I purchased an NVidia SHIELD tablet a few months after launch back in 2013. The idea of playing inexpensive Steam games with gaming PC processing power either in the living room or on the go from a portable device was very, very attractive, to say the least. It took some networking investments and experimentation, but a few months later this was a reality and reality was sweet.
Then one day my warranty expired, and since hardware seems to sense when this occurs, before long my display began to flicker and the end was in sight for my beloved tablet. What to do?
Enter the Nintendo Switch, another Nvidia Tegra-based tablet that is probably going to be better build quality and better supported than the SHIELD tablet was. Why not just get another SHIELD tablet? It's well known that the K1 tablets are just recycled components from the originals in an attempt by NVidia to minimize lost revenue and keep the product going despite the fact that they have no plans to update the product and are exiting the tablet market because... they cannot compete with the Nintendo Switch! Which means that eventually the supply of SHIELD tablets will dry up and we will be left with no ideal streaming device for Nvidia PCs. Sure, you can run the popular Moonlight client on a non-Tegra based Android tablet, but you'll miss out on the smoothness of the native hardware-decoded stream that using a Tegra device affords. Plus, you want a well-supported controller using dedicated RF instead of a laggy Bluetooth controller, and that means you need a dedicated gaming tablet-ish device like the Switch.
What needs to happen for this to work? Nintendo could include GameStream support in the stock device, but I don't see that happening since they really have nothing to gain from it. My hope is that someone will port Moonlight with Tegra support to the Switch's app store. My hope is that Nintendo allows the app since they have nothing to *lose* from this either, and streaming capability will make the device much more attractive for a launch purchase for people like myself who use streaming (for my own library rather than a subscription service) heavily.
Assuming that requirement is passed, the other major pain point for game streaming is latency. Any WiFi or RF-based connection (PowerLine, MoCa) will always have some noticeable lag which is inherent to the technology- since only one client at a time can use the WiFi / RF channel, every time a client wants to transmit, there is an election/handshaking process that introduces lag. If you use a repeater it's twice as bad because the repeater has to perform this process for all relayed traffic. Even really fast bandwidth WiFi technologies will still have at least 10-15 ms latency due to this, and latency is way more important than bandwidth when it comes to game streaming where keeping a minimum delay to update the video stream after controller inputs (which must also be streamed in the other direction, and which also means you can't keep a deep buffer of video like you can for a traditional non-interactive stream) is critical. I have tried *all* of these technologies with my SHIELD (including two expensive ASUS 4x4 802.11ac routers in dedicated bridge mode so they do nothing but relay traffic to each other with all clients hardwired at both ends, this is about the best you can do for latency with WiFi) over a period of about 18 months while trying to get good streaming to my living room TV from my PC about 150 feet away. In the end I just installed an Ethernet twisted pair line and suddenly all my latency issues were resolved :-)
If it turns out that the Switch runs on something sufficiently close to stock Android, then hopefully existing micro-USB Ethernet adapters will work as they do on the SHIELD tablet. Otherwise you can still get a reasonable experience over WiFi, just don't expect totally smooth 30fps.
Here's to hoping the Switch can provide a glorious PC game streaming experience along with the traditional Nintendo goodness we've come to expect. If that happens, I might just retire my trusty Game Boy Advance SP as the best portable gaming device ever and bestow that title on the Switch!
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