Other Ways To Play
The Game Stream feature isn’t the only way you can get your game on with the Nvidia Shield, it is just a welcome bonus feature and the console isn’t exactly short on features to begin with. Let’s not forget that this is still one of the most powerful Android devices on the market today, thanks to the Tegra 4 SoC you can kick back anywhere and play through one of thousands of Andriod compatible titles. With games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, Sonic HD and more at your disposal, you won’t always have to rely on Game Stream.
Nvidia GRID also opens a lot of opportunities, working in much the same way as services such as OnLive, GRID will use the Nvidia servers to render your game and stream it to the device, much in the same way Game Stream uses your own PC to do the rendering. Unfortunately, I live in the UK, and the GRID Beta servers are in California, so there is noticeable lag when I use the service, but with a fast internet connection some games are still playable for me. Of course if you live in the California area, I’m told by a few friends that the system works superbly, with a low ping time and a good internet connection speed you’ll not be able to tell that you’re streaming from servers that are miles away.
Wake from LAN is awesome too, I tried this a few days ago when I was at my friends house. I picked up my Shield and picked one of my PC games from the list, it turned my PC back home (a good 20 miles away) on, loaded up Steam and started streaming the game to my Shield. If there was any lag, I couldn’t notice it at all and it played great. The only thing that dropped was the video quality, I had to run at 720p as my home internet has an upload speed of 1MB. This means that if you’re somewhere with a good connection, be that Broadband, WiFi, perhaps even LTE or 4G, you can pair up your Shield and play your games anywhere you want… I never said you had to be sat on your own toilet to play these games!
