It requires a nvidia video card? Fucking LOL, what a completely contrived, deliberate restriction. Hope this shit bombs fast and hard.
I don't think you read anything about it before that comment..
It's both a stand-alone portable console for Android games and a streaming console for PC games.
The stand-alone part is everything Vita should've been IMO: Android, full "X-Input" controls (analog+digital triggers), cheap expandable storage, huge bateries, comfortable grips, etc.
Either Sony invests
a lot in Vita this year or this will be the final nail in the coffin for the console.
The streaming part is using nVidia's own streaming software, which uses Kepler's own video encoding hardware. CPU encoding would be way too unpredictible because of latency depending a lot on the CPU being used.
Even then, it doesn't need a Kepler GPU even for that. There are many streaming apps available in Google Play.
Game streaming in Shield should probably work in a PC with an AMD GPU if you use Splashtop through a WiFi Direct connection and a very fast CPU.
Plus, with Miracast being supported by most recent Android devices, it's just a matter of time before low-latency game streaming through WiFi becomes widely available using hardware encoders from nVidia GPUs, AMD GPUs/APUs and Intel's Quicksync.
So no, Project Shield doesn't
require a Kepler.