NVIDIA Lines Up Another Android Gaming Machine - The UpStream

NVIDIA Lines Up Another Android Gaming Machine

posted Sunday Jul 20, 2014 by Nicholas DiMeo

NVIDIA Lines Up Another Android Gaming Machine

NVIDIA is slated to launch another gaming device based around Android. Luckily, it is nothing like its previous endeavor, SHIELD. Instead, the gaming company looks to create a machine that can connect to a computer's graphics card to juice up the device to be used with a TV or other monitor.

The Android-based gaming box will be able to broadcast PC games to a television or any other output with its built-in HDMI port. NVIDIA will also be offering an inexpensive controller to go along with the machine that has yet to be named.

A lot of analysts are skeptical about NVIDIA jumping into yet another gaming venture, considering how terrible the SHIELD did in the wild. Ed Barton, analyst for Ovum, a gaming industry consulting firm, said,

I think it's fair to say that Shield sold reasonably poorly. And if the new device requires your PC to have a relatively new NVIDIA GPU to make use of its abilities, that will really limit its addressable market.

As mentioned earlier, the new tiny PC-to-TV device will require a NVIDIA GeForce card, and a pretty high-end one at that. The computer will also require GeForce Experience System to be installed on the machine, which is pretty resource-intensive. For the device itself, the NVIDIA built Tegra K1 processor will be used as the brain inside the little beast.

I only question two things. First, can this new gaming machine really take off with consumers? Considering the bit of hurdle you have to jump through to get it going, I doubt it. Second, aren't we already saturated with Android gaming machines? From Ouya to the SHIELD, I don't think all of the devices combined even come close to the big three in the space today. Will this unnamed project just be another notch on the "failed to make Android a gaming system" list? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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