Last week saw Apple unveil a number of their latest products. In among the announcements was one for their next-gen TV offering, Apple TV. As such, this is expected to be the company’s main contender for the already established Android TV. Shortly after the announcement came through, NVIDIA, who offer the most powerful Android TV device came out explaining why Apple TV just doesn’t compare to the NVIDIA SHIELD.
Well, if you missed the news earlier, Amazon today made a bunch of product announcements too and in among their announcements was the launch of their next-gen TV offering, the new Fire TV. This one comes with a bunch of upgrades compared to the previous model and is likely to be a big seller moving into the holiday season. Well, NVIDIA are once again coming out and declaring that their NVIDIA SHIELD is the only media streaming device worth buying. And when you take a look at the specs, it does make for interesting reading.
The new Fire TV does come with a number of improvements and compares quite well to the Apple TV. However, both are lacking and left wanting when you compare them to the SHIELD. In terms of RAM, both the Fire TV and Apple TV come sporting 2GB RAM, while the SHIELD offers 3GB RAM. In terms of storage, the Fire TV comes with 8GB internal storage and the Apple TV comes in 32 and 64GB storage variants. Although, the baseline version of the Apple TV (with 32GB) does offer more storage than the baseline SHIELD (with 16GB). None of them compare to the SHIELD Pro which comes with 500GB storage.
Of course, one of the big points to note with all of these units, is that they come with much improved processors compared to previous streaming devices and this is an area in which you will need good performance. While, the Fire TV does come with a 64-bit Quad-core processor and the Apple TV comes with a 64-bit Dual-core processor, the SHIELD comes sporting a 64-bit Quad-core Tegra X1 processor. One which has developed quite the name for itself in terms of games processing and is significantly faster than both the processor on the Apple TV and Fire TV.
To further add to the difference between them, NVIDIA also highlight that although the Fire TV does come with 4K streaming capabilities, the 4K playback is greater on the SHIELD with 60 FTPS support enabled. Not to mention, there is a much larger selection of games available for the SHIELD, through its native additional gameplay options. And of course, it offers full Android integration which is something that is unlikely to be the case with the Fire TV due to Amazon hardware’s typical emphasis on the Amazon ecosystem. You can check out the full breakdown of how all the streamers compare in the graph below.
