Great news for laptop game streaming with NVidia GPUs.

Being a NVidia Shield owner this article is good news. Finally 600M GPU laptop owners on up will now be able to join the desktop crowd in streaming their PC games to their NVidia Shield. Very happy to hear this news about laptop GPU support.

Nvidia Debuts 800M Series GPUs, Brings Game Streaming to Laptops - IGN

 

Cool, I'm glad they're doing that. Hopefully, they will "un-gimp" Shadowplay also so we don't have to tweak the GeForce Experience shortcut to make it work on laptops any more.

So, you have a Shield? How do you like it? I am having a hard time understanding why it would be particularly useful to have one of those fancy gadgets. Have you actually found enough use for it that makes it a compelling product? NVIDIA have not really marketed the Shield in a way that makes me feel like I should have one.

Edit: Just clicked and read the link and my wish is granted.

I wonder when this is supposed to kick into action? The new drivers I just installed (335.23) don't have it yet.

 

I've got one because my fiancé thought it would be a good gift. It's a nifty device, although not one I would have purchased for myself. The build quality is fantastic, and the controls are solid. The ability to stream games from your PC is pretty cool, but so far I've found it to functionally be hit or miss. The Grid cloud streaming is actually quite slick, although it's still rather buggy, but slowly getting better. Obviously the chipset is quite powerful, and having VANILLA Android is awesome, but the lack of developers making fully functional Shield games is a limiting factor.

Condensed review: cool gadget, but not easily justifiable unless you have $250 that MUST GO NOW!

 

A bit on the heavy side, but absolutely love the games that support it. The PC streaming had a rough start with bad compression problems, but NVidia has sorted that out mostly. Being able to stream AAA titles from your PC to your Shield is the big draw of course. Hardware wise it is solid as a rock. The Tegra 4 really unleashes when you unlock and root the device. You then can run the "Trickster MOD Kernel Settings" app and set the CPU governor control from "interactive" mode to "performance" mode which removes the CPU governor (much like the 780M throttling) and the native Android games run much better. With its front to back active cooling, removing the CPU governor barely increases its temp at all. Really a neat device. Looking forward to their next gen K1. It will be interesting to see if they release a Shield v2. A very cool thing did happen a few days ago. NVidia helped push out a Tegra 4 version of Mount and Blade called Warband and I hear it is great.

Another great tool that only works on a rooted Shield is FPS Meter. For it to work properly you have to go into "Developer Options" under "Settings" and enable "Disable HW overlays".

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigeyes0x0.trickstermod

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aatt.fpsm

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taleworlds.mbwarband

 

According to Geforce .com:

"Like GeForce ShadowPlay, GeForce GTX 800M GPUs will support game-changing GameStream technology out of the box, with support for GeForce GTX 700M, and GeForce GTX 680M, GTX 675MX, GTX 670MX, and GeForce GTX 660M GPUs following later this month."

 

Why can't Nvidia do like Apple did 3 years ago?
Intel computers that have discrete Nvidia cards have an idle GPU in the IntelCPU: use it.
Apple uses it to real time encode the picture in H264 for Airplay. No cpu time. No main GPU time and works perfectly.

I understand that Nvidia want us to use 20-30% GPU time to encode stuff so that people needs to upgrade. But as a customer: use the Intel GPU!

(I really hate how the gaming industry is evolving. Imagine how great PS4/XboxOne would be without Kinnect? Today Kinnect reserves 10-20% cpu time. The OS reservers 30-40% of the memory. All because of motion stuff and live streaming. Let me turn it of and get 20-40% more performance so that games can run in 1080P instead of 900P on next gen)

 

You can kinda get the "Nvidia Shield" experience with this app on Android tablets as well once you get a gamepad so i for once am looking forward to this being enabled.

Game streaming to other Android devices or PCs with Limelight and GeForce Experience - xda-developers

 

Totally agree, seeing as how QuickSync support getting added to MSI Afterburner basically took the wind out of Nvidia's sails as it replicated ShadowPlay's functionality but brought it to a much larger audience for absolutely free.

Limelight sucks though. If you've ever tried it or watched reviews for it you'd see that the latency and picture quality is worlds apart from what you'd get with Shield or Steam in-home streaming. Definitely not a viable choice for gaming IMO, especially with Steam in-home streaming being decent, free, and easily obtainable.