Nvidia said on Wednesday that for the first time ever, it is exclusively using a third-party game engine to create product presentations. Previously the company used its own internal engine to render products and demos.
"Nvidia heavily relied on the Unreal Matinee cinematic system to create the fly-through video which provided the world’s first glimpse of Project SHIELD and played during their CES keynote," the company said. "This is the first time Nvidia engineers have used a third-party game engine."
Both the Project SHIELD Android-based console and the Tegra 4 Soc were revealed in January during the show. The "Wayne" 28-nm Tegra 4 chip, designed for high-end smartphones and tablets, is the foundation of Nvidia's gaming gadget, packing four ARM Cortex-A15 processor cores and 72 custom GeForce GPU cores.
As for Project SHIELD itself, it's built like a game console controller, but packs its own 5-inch 720p multi-touch display, and the ability to stream PC games from a desktop or laptop using a Kepler-based GPU (GTX 650 or GTX 660M) or higher. It's amazingly light in weight, and supports 802.11n 2x2 MIMO wireless connectivity for seemingly latency-free gaming.
“Nvidia are always on the cutting edge, and we were thrilled to be a part of their awesome Project SHIELD introduction,” said Mark Rein, vice president and co-founder of Epic Games. “The visuals their team are producing using Unreal Engine 4 in real time are fantastic, and they're already exceeding some of the best pre-rendered visuals of only a few short years ago.”
Nvidia said during GTC 2013 last month that Project SHIELD is all set for a 2Q13 release.
