Half-Life 2 and Portal get Tegra K1 Shield Tablet enhancements

by Mark Tyson on 21 August 2014, 13:15

Tags: Valve, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), PC

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Nvidia's recently launched Shield Tablet was popular with HEXUS readers and it earned a coveted 'HEXUS Recommended' award in our review. Now this gaming focussed slate has scored exclusive versions of two classic Valve games titles, Half-Life 2 and Portal, to make it an even more attractive proposition.

The two games are now available for the Nvidia Shield Tablet, downloadable via perusing the Shield Hub. However Nvidia and Valve have worked together to offer Shield Tablet owners something a bit better than the average tablet fare as the games both feature some "exclusive Tegra K1 visual effects that make them just as visually rich as the full PC editions of the games," we are told.

Your Shield tablet viewing peepers will be pleased with the "render-to-texture shadows, bump mapping, specular highlights, motion blur, and higher-quality texture filtering," writes Patrick Shaw on the Nvidia Blog. That will help your tablet gameplay as Dr. Gordon Freeman or Chell be equally as gripping and immersive as playing on your good old PC, it must be hoped.

Both these newly released games require a controller to play on the Nvidia Shield Tablet. The Nvidia Blog says that the tablet’s optional ultra-low-latency Wi-Fi Direct Shield wireless controller is optimised for this purpose. The games will also run on the Nvidia Shield Portable and make use of its built-in controller (without the Tegra K1 graphics enhancements seen in the screen shots here).

Half Life 2 costs $9.99 and Portal costs $9.99, for these Nvidia Shield Android native versions, in the Tegra Zone Store.



HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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I was going to get one of these tablets, until i read the reports about the plastic cracking :(

Such a shame as it ticks almost all the boxes for me.
don't want to be funny but why would I want to play Half life 2 and Portal AGAIN?
The price looks high. Sure it's the same as the PC price (although by itself that's more than you expect on mobile), but Steam has regular deep discounts.
Thought they were being offered free with each purchase as part of the sales pitch, to demonstrate the device and show off it's capabilities.

But to have them available to buy at a higher than expected price is ridiculous considering the age of them and the fact 99% of gamers (you know, the target market for a gaming tablet) already own them.

Still, I like the idea of the Shield and if it really can produce the power to run decent AAA / Indie games while travelling then I'm all for it. In fact, add in Steam OS / or Steam Big Picture Mode with streaming via any newer GPU and i'd be sold.

Dear Santa…..
Chadders87
add in Steam Big Picture Mode with streaming via any newer GPU and i'd be sold.

You mean add in support for AMD, right? Because Steam Big Picture Mode is working today via most 6x0 and 7x0 nVidia GPUs.