At the company's "Made to Game" event held on March 3, Nvidia unveiled the new Shield Android TV-powered set-top box.
"More than five years in the making, what I want to share with you will redefine the future of gaming," Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wrote in the invitation for the event. The Shield set-top box that was unveiled may do just that.
Nvidia's Shield hardware line includes a handheld gaming console and video game-dedicated tablet, and now, also a set-top box that will cost $200.
Nvidia referred to the Shield set-top box as a combination of a "revolutionary TV," a "gaming console" and a "supercomputer," with the company also referring to the device as the first 4K Android TV in the world.
The Shield set-top box is capable of streaming and locally running 4K content to a user's 4K television using the company's Tegra X1 mobile chipset, which was unveiled by Nvidia at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show last January. The Tegra X1 is currently the most powerful mobile processor that the company has ever created.
The Shield set-top box will push 4K content out through HDMI, and pull down streaming 4K content through Gigabit Ethernet.
While the device only has an internal storage of 16GB, it also features an expansion port for a microSD card and a pair of USB 3.0 ports for external HDDs.
The Shield set-top box also features voice control through the microphone of the included Shield gamepad and a dedicated remote control.
However, beyond the set-top box capabilities of the device, Nvidia has geared it to cater directly to gamers. According to the company, the Shield set-top box is capable of double the performance of Microsoft's Xbox 360, and with an ever-growing collection of console games being ported to Android only for use with the Nvidia Shield system, gamers may begin showing heavy interest.
Included in the games ported to Android for Nvidia Shield include Doom 3: BFG Edition, Borderlands: The Presequel, Metal Gear Solid: Revengeance, The Talos Principle, and many more. In addition, there is also already a collection of Android games that are available, with Huang stating that there will be a minimum of 50 games available to users upon the device's launch.
As for being tagged as a "supercomputer," the Shield set-top box also comes with a subscription to Nvidia's Grid service for streaming games, which will give the device the capability of streaming high-powered PC titles that are running remotely in a more powerful machine.
It was previously thought that Nvidia will be unveiling a successor to its Shield gaming tablet at the event that will be using the newly released Tegra X1 mobile chipset.
