@musicalmac said:
You're inferring that I'm making it sound like a huge inconvenience. I never said it was an inconvenience. What I do know is that Nvidia's Shield made exactly zero waves in the industry. I'm not compelled to believe there's an amazing future because of UE4 compatibility (which it shares with literally everything else in the universe), and a workable version of an ancient game (Half-Life 2) and Portal, and the vague "other game developers."
When that potential is realized in a meaningful way, I'll care. Right now, it's just potential that hasn't shown a track record for meaningful success.
I'm aware you never said that, and I know I'm inferring that, but it's based off of your consistent negative responses. You seem to heavily doubt the success of this SoC for the wrong reasons. NVIDIA's Shield was not using the same architecture as a desktop Kepler GPU.
Which other mobile device currently supports the complete version of Unreal Engine 4? The answer is none. No other SoC offers OpenGL 4.4 and DirectX 12 support.
Half Life 2 and Portal came out for the NVIDIA Shield (Tegra 4). That actually took a bit of effort as Tegra 4 is nothing like Tegra K1. Like I said before, ANY SteamOS capable title can be easily ported over to Tegra K1 (for that matter, Tegra K1 might even be able to power a SteamOS device).
As for the "other game developers", I'm referring to the smaller bunch such as Croteam and Frozenbyte.
When it comes to game development, there is also the issue of drivers, something that is a non-issue for NVIDIA and their Kepler GPUs.
Well, hard to say by the specs. For PVR, I saw that unit's demo at the GDC, and I was not impressed. A room with a few objects and some shadows and fur shader may seem impressive, but it's just a tech demo. But to run an FPS game you need a lot of above-baseline features (tons of extensions), a rock solid driver (that won't falter when you actually try to use all the spec-defined corner-cases), and ability to run a lot of separate objects with a lot of different rendering states quickly. In my experience, these things tend to fall apart fairly quickly. We have a lot of problems with that on even desktop things like all OSX systems, and even some Windows systems with Intel GPUs. That's all large part driver-caused. I'm scared to even think what awaits on some of the GLES implementations. (K1 runs full OpenGL4, for starters, though we can run with GLES2/3 with somewhat limited features.)
Credit Alen L developer for Croteam
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