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First there was the NVIDIA Shield. And then came the NVIDIA Shield. And now, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, NVIDIA has announced their newest device: the NVIDIA Shield. That’s not confusing at all.

I kid, of course, but NVIDIA’s propensity to call everything The Shield is a little funny. Their latest device is the NVIDIA Shield Android TV Console, which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled at GDC yesterday. It’s claim to fame in the ever-expanding sea of Android set-top-boxes? It’s the only one of its kind capable of 4K.

It’s controlled by a small bidirectional Bluetooth remote that can be charged with a micro-USB cable. What you should really care about, however, is what’s on the inside. It uses the NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor chip, which is a powerhouse of a chip that we wrote about back in January. According to Huang, the inclusion of the Tegra X1 makes the Shield 35 times more powerful than the Apple TV.

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As far as games go, the NVIDIA Shield hub offers an assortment that includes Resident Evil 5, Tales from the Borderlands, Doom 3 BFG Edition, and more, but this is also where the NVIDIA Grid comes in.

We’ve seen bits and pieces of Grid in its developmental stages, but now it’s a fully-launched service that you can subscribe to through two separate plans. The premium plan will let you stream games at 1080p and 60fps, while the cheaper plan will let you do 720p and 30fps. Both plans come with a wide assortment of games to stream with the option of buying additional games piecemeal, with AAA titles being available day of release. At GDC, Huang demonstrated the service with the recently-released Resident Evil Revelations 2. The service launches in May and will have 50 games available initially with 50 more being added in the following six months.

The most interesting thing is that because the service is backed by supercomputers, it’s technically the most powerful “console” on the market, but odds are you’ll never actually experience all that power given the streaming connection.

via Gizmodo

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