Nvidia SHIELD Has Been Delayed

Nvidia SHIELD units were supposed to go on sale today (June 27).

For those of you who were excited by the prospect of streaming games from your Kepler (or better) graphics cards, I’m sad to tell you that you will not be able to do that just yet. Sometime in July is pretty vague, but that seems like all we’re going to hear from them right now. To cancel and not give a date is a bit disconcerting for the loyal bunch riding the Nvidia SHIELD band-wagon (or maybe a smaller means of transport). Nvidia got on their blog yesterday and said word-for-word:

“We’re grateful for all the enthusiasm that’s been expressed for SHIELD, our new portable gaming device.  And we’re eager to get it into your hands.

But we won’t do that until it’s fully up to the exacting standards that NVIDIA’s known for. And some final quality-assurance testing has just turned up a mechanical issue that we’re not happy with.

So, while we announced last week that SHIELD will go on sale this Thursday, we’ve taken the hard decision to delay shipping until next month.

The issue relates to a third-party mechanical component, and we’re working around the clock with the supplier to get it up to our expectations.

We apologize to those who have preordered SHIELDs and to all those who are waiting for them to go on sale. But we want every SHIELD to be just right.

We’ll let you know when we have an exact shipping date in July. We think it will be worth the wait.”

I’m worried for the Nvidia SHIELD that a lot of people will begin to feel like it’s not worth the wait. Many of Nvidia’s newer GPU’s had major issues with the last Geforce drivers. Between that and a delayed product launch, it would seem that Nvidia is running into all kinds of snags just before their first console hits shelves. I’m sure if the device had buyers, they might be upset or dissuaded from following through with their orders now.

I can’t help but feel that the drivers causing issues for many Nvidia cards must have had something to do with a part they had in the SHIELD. Maybe the problematic mechanical component had some incompatibilities with the graphic cards and required that they add device optimization for the Nvidia SHIELD that caused a blanket of problems across games that would be streamable to the device. Then I wouldn’t be surprised if when they fixed the display driver issue, it rendered that “third-party mechanical component” particularly useless so they had to run back to the chip vendors to buy up a work-around before the official launch. That’s more than likely a stretch, but most of the time the things that seem to be coincidences aren’t truly coincidences. I hope we’ll get to see how this pans out in the next week or so. In the meantime feel free to share with us your thoughts on what’s going on with the Nvidia SHIELD!
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