NEWS

Nvidia drops bombs at CES 2013


The company unveiled their Tegra 4-powered console, Project Shield, as well as the GeForce Experience and its Grid cloud system.

These announcements were made during its CES 2013 presser.

The Tegra 4 optimized Project Shield is the company's newest mobile processor. The processor has 72 GU cores, which essentially makes it nearly four times as powerful as the Tegra 3. It's processing engine can function and process images at 10 times the speed of current devices.

A lot of the Tegra 4 is set up the same as the 3 but instead has Cortex A15 cores and will be compatible with LTE networks. The Project Shied portion of their announcement was Nvidia's first foray into the handheld gaming market. The device that was shown looked like a normal twin-stick controller with a 5" screen attached to it. It was shown running an Android operating system.

The device was also shown to have an SD slot for a cell connection. It also had an HDMI input for connection to a larger display device if needed. Nvidia revealed that the battery life for the device is right at 38 hours.

Next up was the GeForce Experience, as termed by Nvidia - it's a plethora of tools that allow you to tinker with your device's settings to achieve the best possible results without the headache. The company's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang boasted that Nvidia has a team of gamers that play literally every game that comes around and jots down which settings the game runs best at. The GeForce Experience will allow your equipment and the game you're playing to "communicate" with each other and set the best possible settings for you. Huang stated that this will allow new-er PC players to jump right into games and not have to worry about fiddling with the settings (which they might not know anything about).

The last little bomb the graphics company dropped was the introduction to their Grid Gaming System. It's officially Nvidia's cloud gaming setup. The company wants to make PC gaming more accessible to new gamers and old gamers alike.

This new initiative will be compatible with SmartTV's and other devices like laptops so you can game using their servers, where you'll also be able to access your saved files. The company is terming their server farm as "The Grid". Huang stated that Nvidia's system will absolutely work because each one of their servers can house up to 24 players - much more than any existing servers at the time. The company won't be offering up the game's themselves, they plan to bring in third party partners to license their tech out to. Each licensed "Grid System" will include 20 Grid servers, 10 GPUs, with 200 teraflops of processing power.

It's an exciting time to be a gamer right now as this looks to be the first domino to fall in the fight to get PC gaming outside boxed computers.