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An Android gaming handheld with physical controls that can also wirelessly stream PC gameplay, Nvidia's Project Shield is the surprise package of this year's CES show - a portable games machine that supports a massive range of games, from the most basic 2D Android titles through to the power and majesty of top-end AAA epics like Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 via its innovative in-built local cloud gaming technology. Nvidia's Project Shield reveal was important for a number of reasons - not only did we see the company's first foray into handheld gaming territory, but we also witnessed the capabilities of its latest mobile hardware. Nvidia reckons that its new Tegra 4 chip is the most powerful mobile processor in the world, and one more step towards closing the gap with the current-gen console standard set by the Xbox 360's Xenos graphics core.
Demos showing Dead Trigger 2 and eagerly anticipated free-to-play title Hawken looked a cut above most of the mobile titles we've seen, although they still fall some way short of the current-gen standard. Performance looked a bit wobbly, with Dead Trigger regularly dipping under 30 frames per second, but as we've discovered from iOS devices and indeed Tegra 3 hardware, HDMI mirroring appears to incur something of a performance hit, presumably owing to bandwidth limitations on mobile hardware. Until we get the device in our hands, we're not going to be able to ascertain exactly what this new hardware is capable of. Nvidia's claims of 6x performance in relation to Tegra 3 will be quite some achievement though.
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