the go, taking it remotely is where I had problems since you need to have pretty amazing broadband to run it, there were parts were sound dropped but it still played and it did so beautifully. That being said, Game Streaming is still something that NVIDIA needs to work on if it wants to cater the device to more users, it’s not perfect just yet but it’s a step forward for the dream of playing high end PC games on a hand held.
Summing it Up
