How Project SHIELD Got Built

The story behind Project SHIELD is a tale of an idea as much as it is of a product. Jen-Hsun - NVIDIA's intense, motorcycle-jacket clad leader calls that idea ‘speed of light' (or ‘speedolight' as he says it). The notion isn't to hit impossible deadlines fueled by adrenaline and fried chicken grease. It's to understand the limits of what can be done and work within only those basic constraints.

"We couldn't prove that it couldn't be done," says NVIDIA Senior Vice President of Content and Strategy Tony Tamasi, who has quietly led NVIDIA's interactions with game developers for more than a decade. "So we decided it could be."

That's because it turns out NVIDIA had everything it needed to build a new kind of gaming device all along. Rather than engineering a one-of-a-kind console CPU and a GPU, NVIDIA engineers slid their next-generation mobile chip - and its powerful graphics capabilities - into the device.

And rather than building special software - and cultivating a walled-garden of proprietary gaming content - NVIDIA opened its device up. SHIELD runs on the same Android software now powering millions of Tegra devices. Plus it can stream games from the tens of millions of PCs built with NVIDIA's GPUs... NVIDIA Blog