controller, now the first thing you'll notice is it's incredibly
large in comparison to say the PS4 controller or the Xbox One
controller.
It has more in common I would say with the original Xbox controller released many
years ago.
Now it provides thumbsticks which are very reminiscent
of the PlayStation 4 in direct alignment with each other,
likewise Xbox style buttons here
XAV and Y which obviously makes it useful and easy for pairing
with PC games which tend to use the Xbox scheme.
Likewise there is a D pad, your
shoulder buttons and trigger. Now
interesting underneath they've added a really nice groove
so you hands actually sit quite nicely and comfortably
inside the groove which actually makes this additional weight not quite so much of a
problem.
Interestingly, they've also added two volume buttons,
volume rocker, volume up and down and a touchpad
as well. This touchpad allows you to move
a mouse cursor online if you need to hit particular options on screen for
your PC game but also can actually make moving around some
Android interfaces quite easy as well. We then have a back
button, a start button and a well
let's call it the menu button as it were. This one will effectively drop you
out back into the Android menu. This one here would usually bring
up the in game menu and this one here
will back you out of a game or if you long press
will bring up the sharing and recording menu.
So let's simply turn it on by pressing this
Nvidia touch button in the centre there and then what we'll do is we'll go and
pair this up so we go into Shield controller
and it's actually already got this controller nice and connected, that's fine
so if we now come into the Shield help we can see that we have
full control over the interface every part of it
and we can move around and we can also using the touchpad
bring up the touchpad controls as well. Now if I long press on here
it will bring up the recording menu so I can very easily
switch recording on if I want to, same again
and switch recording off. And I can just stop and share at that point as well.
Now if we actually come into an Android game
let's bring one up.
and actually I'm just going to use World of Tanks for this because
it worked perfectly.
So if we long press on this wheel or start button as it's more commonly known
here
what we can do is we can bring up the overlay. Now this is available for all
Android games. From the overlay you are then able if you want
to, to download profiles for the controller
and this allows you to effectively play any game you like
using the controller because hopefully someone has put a profile together for you.
All you need to do is download the profile and then the controller just works.
Or likewise you can customise any of the
on-screen controls and map them directly to the buttons.
Perfect in my opinion for getting, well any game working
with this controller. So let's just come back out.
If we press the Nvidia button again, it is touch-sensitive so sometimes it needs a
little extra press, oops, actually it might be because I'm
still in a menu. Hang on, just come out of that.
There we go.
Now if we say want to play a PC game what we'll find is
that everything has already been mapped across for us and it's done via Nvidia's
own software
so there shouldn't be any major problems there. So if we fire up
Wolfenstein and
now I'm playing Wolfenstein. And I'm using the Nvidia Shield controller that's being relayed to
the PC
for all of the commands and obviously it's sending me a game stream back
working absolutely beautifully. I haven't played this for a couple of weeks.
Beautiful
quick and easy and all of that was done pretty much
in the background by Nvidia's software. It knows this is a controller, and it
knows that it's going to be interacting with a PC
so it sends all of the necessary commands. Now the controller
feels really good when you're actually using it.
It doesn't feel overly heavy or anything like that and the way they've actually
contoured it
actually does feel really nice in the hand. This isn't a particularly heavy controller ooh,
obviously difficult to talk and fight at the same time but it's not a particularly
heavy controller
and even with the additional size of it, it actually does sit in the hand very
very well.
It's not overly heavy, it's not overly light and it
doesn't have any kind of pinch points I would call it where
it kind of feels like it's digging into your hand or anything like that. It's a very good design I have
to say.
Nvidia have really pushed the boat out
when it comes to
cool software features but these features don't really get in the way
of your gaming, they enhance it. For instance
Nvidia has taken its shadowplay technology, broadcasting technology
and folded it directly into the Nvidia Shield tablet. That allows you
at any time to simply press a button, call up a menu on screen
and start recording exactly what the tablet is seeing.
That can be gameplay footage directly from the actual Android operating system
or it can be gameplay that is being streamed from another PC.
That footage is then saved onto the tablet
and can be shared immediately using the Android share functionality.
It's really really slick and it shows Nvidia thought about
well, if we're going to build a gaming tablet let treat it
like a gaming device. Let's give it all the same functionality
we would a fully-fledged PC because it's got the horsepower to cope.
Likewise you can also stream directly to Twitch
from the tablet itself that's a phenomenal thing,
including the microphone and the camera to use effectively as a webcam
recreating functionality you have if you're
streaming from a desktop PC. It really is a watershed moment
and it's quite remarkable Nvidia have not only managed to pull this off
but have done it without compromising the underlying operating system
or form or functionality of the tablet. It's all
nice and transparent to your use of the device.
For me this shows the pedigree of Nvidia and
how they've approached creating this device. It would have been very easy to
simply
say we've created a new GPU, here's a few games you can use with it -
crack on. But no, they've treated this like an
ecosystem. They know that if you want to show off the power of this chip
you're going to have to put the groundwork in to creating the software that shows it off.
The streaming technology, the recording technology
shows that this device has ample power. It can not only stream a game
from your PC or play a game directly on
the tablet at full-speed and spec but it can also record that information or
broadcast it to Twitch
without breaking a sweat. This show's a real
amount of love from Nvidia to get this right.
As I say it would have been very easy for them to simply throw this together,
shove it out onto the market and worry about solving these problems later.
They haven't. They solved them in their first attempt.
That is a remarkable thing. Thanks for watching.
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