Nvidia Shield Gaming Tablet Review

Performance

Time to put the Shield Tablet through its paces! After a quick and very easy to follow setup process; which will be more than familiar to anyone who’s owned an Android device before, the Shield Tablet was good to go.

First up, I thought that it would be good to put that Tegra K1 through its paces and it didn’t fail to disappoint one bit, a score of 31345 is very impressive. To get an idea of this level of performance, it’s a good idea to download the free benchmark and run it on your own device for comparison.

Another incredible score on the Antutu benchmark, with the 2GB ram, fast GPU and fast processor all winning praise from this test.

There aren’t many Tegra K1 optimised apps out there right now, but a great example of the hardware capabilities is the Tegra K1 demo which can be downloaded from the Play Store. It renders a human head, lets you play around with lighting effects and really shows how far mobile graphics have progressed compared to their bigger desktop counterparts; it’s very impressive.

The home screen is what you’ve come to expect from an android device. The Shield comes with two dock bars, one on each side of the screen to better group your important apps.

Some pre-installed apps are sorted into folders to allow quick access to the features that are unique to the Shield; such as the Hub, Dabbler, Controller setup and Console Mode.

Removing the stylus from the side of the tablet launches a popup window, this contains apps that are pre-configured to work with the stylus; you can customise this popup to add or remove apps that you feel you do/don’t need.

One of the coolest ones is the Dabbler, a versatile arts package that allows you to paint and draw using a multitude of effects; it’s a great demonstration of the quality of the screen and the accuracy of the stylus, but not of my art skills.

The Shield Hub is perfect for launching your games and also comes with a special store front to best find games that are Shield optimized.

General gaming performance is exceptional, everything from the humble Minecraft to Unreal powered games will run at maximum settings with ease; this is one of the most powerful mobile gaming devices on the market so you’ll likely not run into performance problems for a very long time.

The high quality screen combined with the kick-stand of the Shield Cover make this tablet great for movie playback. Black levels are very good on the display and the powerful speakers make music and dialogue a joy to listen to.

The Shield Controller is very easy to set up, just load the controller app from the home screen, turn on the controller and you’re good to go.

Here you can see I’ve got the tablet on the arm of my couch; propped us using the Shield Cover and I’ve already got my controller paired to the system. Playing Half Life 2 like this is a blast and it means I can put my feet up somewhere comfortable to enjoy the game.

I loved how I could hold the original Shield and play like any other hand-held device; this isn’t really possible on the tablet if you want to use the controller, but you can pop it on your knee easy enough. It should be fine for putting on the back-of-seat tables you get on trains and planes.

Want to take things over to the big screen? Hook up a HDMI cable to the tablet and this screen will pop up.

Mirror mode outputs the same native resolution of the tablet (scaled up to match your display), this mode still allows you to use the touch screen on the tablet.

If you want to use the controller and sit further back, you can enable full console mode; this allows for 1080p video output for multimedia and gaming. Console Mode disables the tablets screen; so you really will need the controller or a compatible bluetooth device to use this mode. The performance of Half Life 2 was pretty good here, graphics look great, but there was a noticeable drop in frame rates when things got a little busy on-screen. Of course you could use this mode with any Android app, game, or use the game streaming features if you have a compatible Nvidia GTX graphics card and a fast enough router.

The built-in cameras both offer very good quality snaps, here you can see one at the default settings.

Here is the same shot with the Nvidia enhancements enabled; colours are richer and there is a little more detail in the shot. Not the greatest camera in the world, but more than enough for a few quick pictures when needed.