The world’s first 4K streaming Android TV is now available with NVIDIA SHIELD. Powered by the revolutionary Tegra X1 Superchip, SHIELD is powerful enough to own the living room, delivering a world of content and apps as well AAA gaming franchises locally or streaming them from the cloud using GRID technology.

SHIELD combines the performance of a console, with the ease of development that comes from Android and OpenGL, making it developer friendly. We are backing the launch of SHIELD by making our class leading native Android development tools available to all Android developers everywhere, no matter what platform they develop on through our AndroidWorks initiative.


“With functionality that extends beyond Tegra, NVIDIA’s AndroidWorks is a valuable part of EA’s mobile game development tools. AndroidWorks helps us bring players incredible mobile experiences on a variety of Android devices and chipsets,” said Lewis Strudwick, Studio Technology Director, EA Melbourne.


Serious Power for the living room

With approximately 35x the processing power found in an Apple TV and 6 times the memory of a PlayStation3 it's obvious that SHIELD is a flagship for Android TV. SHIELD is capable of running games like Crytek's Crysis3 which were considered intensive on PC just a few years ago. SHIELD is also ideal for Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games. Check out the Rivalry demo running on SHIELD.

“Epic's use of Nsight Tegra has been crucial for the efficient development of Unreal Engine 4's Android features," said Epic Games Senior Graphics Programmer Niklas Smedberg. "We’re delighted to see AndroidWorks extend support beyond Tegra so Unreal Engine developers can remain in their favorite authoring tools during all development scenarios. NVIDIA’s tool advancements are refining Android to a level matching game console development.”

Developing for SHIELD

Unlike consoles with their proprietary libraries, which are hard to develop for, SHIELD is Android and uses modern OpenGL ES 3.1 and AEP (Android Extension Pack) meaning developers can easily integrate Google Play services while taking advantage of modern OpenGL features like bindless graphics and tessellation. To get peak performance, developers will want to program natively (C/C++) and NVIDIA makes this easy with AndroidWorks. AndroidWorks is our one click installation solution that provides tight integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, the IDE of choice among professional game developers.

NVIDIA also provides console grade profiling and debugging tools like our Tegra Graphics Debugger and Tegra System Profiler. These tools give developers insight into how code performs making them more productive.

Summary

Console levels of performance with the ease of development that comes from Android and OpenGL. All of this for a device designed to own the living room with 4K streaming and all the services you expect from Android. This is how you develop for TV

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