The Nvidia SHIELD tablet was already a great tablet from the beginning, offering up the best gaming capabilities on a tablet thanks to the Nvidia Tegra K1 and its 192 graphics cores. Not to mention the selection of Tegra optimized games with rich, lush, graphics that can only be experienced on a Tegra powered device, and SHIELD device specific games on top of that. There was also the game streaming feature, which is awesome in its own right, although a little less appealing to some since it requires a very specific set of computer hardware for it to be compatible. All that aside, it’s a cool feature and offered up a way to play PC games on the tablet with a controller. Hardcore gamers we’re eating it up. They’re still eating it up.
Now Nvidia is taking the gaming experience on the SHIELD tablet to new heights by introducing SHIELD tablet owners to the capability to use the Nvidia GRID streaming game service, which is their gaming in the cloud. The collection of games will be available to all owners of the SHIELD tablet for free this month through June 30th of next year for North America residents, and GRID launches in Western Europe in December and Asia in 2015. The service will also be available on the SHIELD portable, so SHIELD tablet owners won’t be the only ones having fun. At launch Nvidia says there will be a collection of 20 games to start, which includes Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands 2, Physconauts, Dead Island, Turbo Dismount, Strike Suit Zero, The Witcher 2, Flyhunter Origins, Darksiders II and more.
We know that 20 games doesn’t sound like a lot, but Nvidia has also stated that more games will be added every single week, which means the week after it launches there will be even more games to play. GRID brings the power of GeForce GTX gaming to SHIELD devices, and if you have ever played games on a PC running a powerful GeForce GTX GPU, this is something you should be excited about, provided you own the SHIELD tablet or the SHIELD portable of course, or are considering buying one. In addition to the launch of GRID, Nvidia announced last week that they would be updating the SHIELD tablet to Android 5.0 Lollipop in November and would be among the first devices to get the software upgrade. The SHIELD tablet will get Lollipop on November 18th, which is just days away, and should be the time we see the launch of GRID for all SHIELD device owners in NA too. If $300 for a tablet like the SHIELD wasn’t enough to entice you, perhaps the presence of the sweet Android upgrade to Lollipop in just 5 days, along with an even sweeter collection of top PC games to stream from the cloud will do the trick.