Nvidia's gaming-focused Shield tablet will be getting Android 5.0 Lollipop sometime later in November and its Grid gaming service is coming out of beta, allowing users to play games such as Batman: Arkham City and Borderlands 2 at 60 frames per second.
"The enabling technologies of Grid are super-low-latency from controller streaming to graphics to game streaming. And, virtualization so that many gamers can share the GeForce cloud gaming supercomputer," said the company in a statement. "...And we're loading it up with great games. We have triple-A titles like Batman: Arkham City and Borderlands 2, as well as classics like Brutal Legend and Psychonauts. We have 20 great games on Grid at launch worth over $400, and we plan to add more games every week."
The Shield getting Lollipop is quite a big deal. At $300, the Shield tablet will be one of the cheapest ways to get stock Lollipop come Nov. 18. In fact, the tablet is around $100 cheaper than Google's Nexus 9 tablet, a tablet specifically aimed at showing off stock Android. Not only that, but the gaming capabilities of the Shield make it a clear choice.
The Grid game-streaming service is a great addition to the Nvidia apps lineup and will let users stream PC games straight to the tablet without having to wait for ports. The company now has servers on the East Coast, and is planning on adding servers in Europe and Asia in the near future. The service will get new games every week and these games will be free through June 30, 2015. After this date, the company has said that games will be available for a flat monthly fee to access a back-catalog of games, and it may offer new games for rental pricing.
The resolution of the games is 720p, which certainly isn't bad considering that data needs to be streamed from a local controller input to the cloud and back to the local device. All this takes place over Wi-Fi, though Nvidia says users should have at least 10 Mbps download speed.
It was unknown whether Nvidia would be keeping Grid for a while or not, although the company's recent announcement suggests the service isn't going anywhere.
Grid itself is only available on Nvidia's Shield Tablet and the original Nvidia Shield, but it would be very easy for the service to scale to other Android devices and even Windows computers.
