NVIDIA released a refreshed NVIDIA Shield TV alongside an NVIDIA Shield TV Pro with some marginal CPU upgrades and a handful of new features. These aren't drastic improvements, but the original NVIDIA Shield TV still holds up as one of the best streaming boxes on the market, so we really didn't need to see much.

We got our hands on the oddly shaped regular NVIDIA Shield TV to see how it holds up next to its predecessor.

Design

NVIDIA got weird with this thing. Instead of a regular box like the other Shield TV or an Apple TV, they went with something more like a Fire Stick or Roku Stick. Except, it's actually not really stick, either, but more like a tube with ports on both ends. NVIDIA says this is to let it sit in line with the rest of your cables, but honestly, it's just strange.

Maybe this design makes more sense in some home theater setups, but it really doesn't sit well with mine. All of my streaming devices, gadgets, and game consoles have a compartment to sit, but the NVIDIA Shield TV doesn't “sit.” It'll roll around unless you position it somewhere that the cables will keep it in place, so this just ended up sitting in an awkward place so it won't roll away. Again, I see what NVIDIA was going for here, but I just don't care for it.

You're also losing some ports from the older Shield TV and the Pro. There's only an ethernet port and a microSD card slot, but no USB ports on this model. For regular streaming this is probably fine, since you can expand the meager storage with an SD card, but it's going to ruin your plans of using this thing as a big hub like the Shield TV Pro with game controllers, hard drives, and whatever else you want to plug in.

• Check out the best wireless keyboards for the NVIDIA Shield TV!

Also, it gets pretty warm. This might be because of the more compact design of the Shield TV, but after watching a few videos (and not even 4K videos) it's toasty to touch. Couple that with the intention of this design to be hidden away and potentially not properly ventilated, and I think you're going to have to be careful about not accidentally cooking your streaming stick.

With all of that being said, the remote is fantastic. It looks kinda weird, sure, because it's a triangle, but it feels great in hand, has dedicated buttons for volume control and Netflix, and the buttons are backlit. NVIDIA plans on selling the remote by itself later, and if you're just looking to invest in one for your older Shield TV I can fully recommend it. It's one of the best remotes I've ever used.

Streaming video, games, and apps

I'm probably being a little overly critical of the Shield TV's design, but fortunately NVIDIA more than makes up for it with software and performance. The original Shield TV was the definitive Android TV experience, and no other device can take that crown. Once again, you're getting the best of the best of Google's TV software here.

Regardless of what content you want to watch, there's most likely an Android TV app for it. Whether that's something new like Disney+, trustworthy old Netflix, or even something that's just obscure because you don't know what you want to watch, you'll get it here. The only exception I can think of would be AT&T TV Now, which was always a problem with DirecTV Now, but considering how janky and badly priced that service has gotten, I don't think it matters all that much.

Android TV and NVIDIA's GeForce platform also delivers an exceptional gaming experience. You can't plug a controller in anymore, and this Shield TV doesn't come with a controller, so it might not be front on a potential buyer's mind, but if you want something that can somewhat replace a game console, NVIDIA has an answer. There are a ton of games available on the Play Store, including some things like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 5 that have been specifically built and ported to NVIDIA's hardware. As we noted on our previous review, the performance and experience out of those is just as good as a dedicated video game console, albeit without some of the extra stuff that goes along with an Xbox or PlayStation.

If you want that kind of gaming experience, though, you've got options. There's no Stadia support on Android TV yet, which is odd on its own, but Stadia didn't have a very hot start and NVIDIA has an alternative. Instead you can use GeForce Now, which is a very similar game streaming service but with a much bigger library of PC games to stream directly to your TV. It doesn't have as Buddy Passes or seamless switching between devices, but it does the core experience right, and that's something Stadia has struggled with so far.

My personal favorite way to play is by using GameStream, though. If you have an NVIDIA GPU in your computer you can stream your entire PC library over to the Shield TV wirelessly, and it uses your local hardware. No funky internet buffering, and no waiting on your favorite games to be added to any particular service. If you don't have an NVIDIA GPU you can still use Valve's Steam Link app to handle it, too. Android TV natively supports a mouse and keyboard, too, so you don't even have to use a controller if you don't want to, but that's an option as well.

With the smaller form factor comes some limitations, however. You can't use the regular Shield TV as a Plex Media Server anymore, and you've only got 8GB of storage to work with out of the box. That's enough for your basic apps, but getting into things like Plex or heavy gaming absolutely requires more storage. You'll want to pick up a microSD card to bolster that storage to get into anything advanced.

AI upscaling, more format support

Another big selling point of the newer Shield TVs is their ability to do better upscaling than your older streaming boxes or your TV. We did a full write-up about that feature in a separate article, but we'll talk a little more about it here.

First off, let’s talk about what that upscaling actually does.

If you’re watching standard 1080p content with a 1920 x 1080 resolution on a 4K television with 3840 x 2160 resolution, that means you’re putting about 2 million pixels onto a display that can show about 8 million pixels. Now, with zero upscaling you’d just see a small box of your TV show that only takes up 25% of the center of your screen, surrounded by gigantic black bars on all sides. But obviously that would be a pretty terrible experience, so instead of showing a 1:1 image of a 1080p file, your TV/streaming box tries to “fill in” those remaining 6 million pixels so you get a full-screen image.

That content can be filled in by just stretching out the pixels to fill the screen, which looks terrible, or by upscaling it. Upscaling takes that content and tries to “guess” what the nearby pixels should look like to give you a crisper, clearer image. For the most part now even cheaper TVs and boxes do this reasonably well, but NVIDIA’s solution uses AI and machine learning to take significantly more educated guesses about those surrounding pixels. Ideally it should be much better at handling this than your TV, assuming you aren’t rocking a Sony Master series or something.

But is all of that worthwhile? Honestly, yes, especially on things like Plex content or network shows that aren't as often in 4K. Since the upscaling doesn't work on 4K you won't need it for a lot of Netflix stuff, and it doesn't work on content over 30fps so even some YouTube stuff is out. But I've got quite a bit of 1080p30fps Plex content that seriously benefits from the upscaling, making even 720p stuff look sharper and a bit more vivid. Some people might hate it, but hey, you can always turn it off if it doesn't work for you.

Other visual enhancements include NVIDIA supporting Dolby Vision content, which is something that was lacking from the original models. Dolby Vision is an enhanced form of HDR that allows for the dynamic range to be set per scene instead of per movie. It's not a massive jump, but Dolby Vision does seem like it's getting more popular than HDR10+ and Netflix offers a lot of it, so it's a great addition here.

The Shield TV still supports Dolby Atmos and all of the other important Dolby and DTS codecs for audio. It doesn't support 4K HDR playback from YouTube, though, which is an incredibly odd omission. Can't have everything, I guess.

But support for all of this makes the Shield TV the most well-rounded streaming box you can find. It matches the Apple TV now that it's picked up Dolby Vision support, but if you use Plex frequently it holds an edge over the Apple TV since you can play your own Dolby Atmos content. The Apple TV can't passthrough Atmos tracks.

Worth it?

If you're looking for the best Android TV streaming device on the market, NVIDIA's lineup is all you need to look at. It supports everything you can throw at it and it has a huge selection of apps, and using Android on the backend makes it compatible with all kinds of other devices and hardware. The Apple TV is the only thing that comes close, and that technically only holds an edge for someone that's invested in Apple's ecosystem.

The harder questions come from what other devices you own, or that you're looking at. If you have an older NVIDIA Shield TV, this isn't necessarily an upgrade. The faster processor is nice, but not significant. Dolby Vision support is great, but you trade away a more functional form factor with USB ports and the ability to run a Plex server.

So then you have to compare this to the NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, with the regular model priced at $149 and the Pro priced at $199. That's a hard conversation.

I think the $199 price point makes sense for the Shield TV Pro, even without the game controller, but it really makes the $149 a hard pill to swallow for its cylindrical sibling. Yes, it supports all of the formats you could possibly want and with NVIDIA's advanced processor and upscaling, but you're only getting 8GB of storage and you could get a still pretty capable 4K Fire Stick or Roku for a fraction of what NVIDIA wants. I can't tell if this was supposed to be aimed at those cheaper streaming devices, or if it's supposed to be an affordable power user option without as many power user features.

It's an excellent device, and if you're willing to pay that price for a great streaming experience, it's worth it. But you might want to think about dropping the extra $50 to pick up the Pro and let it be the center of your cord-cutting experience like it's supposed to be.

NVIDIA Shield TV | $149 | Best Buy, Amazon, NVIDIA
NVIDIA Shield TV Pro | $199 | Best Buy, Amazon, NVIDIA