Nvidia estimates that you can play PC games for 10 to 12 hours on a charge, which seems accurate. GameStream isn’t even much of a power draw on the Shield’s battery, because it’s essentially just a streaming video signal. There’s nothing extra-special about a GameStream-ready router, except that they’ve been tested by Nvidia, so as long as you have a dual-band router with at least 450 Mbps speeds on one of the bands, it’s probably not worth replacing. At worst, the stream would stutter or become choppy on occasion, and would then go back to being smooth and lag-free. Performance wasn’t quite as smooth with my existing router, a Netgear WNDR4300, but it was still respectable. Although Nvidia recommends connecting your desktop PC to the router with an Ethernet cable, I had good results over Wi-Fi as well. During a tense battle with the Capra Demon in Dark Souls, the streaming setup didn’t even cross my mind. I popped headshots with ease in Borderlands 2 and pulled off some slick acrobatics in the notoriously difficult Super Meat Boy. Nvidia’s Shield (shown with the lid shut) is diminutive, but dense, and the weight can be tiresome during extended play sessions.īut the technology really works, with low enough latency to play with confidence. The only major downside to the hardware is that at 1.28 pounds, it can be tiresome to hold during long play sessions. Unlike, say, a gaming laptop, there are no additional controllers or mice to connect, and you can actually curl up with Shield on the couch or in bed.
#Using nvidia shield controller on pc 720p
The beauty of the Shield is that it’s compact and self-contained-a five-inch 720p display attached to a hefty game controller with the guts of a high-end tablet inside. Years of Steam sales have left me with a massive backlog of PC games, and not being chained to my desk means it’s a lot more convenient to play them.