The Tegra 4 Handheld: A Retrospective Review

The Tegra 4 handheld is an old device, released years ago when it was considered one of the most powerful Android devices on the market. It features a Tegra 4 processor, which was a powerhouse at its time but has since been surpassed by newer generations of Snapdragon chips. Despite being an older model, the device still holds up surprisingly well, and its performance is still respectable.

In terms of emulation, the Tegra 4 handheld can run a variety of retro games and applications with relatively good performance. The user was able to run Arch from the Google Play Store, which still boots up and runs, although there are some limitations. For example, the Flycast core, which allows for Dreamcast emulation, is not working as expected. However, other emulators like RetroArch and Dolphin do work, albeit with some issues. The user also reported being able to run PlayStation 1 games at 60 FPS using RetroArch, although this was limited by the device's 32-bit architecture.

Another notable feature of the Tegra 4 handheld is its support for Steam Link, which allows users to stream PC games to their Android devices. This feature has been useful for playing single-player games on the go, and the user reported being able to play most of their favorite games without any issues. However, online multiplayer games like fighting games are not recommended due to latency issues.

Despite its performance, the Tegra 4 handheld is limited in terms of Android applications that can be installed and run. The device's outdated hardware makes it difficult for newer apps to work properly, although some clicker games and other casual titles may still be playable. The user also reported being unable to install more modern games like Call of Duty Mobile.

In comparison to newer Android devices, the Tegra 4 handheld's performance is noticeably lower. The device was tested with 3D Mark benchmarks, which were not supported by the Tegra 4's hardware due to its outdated architecture. This made it difficult to compare the device's performance to that of newer devices like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

One surprising aspect of the Tegra 4 handheld is how well its battery holds up. Despite being an old device, the user reported that the battery life is still respectable, and they were able to get good performance out of it for several hours on end.

In conclusion, the Tegra 4 handheld is a relic from the past but still has some tricks up its sleeve. While it may not be suitable for modern gaming or running newer Android applications, it can still hold its own with retro games and emulation. Its support for Steam Link and decent performance make it a worthwhile device to consider for those looking for an old-school Android experience.

Comparison Benchmarks

While the Tegra 4 handheld's hardware is outdated compared to newer devices like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, there are some interesting comparisons that can be made with modern benchmarks. However, due to the device's lack of support for newer benchmarks like Vulcan, which is used by the Snapdragon series, direct comparisons are difficult.

The user did manage to get some benchmarking tests done using older versions of 3D Mark, but these results were not comparable to those achieved by newer devices. The Tegra 4 handheld's performance in these tests was likely due to its outdated architecture and hardware capabilities.

Steam Link Experience

One of the most useful features on the Tegra 4 handheld is its support for Steam Link, which allows users to stream PC games to their Android device. This feature has been a game-changer for those looking to play PC games on the go without having to carry around a separate gaming PC.

The user reported being able to play most of their favorite single-player games without any issues using Steam Link, although online multiplayer games were not as smooth due to latency issues. The device's wired Ethernet connection helped alleviate some of these issues by providing a stable and fast connection for streaming.

Emulation Experience

The Tegra 4 handheld is an excellent device for retro game enthusiasts, with a wide range of emulators available that support popular consoles like the Dreamcast, PlayStation 1, and more. The user reported being able to run Arch from the Google Play Store, which still boots up and runs, although there were some limitations.

The Flycast core, which allows for Dreamcast emulation, was not working as expected, but other emulators like RetroArch and Dolphin did work, albeit with some issues. The user also reported being able to run PlayStation 1 games at 60 FPS using RetroArch, although this was limited by the device's 32-bit architecture.

Gaming Performance

The Tegra 4 handheld has decent performance for a device of its age, particularly when it comes to running retro games and emulators. The user reported being able to play most of their favorite single-player games without any issues using Steam Link, although online multiplayer games were not as smooth due to latency issues.

In terms of native Android gaming, the Tegra 4 handheld is limited by its outdated hardware, which makes it difficult for newer apps to work properly. However, some clicker games and other casual titles may still be playable.

Conclusion

The Tegra 4 handheld is a unique device that offers an old-school Android experience. While its performance may not be suitable for modern gaming or running newer Android applications, it can still hold its own with retro games and emulation. Its support for Steam Link and decent performance make it a worthwhile device to consider for those looking for an old-school Android experience.

Overall, the Tegra 4 handheld is a nostalgic device that offers a glimpse into the past of Android gaming. While it may not be suitable for modern gamers, it can still provide hours of entertainment for those who enjoy retro games and emulation.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the Nvidia Shield portable some of you out there might remember this uh Nvidia released this Android powered handheld in 2013 so at the time of making this video it's around 10 years old it's 2024 and I wanted to see if we could still game and run emulators on this device and given that it is powered by an arm chip that's 10 years old I'm not expecting that much from it but I was actually pretty surprised after booting this thing up getting everything charged up everything installed we can actually still use this device now I do want to mention that this was sent over by a viewer a couple years ago and it's actually in really good condition everything on this is functional battery still holds a really good charge I think Nvidia did a pretty good job building this thing because it's been used quite a bit and it's still holding up just fine and I got to say it's actually really comfortable to hang on to it's definitely very odd when you take a look at it now in 2024 but it did serve its purpose quite well and I'm actually running stock firmware on this when this was released it was kind of the Heyday for Android ROMs I know I was flashing all kinds of stuff to my Android phones I did not flash anything to this and to tell you the truth I haven't done any research there is probably a custom rom out there that overclocks this Tegra 4 CPU because when these Tegra chips were released everybody was all over them now when it comes to io on the backside here we've got a mini HDMI output we can mirror the display or we can go into kind of console mode which just basically takes us over to GeForce now on a bigger screen it also supports Ed a Micro SD card we've got micro USB for charging and syncing the device plus a 3.5 mm audio jack and you might notice we've also got a vent above all of that I/O and that's because this had an active cooling system built in and at the time this was released believe it or not this Tegra 4 chip was actually a pretty high clock coming in at 1.9 GHz got our intake up here at the front so we'll pull air in across the board and cool that whole system off taking a look at the overall specs here like I mentioned this is power by the Tegra 4 S so it's a quad core a15 chip up to 1.9 GHz and when it comes to the GPU this actually had 72 GeForce Graphics cores and it was the most powerful arm GPU on the market or mobile GPU at the time we've got 2 GB of LP DDR3 RAM 16 GB of internal storage which was quite a bit back in the day micro SD card slot a 5in 720p IPS display 7,350 mAh battery also had 5 GHz Wi-Fi because they were really touting GeForce now and this is still running Android 5.1 remember we're on Android 14 now with our phones uh Android 15 is coming in a couple months so yeah we're working with a pretty old operating system also and just to give you an idea of the Forum Factor I've got the a Odin mini which is coming in so much more powerful than this and it is an Android based system plus I kind of want to just give you an idea beside the steam deck we're definitely not seeing a lot of handhelds on the market like this today day but again I got to say this is really comfortable it really does kind of hug your palms and around back here you got a place to rest your finger you can reach these triggers no problem at all got access to all of the buttons on the unit and plus we've got a built-in touchcreen here in case you needed to use the touchs screen for something but we've got the home button and back button plus our Nvidia button right on the front of the handheld built-in front faing stereo speakers they're a bit tinny but they do get pretty loud but I'd say the main thing here given that it's so old with that software is there's a lot of apps that just won't start up including YouTube tells me I need to go over to the Chrome browser to watch YouTube and through there yeah I can watch videos no problem at all I've still got access to Google Play but remember we're working with the 32-bit operating system and even though the apps are here even though we can install apps it doesn't mean that every single app is going to start up properly so for instance one game that usually works on all Android systems that I've ever tested is Real Racing 3 fortunately keeps crashing on me I've uninstalled it reinstalled it tried an older version I just can't get it to run here I guess with the new updates to the app it just won't work on Android 5.1 or maybe even just the Tegra 4 chip we do have HDMI out we can mirror the display or go into what they call console mode and from console mode it'll basically just bring up GeForce now for us and we could always use this as kind of a shield controller for the Nvidia Shield TV so it's just going to bring up the controller icon it'll link up to that so you can use this directly on the shield TV but back in the day with this device there were a few really awesome perks like the fact that we could run halflife 2 I believe Borderlands was also ported over here and you'd enter Tegra Zone you'd have to buy the game I've got halflife 2 installed and this is one that just works so to boot right up another game that worked just fine was Minecraft of course Minecraft works on everything but yeah we did have a few awesome PC ports come over to these teger devices like The Shield tablet also obviously the handheld I believe Borderlands halflife 2 there were a few others and at the time this was kind of never seen before a real PC game running on an arm chip or just a mobile device that you could carry around in your pocket yeah it still runs really well on the Tegra 4 I believe we're at 30 FPS and if I had to guess it's kind of a mix of low and medium settings here it's not bad at 720p but one of the main things a lot of people loved about this device was emulation retro Arch from the Google Play Store still boots up and runs but there are a few cores I can't get working like the flycast core so uh Dreamcast isn't working right now I did try raycast the older app but unfortunately it just won't work I get crashes sometimes the game goes to the menu and then just stops all together but the lure end stuff still works really well here I've got some PlayStation 1 running at 60 FPS using retro Arch and again it's a 32-bit operating system so apps like dolphin we really can't get running anymore because they're all 64 bit with all of the newer chips on the market but I was able to get PSP up and running using PPSSPP we do not have access to the Vulcan back in back when this was released Vulcan wasn't even thing we've only got openg G never came over to the Tegra chips and even then some of the easier to emulate PSP games still gave us issues on the tagra 4 and moving over to something like chains of Olympus we did have to turn frame skip on so instead of running at 60 we're running at 30 and you can still see it stuttering quite a bit so obviously there's a lot of Android applications that just aren't working with the device this old but one that still works really well and even though we've got Wi-Fi 5 is a really good experience steamlink on the shield handheld so I've got this connected to my main gaming PC in the house obviously we're on Wi-Fi with the handheld but with my gaming PC I've always got it set up with a wired connection connected over ethernet that way we can alleviate as much l latency as possible and with it setup like this I've been able to play most of my PC games without an issue now playing let's say a fighting game online connected through Steam link just isn't a good idea because there is that latency there but with most of the games that I personally like to play especially single player games they work great on the shield handheld using steamlink and I'm really glad that steamlink is still supported by this device because even 10 years later you can still get some use out of this device even though there's a lot of Android applications that just aren't going to work on this anymore now if you wanted to play some lower in Android games I'm sure we could get a lot of stuff working you know like clicker games and things like that but going with let's say ginin impact or even Call of Duty mobile unfortunately you can't even get them to install on this thing another thing I kind of wanted to compare here was some benchmarks on this device versus a newer Android phone but even 3D Mark has been updated so much that none of the benchmarks are supported by the Tegra 4 anymore and for the newer GPU bench marks that we run on something like the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 those are basically Vulcan benchmarks and again this does not support Vulcan but either way I've still been having a lot of fun with this device kind of breaking it back out really surprised that this battery is holding up and one thing that I'm even more surprised about is the fact that we can actually get any of these Android apps to work with Android 5.1 and don't get me wrong when this thing was released it was a Powerhouse it was the most powerful Android device on the market be it a phone or tablet or even a handheld like this that Tegra 4 did put down some really good performance and unfortunately you know the Tegra line kind of died off Qualcomm has that Snapdragon that's just beaten everything in the Android market right now but for its time this was one of the best handhelds out but that's going to wrap it up for this video I really appreciate you watching don't run out and buy one of these I mean you saw what we can do with it it's really not that much lowerin emulators steam link that kind of stuff's going to work but you're super limited given we've got 10-year-old hardware and 10-year-old software on this device but that's going to wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching let us know in the comments below if you own one of these while it was relevant what was your favorite game to play what did you do with this device was it emulation was it native Android games those teger Zone games like halflife 2 let us know in the comments and like always thanks for watchingthis is the Nvidia Shield portable some of you out there might remember this uh Nvidia released this Android powered handheld in 2013 so at the time of making this video it's around 10 years old it's 2024 and I wanted to see if we could still game and run emulators on this device and given that it is powered by an arm chip that's 10 years old I'm not expecting that much from it but I was actually pretty surprised after booting this thing up getting everything charged up everything installed we can actually still use this device now I do want to mention that this was sent over by a viewer a couple years ago and it's actually in really good condition everything on this is functional battery still holds a really good charge I think Nvidia did a pretty good job building this thing because it's been used quite a bit and it's still holding up just fine and I got to say it's actually really comfortable to hang on to it's definitely very odd when you take a look at it now in 2024 but it did serve its purpose quite well and I'm actually running stock firmware on this when this was released it was kind of the Heyday for Android ROMs I know I was flashing all kinds of stuff to my Android phones I did not flash anything to this and to tell you the truth I haven't done any research there is probably a custom rom out there that overclocks this Tegra 4 CPU because when these Tegra chips were released everybody was all over them now when it comes to io on the backside here we've got a mini HDMI output we can mirror the display or we can go into kind of console mode which just basically takes us over to GeForce now on a bigger screen it also supports Ed a Micro SD card we've got micro USB for charging and syncing the device plus a 3.5 mm audio jack and you might notice we've also got a vent above all of that I/O and that's because this had an active cooling system built in and at the time this was released believe it or not this Tegra 4 chip was actually a pretty high clock coming in at 1.9 GHz got our intake up here at the front so we'll pull air in across the board and cool that whole system off taking a look at the overall specs here like I mentioned this is power by the Tegra 4 S so it's a quad core a15 chip up to 1.9 GHz and when it comes to the GPU this actually had 72 GeForce Graphics cores and it was the most powerful arm GPU on the market or mobile GPU at the time we've got 2 GB of LP DDR3 RAM 16 GB of internal storage which was quite a bit back in the day micro SD card slot a 5in 720p IPS display 7,350 mAh battery also had 5 GHz Wi-Fi because they were really touting GeForce now and this is still running Android 5.1 remember we're on Android 14 now with our phones uh Android 15 is coming in a couple months so yeah we're working with a pretty old operating system also and just to give you an idea of the Forum Factor I've got the a Odin mini which is coming in so much more powerful than this and it is an Android based system plus I kind of want to just give you an idea beside the steam deck we're definitely not seeing a lot of handhelds on the market like this today day but again I got to say this is really comfortable it really does kind of hug your palms and around back here you got a place to rest your finger you can reach these triggers no problem at all got access to all of the buttons on the unit and plus we've got a built-in touchcreen here in case you needed to use the touchs screen for something but we've got the home button and back button plus our Nvidia button right on the front of the handheld built-in front faing stereo speakers they're a bit tinny but they do get pretty loud but I'd say the main thing here given that it's so old with that software is there's a lot of apps that just won't start up including YouTube tells me I need to go over to the Chrome browser to watch YouTube and through there yeah I can watch videos no problem at all I've still got access to Google Play but remember we're working with the 32-bit operating system and even though the apps are here even though we can install apps it doesn't mean that every single app is going to start up properly so for instance one game that usually works on all Android systems that I've ever tested is Real Racing 3 fortunately keeps crashing on me I've uninstalled it reinstalled it tried an older version I just can't get it to run here I guess with the new updates to the app it just won't work on Android 5.1 or maybe even just the Tegra 4 chip we do have HDMI out we can mirror the display or go into what they call console mode and from console mode it'll basically just bring up GeForce now for us and we could always use this as kind of a shield controller for the Nvidia Shield TV so it's just going to bring up the controller icon it'll link up to that so you can use this directly on the shield TV but back in the day with this device there were a few really awesome perks like the fact that we could run halflife 2 I believe Borderlands was also ported over here and you'd enter Tegra Zone you'd have to buy the game I've got halflife 2 installed and this is one that just works so to boot right up another game that worked just fine was Minecraft of course Minecraft works on everything but yeah we did have a few awesome PC ports come over to these teger devices like The Shield tablet also obviously the handheld I believe Borderlands halflife 2 there were a few others and at the time this was kind of never seen before a real PC game running on an arm chip or just a mobile device that you could carry around in your pocket yeah it still runs really well on the Tegra 4 I believe we're at 30 FPS and if I had to guess it's kind of a mix of low and medium settings here it's not bad at 720p but one of the main things a lot of people loved about this device was emulation retro Arch from the Google Play Store still boots up and runs but there are a few cores I can't get working like the flycast core so uh Dreamcast isn't working right now I did try raycast the older app but unfortunately it just won't work I get crashes sometimes the game goes to the menu and then just stops all together but the lure end stuff still works really well here I've got some PlayStation 1 running at 60 FPS using retro Arch and again it's a 32-bit operating system so apps like dolphin we really can't get running anymore because they're all 64 bit with all of the newer chips on the market but I was able to get PSP up and running using PPSSPP we do not have access to the Vulcan back in back when this was released Vulcan wasn't even thing we've only got openg G never came over to the Tegra chips and even then some of the easier to emulate PSP games still gave us issues on the tagra 4 and moving over to something like chains of Olympus we did have to turn frame skip on so instead of running at 60 we're running at 30 and you can still see it stuttering quite a bit so obviously there's a lot of Android applications that just aren't working with the device this old but one that still works really well and even though we've got Wi-Fi 5 is a really good experience steamlink on the shield handheld so I've got this connected to my main gaming PC in the house obviously we're on Wi-Fi with the handheld but with my gaming PC I've always got it set up with a wired connection connected over ethernet that way we can alleviate as much l latency as possible and with it setup like this I've been able to play most of my PC games without an issue now playing let's say a fighting game online connected through Steam link just isn't a good idea because there is that latency there but with most of the games that I personally like to play especially single player games they work great on the shield handheld using steamlink and I'm really glad that steamlink is still supported by this device because even 10 years later you can still get some use out of this device even though there's a lot of Android applications that just aren't going to work on this anymore now if you wanted to play some lower in Android games I'm sure we could get a lot of stuff working you know like clicker games and things like that but going with let's say ginin impact or even Call of Duty mobile unfortunately you can't even get them to install on this thing another thing I kind of wanted to compare here was some benchmarks on this device versus a newer Android phone but even 3D Mark has been updated so much that none of the benchmarks are supported by the Tegra 4 anymore and for the newer GPU bench marks that we run on something like the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 those are basically Vulcan benchmarks and again this does not support Vulcan but either way I've still been having a lot of fun with this device kind of breaking it back out really surprised that this battery is holding up and one thing that I'm even more surprised about is the fact that we can actually get any of these Android apps to work with Android 5.1 and don't get me wrong when this thing was released it was a Powerhouse it was the most powerful Android device on the market be it a phone or tablet or even a handheld like this that Tegra 4 did put down some really good performance and unfortunately you know the Tegra line kind of died off Qualcomm has that Snapdragon that's just beaten everything in the Android market right now but for its time this was one of the best handhelds out but that's going to wrap it up for this video I really appreciate you watching don't run out and buy one of these I mean you saw what we can do with it it's really not that much lowerin emulators steam link that kind of stuff's going to work but you're super limited given we've got 10-year-old hardware and 10-year-old software on this device but that's going to wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching let us know in the comments below if you own one of these while it was relevant what was your favorite game to play what did you do with this device was it emulation was it native Android games those teger Zone games like halflife 2 let us know in the comments and like always thanks for watching\n"