I've been blown away at the AI upscaling on the Nvidia Shield. On my fairly large 4K TV, the Shield can produce picture quality that looks incredible out of source that isn't all that great. On that note, the Shield has been an unexpectedly great purchase over the years. Long life of support from Nvidia, runs Google TV, works incredibly as a gaming console for Steam Linking into my PC and/or playing compatible Android games, and hosting a Plex server (although I now use Jellyfin hosted on a raspberry pi). If Nvidia would open source their Linux driver (or at least drastically improve support), I'd be a huge fan. I highly recommend, despite the fact that I'm mad at them for the pain they cause me on Linux. Buy AMD cards if you run Linux).
I also have an Nvidia shield that now sits unused for the simple reason that Google forced ads onto the home screen.
It used to be that the Shield was the one bastion away from ads on Android TV, then with one update that somehow manages to reinstall itself despite being completely disconnected from the internet, there are now permanently ads on my Nvidia Shield TV.
I honestly don't know why it's such a big deal for me, but I basically never use it anymore. It's real shame, I got a lot of good use out of it, because as you mention the support has been going on for years now. But I will not subject myself to ads if I can help it. I pay for Youtube to avoid ads, I pay for Twitch to avoid ads. I can't pay to remove ads from my Android TV homescreen (that I didn't even have for the past like 5 years)
I was the same, really pissed off when they made the change. Luckily, it's android, so you can install a custom launcher. I remember I had to play around with adb a bit, but after that, it's smooth sailing. I use FLauncher[0], but there might be something better out there.
Thank you for this link! I, like a moron, kept looking on the play store for something and only saw garbage. Never thought to sideload.
The nagging in the android launcher has got more and more obnoxious recently. Half the time I open an app it asks if I want to "add it to my discover" with the only options being "yes" or "later". Infuriating.
It is possible to plug your shield into your PC and sideload a new launcher which doesn't have ads, it's not too difficult (tho installing adb is a hassle).
I heard on reddit that if Nvidia even hints that this is possible, they violate the license agreements with Google, and then Google is allowed to yank the play store...
The home screen ads are infuriating. I know it's Android, by Google, but I bought the freakin device. It wasn't cheap. And they added this retroactively. Shame on Google and shame on Nvidia for allowing it.
I used a 3rd party launcher but there wasn't a way (at the time) to make it the default.
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. I don't have an Nvidia device, but I do have an Android/Google TV. I really don't care about all the "recommended" crap on the home screen; I just ignore it all, and use my remove to skip down to the SmartTubeNext icon and open that app to watch YouTube videos ad-free (no sponsor messages either!). Or I use a different button that leaves the home screen and takes me to a file manager to view the files I've loaded on my USB stick so I can watch those (I decline to say where these files came from exactly). These are the only 2 things I need out of a TV.
I've been a year or so using Sponsor block in addition to basic ad blocking. Now any device that doesn't offer both simply is a complete non starter for me.
I mostly stream to "dumb" devices connected directly to a display. I hate smart TVs. You can still use a remote and stuff by just opening `youtube.com/tv` in the browser and you can even use a remote/phone to control it.
It's not like they're showing you ads about shoes or kitchen utensils. It's a TV appliance so.. what else did you expect? A blank screen with just the Netflix icon? Are the Netflix recommendations ads too?
Interesting. Most of the content creators I tend to watch (not that many really) organise their own sponsorships. eg "This video brought to you by XYZ"
For those, using an ad blocker won't make much difference. But I guess if the content creators important to you are relying on youtube's monetisation, they would indeed be affected.
Not sure how else to send a signal to Youtube though, as they only seem to care about revenue. Seems like there's only that one lever that can be pulled. eg "ad blocker or not?"
Interesting I haven't seen any ads, although I do use the Dan Pollock hosts file on my router to block a lot of stuff: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
I had 5 Shields in my family I maintained/advised people to buy, they all went in the trash and got replaced by Apple TV as soon as Google callously and retroactively forced tracking and ads onto the Shield.
I loved what the Shield was, but what it is now is utterly unacceptable.
I like the hardware in the shield but Android TV kind of kills it for me. When I was still using my shield, the UI would frequently get updated, and each update made the home screen worse and worse.
I wish they would just copy the Apple TV's home screen. All anyone needs is a grid of icons and NO ADVERTISEMENTS. There is no more room for innovation here. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. Just admit someone else already perfected it and move on.
I have an Nvidia Shield pro and I have to say it's been a significant cause of frustration for me. 1-2 second audio drops on occasion, apps that have glaring bugs (such as freezes or inability to go forward/backwards) that I suspect is due to lack of adoption, adverts on the home screen. I haven't switched off of it, I guess, but I wish I had something better.
Fascinating, thanks. I've been considering the Pro, but my current one still does everything I need it to and more so I can't justify the purchase, but this makes me a little more content with my status quo.
No freezing or notable stuttering for me. I switched to wired internet for better consistently higher bandwidth videos as my wifi is super swampy. Some applications like Netflix would normally be able to lower you to a smaller sample rate to compensate for bad conditions, but most applications will just be inferior in studders, skips, etc
I dont feel like I share the same planet with this comment. AMD on Linux is vastly widely better in almost every way. Nvidia is a terrible partner & the binary/closed/proprietary drivers they offer have tons of wrinkles/issues, and whether Nvidia even bothers supporting modern capabilities everyone else agrees on is forever & seemingly always will be in question.
Nvidia's whole role in life seems to be competing against standards. Everyone else heads one way, Nvidia tries to out-compete by making their own. Oh great, there's DLSS support in the new binary driver... FSR only works because AMD did it at a share-able level. FreeDesktop is making GBM? Let's invent EGLStreams & insist on that for a decade. Nvidia has no visible cooperative spirit.
AMD has good drivers, super reliable, worked on by a wide variety of the gaming/computer-graphics industry/world. There's a huge trove of Proton games that run exceedingly well & without fail: proof positive that AMD has the situation down.
Some people's planet is graphics-only, and for them AMD is a great choice.
AMD is pretty great on Linux so long as you only ever want graphics. Once you want anything else out of their very-good-on-paper hardware, the experience starts to break down. You have to manually install/uninstall/reinstall their ever-shifting compute driver(s) and which driver you install (and the cadence at which said driver is updated, particularly for newer kernels) depends heavily on the device you have. E.g. I have a 5700XT and W5700, very similar hardware, yet supported by two very different drivers (I'll let you guess which one lags much farther behind - hint, it's for the more expensive card).
In contrast, Nvidia's driver has essentially always worked - I install the same driver on all my systems, and it gets updated frequently enough that it's always compatible with the current Ubuntu kernels. Over a dozen or so machines (personal, not counting work) over the last ~15 years, I've only encountered one or two serious issues with the Nvidia driver stack. Compare that to ~5 AMD machines over the last ~6 years where I've encountered at least one major issue per machine each year with the AMD driver stack.
Since when is FSR the standard, or even a standard at all? A part from AMD using it.
Also, in my experience Nvidia works just fine on linux, you just have to install their drivers. I literally never had an issue with them, and I use it professionally and for games. AMD is probably better if you want bleeding edge updates or use a rolling release distro, but the downside is that you still have to contend with some weird driver issues that aren't magically fixed just because the code is open source.
While FSR isn't a standard, AMD at least put effort into getting it working on competing Nvidia cards.
Yes, things mostly work when you install the Nvidia Linux drivers. But even on a Ubuntu LTS I've had updates break the Nvidia driver, sleep is a 50/50 toss up whether it resumes broken too. And that's on my desktop and ignoring the giant PITA of using a laptop with hybrid graphics. Using the Nvidia drivers also greatly complicates using a Libre distro like Debian or Guix because obviously they're non-free. Plus until the past year or so Wayland has just been essentially a non-starter with Nvidia even with drivers because of their choices.
I agree that you shouldn't use nvidia if you want any distro that prefers libre software. For most regular users it's just fine, except for wayland as you said. I wonder if nvidia has any plans w.r.t wayland support. Everything still works with X but wayland has finally shaped up to probably displace it.
The one major downside I'm experiencing using an Nvidia card (980 Ti), is sleep/resume not working. eg at resume time the screen rarely powers back on, then the system hard locks with the kernel traceback indicating an nvidia problem
The whole power off/power on thing instead doesn't take all that long, but it would be more convenient to just have a working sleep/resume.
AMD decided that my APU card wasn't worth their time on the new open source driver. fxglr => OpenGL 4.1, AMD new open source driver => OpenGL 3.3, without hardware video acceleration.
Secondly, good luck having a go at any compute framework offering from AMD on Linux, unless working for some research lab doing HPC.
Yeah sadly agree, depending on what you want. If you want OpenCL, you're absolutely right. The AMD PRO driver is even worse than the Nvidia driver as it only supports old kernels and install process is terrible.
Is this true? I'm in the market for an AMD card just to switch over to linux. I'm on an old 1080.
Most discussions centered around the various linux communities seem to parrot that AMD is the way to go now because of open source drivers etc. I always wonder how much of it is an echo chamber.
I run Linux on everything, and have a system with nvidia card and one with AMD, so speaking from real experience rather than echo chamber regurgitation (which is definitely a problem in this space so good to be aware of it). I will go AMD every time for gaming and general dual/triple screen monitors. I would only go Nvidia if I needed CUDA (such as for machine learning).
If you need OpenCL or if you go Nvidia and need the proprietary driver, it will make distros like Fedora (my favorite), Arch, etc a lot more difficult as they stay very current on kernels (which is great for hardware compatibility). Nvidia is better than AMD in this regard if you need the AMD pro then you just won't be able to run Fedora. If you don't mind Ubuntu, then you'll be ok. It's well supported for Nvidia drivers and AMD Pro.
I have been amazed at how well everything "just works" with AMD on Fedora, and for that reason AMD is my default.
It depends. If you are willing to download proprietary drivers from nvidia, it literally just works. Though I'd probably suggest not getting on a rolling release distro, or any distro that is focused on mostly sticking with libre/foss solutions. Ubuntu works great with non free drivers, out of the box, so just use that. Kernel updates might be tricky on some distros, so sticking with more stable releases is preferable in my experience
(I have used AMD and NVIDIA cards, including a 4 GTX1070 cluster a few years back with mostly little issues on both. Also used GCN andRDNA1, and now I use nvidia on ubuntu for work and it just works.)
I don't agree with this. I've been using an Ubuntu system for ages with Nvidia and it regularly needs a reinstall of the drivers when it randomly decides to come up in some silly low resolution, like 320x240 or something.
With the first-party NVidia drivers? I've never had that happen or even heard of it happening before now. Admittedly I don't use Ubuntu much, and they sound like the kind of distro that would silently auto-update your kernel or something, which would produce that kind of failure mode? (Which is at least a clean immediate failure on reboot that you can fix immediately, rather than something that crashes in the middle of your session destroying your work - as bad as it is, that still sounds a lot better than my AMD card experience).
Whereas I've used linux on several systems with AMD/ATi cards and they've always been flaky.
It only happens on a reboot, not while I'm using it, and only maybe once a month, but it's still annoying because I have to ssh in to reinstall the drivers every time.
And here I was all hyped that AMD would be my savior. I hope you're wrong!!
I'll find out for myself the next time I upgrade and I switch the current AMD card that I'm using on my Windows PC into the ubuntu system.
If you're manually installing them outside of Ubuntu package management then you need to reinstall them every time you upgrade your kernel. (This is a design decision by Linux to make life harder for closed source drivers, there's nothing Nvidia can do about it)
In my experience the ubuntu nvidia packages were hopeless, I forget exactly what it was but I think even basic stuff like hardware video decoding was not working.
Anyway just basic stuff wasn't working and IIRC the GPU fans would stay at 100% all the time. Just terribly broken.
I'm overall happy with the .run drivers from the site except when they come up at the wrong resolution and need reinstalling as I described.
I recently switched back from AMD -> Nvidia and couldn't be happier. Other than some issues with an inadvertent install blocking the kernel module it has been pretty much flawless.
Could you give an example of a TV show that blew you away when processed with Nvidia Shield's upscaling? I tried the feature while streaming HBO's Sopranos, going from 1080p to 4k and it didn't look any better to me, just slightly different with occasional artifacts. I didn't understand the hype around this feature.
I believe how good your TV's native upscaling will also be a factor in how improved the Shield's implementation looks.
I can: Star Trek DS9 (DVD rips). I actually had forgotten the Shield was supposed to be doing AI upscaling since a lot of what I watched for a while was current.
I was midway through the series when I traveled somewhere else and used a Roku on a different TV - and it was instantly noticeable. When I got home, I plugged in a Chromecast Google TV to my TV (LG OLED) and watched parts of an episode.
This happened to me with TNG! I was blown away by the picture quality. That's not something my wife usually notices, but even she commented about how good it looked. I later watched it on a different device and the quality was noticeably worse.
> The Shield upscaler works, but if you have an eye for quality it is terrible. The sharpening it uses leaves a very noticeable sharpening ring around edges, most noticeable on animated content. It will also cause weird artifacts to pop up on live action content.
I'm tempted to get one, but it doesn't support HDR+ and some DV profiles, and AVI. Hopefully once the new Nintendo Switch comes out (as that's been the cadence for new Shields) an updated version will come out with updated support.
My biggest issue with the Shield is that they still have not implemented refresh rate match across the OS, which all it will take is an update to the OS since google has implemented it.
For the newer GPUs nvidia's open kernel modules have created less hair pulling for me and are much more comparable to amdgpu than the traditional modules. Recently I was reading Nouveau is working on re-clocking support on newer GPUs via GSP support which is just starting to be upstreamed, that'll be even nicer if it materializes.
It's good that there's at least some way to load the whole scmorgasboard of proprietary drivers/firmware now that doesnt constantly break, but this is still so far from great.
Nvidia picks & chooses what to implement. If they deign do work at all. And actually open-source Nouveau is wonderful, but wow, they have like 1/20th the chip-maker resources to read-from/work-with & 1/20th the developer headcount of Intel or AMD open-source driver development. Phoronix is posting RADV stories every other week with cutting edge industry folk making this or that innovation, & Noveau shows up like quarterly maybe.
The dearth of Nouveau interest is largely to do with the last 4 generations of cards being limited to the power saving clock speed. The new method of using the GSP in the open driver will remove that limitation and allow work done on Nouveau to actually be usable again.
Yes, another + from me for the shield. After ~ 5 years now, still running great. Using it for Kodi/SmartYoutube/Steam-streaming. Only had to remove the inner dust last year
I know that from the DaVinci Resolve forums and subreddit, everyone using AMD has all sorts of pain-in-the-arse problems that just don't happen with NVidia, even on Windows.
Many users who are happy with "I want a GPU to drive my display and maybe game" are pleased with the current state of AMD - and that's fine. However, that population rarely goes beyond "how many FPS am I getting?". That population regularly complains about the Nvidia closed-source/binary driver situation. A lot of that criticism (from their point of view) is fair - although I've never had issues with the binary driver and as seen in this thread I'm not alone.
However, if they were to expect even just a little bit more - ML, reliable and usable hardware video encoding/decoding, etc they'd quickly realize what we have. The closed-source Nvidia driver is remarkable capable and consistent (from a functionality perspective) supporting every single feature and function of any and every card that says "Nvidia" on it across multiple platforms. From nearly decade-old laptop GPUs to the latest and greatest H100 datacenter GPU and everything in between. This is before you even get to the dozens of libraries Nvidia supports and provides (like cuDNN, TensorRT, etc) that have the same consistent, reliable, and cross-platform functionality.
Again, I understand their perspective and I don't look down on them or their simple use case (gaming on desktop) but in 2023 that's an extremely low bar. There's also a lot of criticism of the Nvidia price point - but those of us who are making full utilization of our hardware and supported features balk at that criticism. What's also interesting is the more buggy and less supported also closed-source (to my knowledge) AMD Pro driver that's required to do anything more than game. So at this point you're still not going to please the open source community and the functionality and experience is worse in every aspect.
My 4090s will not only beat AMD top of the line on just about every gaming benchmark, in seconds (or simultaneously) I can be training an ML model, encoding video, upscaling, doing realtime noise suppression, etc. The functionality fundamentally supported by that driver is amazing. When you look at it from that standpoint an Nvidia card being (at most) 3x the price point is perfectly reasonable. I'm thrilled to spend $1000 more if it means I can actually use the card for what I need and I save many, many hours of my time. In terms of total value it's not even close.
The increase in value, utility, and time returned is astounding and (to many of us) more than justifies the driver situation and cost. I support competition and have tried several times over the years to get ROCm to perform the most basic ML tasks - it's a blackhole of wasted time, energy, and effort (starting with the AMDPro driver). AMD clearly just doesn't care - and even if they decided to throw everything they have at it Nvidia has a decade-plus head start.
I truly wish the AMD software situation was better but I've been let down too many times to be hopeful I will be making anything approaching full use of any AMD GPU anytime in the near future.
