Gadgetory

you oh hey Oh a shield okay so when this guy launched expectations were a little bit tempered and that's to be expected I mean it's the first real handheld Android gaming device that really came on the market it did have a couple really cool selling features though it was able to play Android based games as well as able to play PC games by streaming them to the actual handheld device so in order to play them on the shield you needed a couple things you needed to have a coupler based GPU as well as a router with a 5 gigahertz band so it was basically just going after the likes of the PS Vita and I say was because now and videos kind of turned the RAI on something that's a little more generic they're going after consoles so as such console mode was born you could use a Bluetooth controller from the comfort of your own couch and play your PC games when your PC's a room point all right guys so now we're going to take a look how to actually sync up your Nvidia shield with your PC so to start things off you're going to take your actual shield and you're going to jump into the Nvidia application by pressing the Nvidia application now this brings you into something that looks a lot like steams big picture and that's because it pretty much is steams big picture so we're going to go over to PC games select it and you're going to select the PC that is connected to your network that has a Kepler based GPU for me this is motivation gamers so I'm going to select connect and now as you can see here it's asking us to connect the shield to the PC so quite simply you just hit connect it's now connected to the PC so now all my games are on the shield so let's take a look now how to actually end your console mode first thing that we need to do to get gaming is you need to connect a bluetooth enable controller like this Nyko controller the connection process is really simple and like the majority of Bluetooth devices all you have to do is sync the two together after the tour syncs you can connect a mini HDMI cable from your TV and enter console mode we can get into our PC games by entering the same ways we have been before you can launch the Nvidia app and using game stream we can launch even the most recent holiday hit titles including Black Flag Batman battlefield 4 and many others so let's jump into Crysis 3 all in all the actual experience when you're gaming from your couch using the shield is pretty incredible it's also really seamless you can't even tell the fact that it's you know taking what basically your PC is feeding up for graphics and streaming it down to the actual device and then displaying it on your TV like I said it's a seamless experience now there are some hiccups some of the hiccups that I've noticed basically is that you can't use your PC at the exact same time that you're actually gaming if you're playing a game and let's say my girlfriend wants to go on skype or do some web browsing and stuff she can't actually do it because you can't alt-tab out of the game and do what you want to do so that's one of the hiccups as well to some games aren't completely supported so for games like Battlefield 4 that are based at a chrome there's a little bit of a unique experience in regards to getting them all set up so in order to show you the experience and how to get the game set up we've disconnected our shields from the TV and now we're just going to demonstrate on how to do it with your PC so the first step that you would have to do is you launch battlefields for from the actual shields in console mode the way that you normally would if it was connected to your TV this will cause the Chrome browser to load up with your battlefield 4 content when this happens your shield will basically just crash out and say that it can no longer connect to the to the network so when it does that what we're going to do is we're going to click OK and launch the game this one being battlefield 4 from your actual Chrome browser and then re-enter the shield by pressing resume so now by pressing resume it's going to jump right back into battlefield 4 and 720p glory as well too with console mode you have the ability that you can enter into your Netflix and Hulu content now my Netflix experience has been a bit of a mixed bag I can't really tell if it's because of the 5 gigahertz band or if it's because the application is an Android based application but the quality on Netflix isn't really necessarily what I'd expect or want to see out of something that I would say is a 1080p experience now in saying that you also have the ability that you can play 4k videos using this device now I kind of wish that I had a 4k TV so I could show you exactly what the experience was like but yet trust me you can play 4k videos and kV and FLV content so another one of the hiccups is the fact that the shield doesn't actually accept a native 1080p stream the stream that it accepts is actually 720 which because I have a 1080p TV is now being upscaled to 1080p so in other words you're not getting true 1080p resolution now that will change in the future because Nvidia will allow us to connect in micro USB to Ethernet adapter so we can actually have a hard wired connection to our network which means that will accept a 1080p stream however those adapters and I think the firmware is not available as right now and when you do that you lose the micro USB port which means that you can't actually charge the device so you might only get a couple hours with the gaming so another thing to mention as well is that with GeForce experience it allows you to optimize your games based on your systems configuration so in other words your shield experience will be optimized as well now because of the fact that it runs on a 720p stream that means that you're going to be able to use lower based Kepler GPUs to get the same optimal gaming performance that might not impact your performance on the shield so all in all and video was pretty innovative when they thought of this console mode and what is really an incredible device the shield they gave users the ability to play next-gen content now using the horsepower their piece to basically fuel where you're gonna see on the screen at 1080p resolutions so let's take a look at the good things and some of the bad things about the device the device is pretty small and it does pack a punch with the Tegra 4 processor and it also has the ability that you can play next-gen quality content on your TV right now just like a next-gen console and it can act as a pretty decent media player however on the flip side you're limited to Nvidia hardware and it would limit the exposure so you can't use an AMD device there's no real multitasking so other people can't use the PC while you're gaming and some controllers that you might get for Bluetooth are pretty sensitive and there is a little bit of a learning curve so guys console mode is a pretty solid option and it does actually give you some benefits and some really great things that will help you compete against this next gen consoles it will give you that next gen console feel and you can play next gen content now but would that actually replace next-gen consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox one I'm not too sure guys I'm Matt for Hardware canucks and we'll see you in the next one