• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.

StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

Reader mode
Goodtwin said:
Perhaps, but the clock speeds would have to be about 35% higher to offset the reduced core count. Again, my theory would assume that portable clock speeds would be right at 8nm Ampere peak efficiency, roughly 550-650Mhz I believe? Because an 8sm chip would have to be clocked 35% higher just to reach the same performance, it will operate in a less efficient parts of the power draw curve. What is the power draw for a 12sm chip at 650 Mhz compared to 8sm's at 1Ghz? Even worse on the bell curve would be docked power draw where the 12sm chip could be clocked at 1.1Ghz vs a 8sm chip at 1.6Ghz. The 8sm chip might actually draw more power at those clock speeds compared to the 12sm chip at the lower speed.

This is obviously just spit balling ideas and it of course is 8sm 8nm vs 12sm 8nm. There is no argument to me made against 4N in terms of performance or efficiency. Just looking 8nm and how a 8sm design might compare to a 12sm design. Once we remove the power budget limitations of the Switch and instead increase the power budget to match the efficiency sweet spot for 8nm, then things can start to make sense. As long as we are under the impression that the TDP for the SOC cannot be higher than 5w, it makes it impossible to square that with 8nm, but if that power budget is now 8-10 watts for portable mode and 15-20 watts for docked, suddenly 8nm is plausible again.

Not advocating for 8nm, still hoping its 4N, but if it does end up being 8nm, perhaps a higher power draw was an accepted part of the design from the get go.
Click to expand...
well the device is larger so will house a larger maybe even significantly larger battery.

again i'm not saying 8nm but there's enough things that point to it being possible.
 
oldpuck said:
Series S has two pools of memory, an 8GB pool which runs at 224 GB/s and a second 2GB pool which runs at 56 GB/s. Ideally, developers never need to tap into that second pool, and you just let the OS live there, and you go about your life. But that 8GB pool is pretty constrained - it's less than the One X had, after all, and much less than the Series X/PS5 - so developers often need to tap that second pool.
Click to expand...
Whoooooa okay, I heard about Microsoft eventually caving to complaints from devs and allowing them to tap into the RAM that was held aside for the OS, but I had no idea the "extra RAM" devs were given access to was a quarter of the speed. 😳
 
oldpuck said:
Two things can be true. A game's load can be caused by the high level of simulation, and the engine can be straining to take advantage of modern CPU designs. Video games are basically a worst case scenario for multi-core/multi-threaded hardware. It'll be interesting to see if the 10th gen goes with 12 cores, or stays with 8. I imagine they stay with 8, simply because engines aren't taking sufficient advantage of multi-core to make the cost of the extra hardware worth it.

I don't know of any engines that are "good" at multi-threading come to think of it. I'd be curious what folks think the best examples of multi-threading are on the video game side. To my knowledge, gaming engines are still using separation-of-concerns style threading models, with some work-sharing in the subsystems, rather than a global work-sharing (or even work-stealing) model.
Click to expand...

It wouldn't surprise me if the best multi-threading implementations were in custom engines by relatively small developers. When there are only a handful of people responsible for the entire engine, it's a lot easier for one person to get pissed off at how difficult it is to get good thread utilisation out of the current implementation and say "fuck it, I'll just rewrite the whole thing". Of course game engines these days are more typically big projects with many stakeholders, and the bigger the software project and the more people it impacts, the more likely it is to be stuck with legacy solutions past their use-by date. The cost of actually rewriting Unreal Engine's threading and task handling code from scratch is likely pretty trivial by Epic's standards, but the cost of everything else around that would be far from it.
 
LinkURL said:
I'm not going to lie, but removing the 2GB DDR6, and counting for 12SMs @ 660MHz, we get just above 4.2W consumption, if we count improvements such as clock gating seems like a possible target.
Click to expand...

15W at 1155MHz...
25% less CUDA. Let's say it accounts to less 20% power consumption, so we have 12W. 660MHz is a ~57% reduction in clock. If we get the same reduction in power (could be more, right? Higher the clock, less efficient we get), then we have 5.16W. GDDR has a higher power draw, and we aren't accounting for the clock gate thing.

Well, who knows...
 
Kise Ryota said:
15W at 1155MHz...
25% less CUDA. Let's say it accounts to less 20% power consumption, so we have 12W. 660MHz is a ~57% reduction in clock. If we get the same reduction in power (could be more, right? Higher the clock, less efficient we get), then we have 5.16W. GDDR has a higher power draw, and we aren't accounting for the clock gate thing.

Well, who knows...
Click to expand...
then you have to add back in the RT/Tensor cores which may cost quite a bit. still very interesting...
 
Hermii said:
If by some wizardry they are able to hit peak efficiency in handheld mode 8nm makes sense. If they are not, it wont be 8nm. That's where Im at.
Click to expand...

Peak efficiency is just a sweet spot in the bell curve as it relates to the best performance per watt. For the Tegra X1, peak efficiency happened in the 300-400Mhz range pulling 3-5 watts. T239 wont hit peak efficiency until around 650 Mhz, but its not going to pull just 3-5 watts like the Tegra X1. Trying to square T239 on 8nm with a portable power budget of just 3-5 watts is basically impossible, and that is primarily why we have been so skeptical that it will be 8nm. However, if it were to somehow leak that SNG would consume about 10 watts in portable mode and around 20 watts in docked mode, it would instantly become very plausible for T239 to be 8nm. Bottom line is that its very possible that it is 8nm, but the caveat is that it will draw a lot more power than Switch does.
 
Goodtwin said:
So.....8nm is back on the table? LOL Who knows, but this does make it seem a bit more possible. It has 25% more GPU cores than T239, can clock as high as 1155Mhz and still operate within the 15w TDP budget. It does make me wonder if the GDDR6 memory is a bigger power hog than we realize. The MX570 only has 2GB and perhaps this is a big reason why it can operate on a 15w TDP. T239 saves die space by having 25% fewer GPU cores, but it also has to fit the CPU cores, so it is probably pretty close to a wash. Maybe some further tweaks and optimizations could get it down under the 200mm2 dies size, but at 8nm, that's probably pretty close to what it would be.

The AYA Neo Air is about the same size as the Nintendo Switch and they use a 7350 or 10,000 mAh batteries (depending on configuration) compared to the 4310 mAh battery in the Switch. Leads me to believe that Nintendo would quite easily implement a battery with twice the capacity of the Switch without issue. The TDP for the Tegra X1 in portable mode is around 5w max I believe. With a battery that has twice the capacity, perhaps T239 could draw 8-10w and still maintain battery life north of 3 hours. The AYA Neo Air has a peak TDP for its APU of 18watts, there is no reason to believe that t239 couldn't draw 15-20watts in docked mode. I think a lot of our assumptions is that SNG wouldn't go with power draw above the original Switch, but if that isn't the case, then perhaps a more power hungry SOC is acceptable.

So why go with 12sms when they could have gone with 8sm, resulting in a smaller die size and clock it higher? Tensor and raytracing cores would be a possible answer. These cores are directly linked to the number of sm's. 8sm's might not have had enough Tensor cores to use DLSS and not enough ray tracing cores to make good use of that technology.

Not saying its going to be 8nm, I still hope it isn't, but after looking at the MX570 alongside the possibility that Nintendo settled on higher power draws than with the Switch thanks to a bigger battery, I would say its possible.
Click to expand...
i dont think itll be 8nm, but i also think that we could see a more powerful docked mode. if the heatsink is engineered well enough, is there any reason to not let it run free?
 
eye0h said:
* Hidden text: cannot be quoted. *
Click to expand...
I distinctly remember a couple here pooh-poohing me for saying Nintendo has a booth presence at GDC.. something to effect of "iT dOeSnT mEaN aNyThInG" haha

Granted, it might still be nothing, but I feel like sometimes a couple of posters here need to learn how to reel in their own cynicism.
 
HankyPanky said:
well the device is larger so will house a larger maybe even significantly larger battery.

again i'm not saying 8nm but there's enough things that point to it being possible.
Click to expand...
7.91" of screen, unless the bezels grow significantly, wouldn't mean a device that's much larger than the existing Nintendo Switch. The difference in thermals presented by this change in size cannot, physically, overcome a disastrous increase in power consumption without melting. Nvidia hasn't broken physics.

Remember also that a bigger battery means LESS space for the cooling system, it's all a balancing act. If the battery has to get bigger, you've lost what little thermal leeway an increased size has given you.

The counterpoint is of course, increase thickness... And become a Steam Deck? This is the next generation of Nintendo handheld, this is the next Pokémon machine, this is the next Animal Crossing's home. Games targeted at four year olds on a device as big and heavy as a Steam Deck sounds like a disaster. I have some confidence in Nintendo, enough to be sure they wouldn't do such a thing. It's still a portable, it's still a Nintendo handheld, at the end of the day, and it has to look and act like one, realistically.

8nm isn't necessarily pie in the sky, though it does seem unlikely, but what it doesn't necessarily do is mandate or dictate a particular size. Given how effective, genuinely, the original Nintendo Switch cooling system is for its size, and the fact 8nm T239 would fit on comparably sized substrate to Tegra X1, an 8nm T239 could work in a Switch body- but at sacrifice of performance they appear to be adamant about across leaked target tests and developer demonstrations targeting 4K60 and the full suite of UE5 features, even if not necessarily simultaneously.
 
darthdiablo said:
I distinctly remember a couple here pooh-poohing me for saying Nintendo has a booth presence at GDC.. something to effect of "iT dOeSnT mEaN aNyThInG" haha

Granted, it might still be nothing, but I feel like sometimes a couple of posters here need to learn how to reel in their own cynicism.
Click to expand...
We know they were showing off tech demos last gdc. Would be strange if they had nothing this year.
 
NZZN said:
Just found this low power Ampere mobile SKU with 2048 CUDA, 4.7 TFLOPS, 96 GB/s, and a 15 Watt TDP
Is this a closer PC match for GA20B than the 2050?
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-mx570.c3919

fpsta7.png
kjai8z.png

Edit: RT/DLSS are disabled and it's even more memory starved than the 2050 in most configurations (4GB>2GB). Maybe not.
15 watts from a GA107 (which is 115w in the 3050) is interesting for scalability of SEC8N though.
Click to expand...
Why are RT and DLSS disabled? All the spec sheets I've seen mention RT and Tensor Cores, on the NVidia website it doesn't say anything, but perhaps that's because it's not a GPU focused on games.
I also found this article from Videocardz that mentions that DLSS and RT are possible on the MX570.
 
chocolate_supra said:
Whoooooa okay, I heard about Microsoft eventually caving to complaints from devs and allowing them to tap into the RAM that was held aside for the OS, but I had no idea the "extra RAM" devs were given access to was a quarter of the speed. 😳
Click to expand...
Yeah this wasnt very smart to do. I thought the memory was a bit less but otherwise the same as Series X......not very smart indeed.
 
Concernt said:
7.91" of screen, unless the bezels grow significantly, wouldn't mean a device that's much larger than the existing Nintendo Switch. The difference in thermals presented by this change in size cannot, physically, overcome a disastrous increase in power consumption without melting. Nvidia hasn't broken physics.

Remember also that a bigger battery means LESS space for the cooling system, it's all a balancing act. If the battery has to get bigger, you've lost what little thermal leeway an increased size has given you.

The counterpoint is of course, increase thickness... And become a Steam Deck? This is the next generation of Nintendo handheld, this is the next Pokémon machine, this is the next Animal Crossing's home. Games targeted at four year olds on a device as big and heavy as a Steam Deck sounds like a disaster. I have some confidence in Nintendo, enough to be sure they wouldn't do such a thing. It's still a portable, it's still a Nintendo handheld, at the end of the day, and it has to look and act like one, realistically.

8nm isn't necessarily pie in the sky, though it does seem unlikely, but what it doesn't necessarily do is mandate or dictate a particular size. Given how effective, genuinely, the original Nintendo Switch cooling system is for its size, and the fact 8nm T239 would fit on comparably sized substrate to Tegra X1, an 8nm T239 could work in a Switch body- but at sacrifice of performance they appear to be adamant about across leaked target tests and developer demonstrations targeting 4K60 and the full suite of UE5 features, even if not necessarily simultaneously.
Click to expand...


Switch is already a big handheld, got slightly bigger with the OLED, and SNG with its 8" screen will be even bigger. Nintendo doesn't seem to concerned with prioritizing its ergonomics around the hands of small children.

The AYANEO Air S is smaller than the Switch and is only 18mm thick. It uses the AMD 7840U APU and can draw 15w in portable mode and the die size is 178mm. It also uses a 7350 mAh battery. SNG is going to be bigger than Switch and will be quite a bit bigger than the AYANEO Air S. The Neo S runs in portable mode with 15w TDP. I really don't think we are in any trouble as far as thermals go. Hell, you can look at videos of jail broken Erista Switch models running portably with docked clock speeds with no overheating issues, this equates to about 10w for the SOC. Nintendo could also use an aluminum back plate to act as a large heat sink in addition to the active cooling system.

SNG could also be utilizing a dock design that is much better for cooling. They already added additional venting for the OLED dock. Hell, they could add an exhaust fan in the dock that siphons away heat from the unit.

Its easy to gloss over the fact that when Switch launched, it was a relatively power hungry device pulling around 9w in portable mode.


Nintendo Switch Power Consumption

With improvements to battery density over the years and some cooling improvements, we probably shouldn't write off the possibility SNG could be pulling 15 watts total in portable mode.
 
Goodtwin said:
With improvements to battery density over the years and some cooling improvements, we probably shouldn't write off the possibility SNG could be pulling 15 watts total in portable mode.
Click to expand...

I don't think this will happen.

There almost certainly will not be efficiency gains comparable to Mariko for T239. The efficiency savings will be much more modest. Starting out with 15W handheld mode would be very limiting in terms of future revisions/ form factors for Switch 2.
 
I'll be honest, if Switch 2 can hit 3 teraflops docked (yes, I know teraflops isn't the be all, end all, but just as a ball park figure) and has good DLSS implementation, I'm fine with that. If that's 5nm or 8nm, I'm getting to the point where I don't care. I don't carry my Switch in my pocket, so I don't care if it's larger, probably would prefer a larger device to be honest, larger screen + larger joycons would be good for me.

I don't really find myself in any situation where I play more than 2 1/2 hours portably and away from a power source without a break anyway, things like long distance trains and planes generally all have plug in outlets, so battery life is really not that much of a concern to me either.

Having said that, I don't think Nintendo should be lackadaisical with the specs, Steam Deck 2 is inevitably going to come so are successors to the ROG Ally and the like and I can see the portable Switch-like PC product category gradually taking off. I also think it's probably only a matter of time before Sony and/or Microsoft also release their own version of the Steam Deck, I'm sure they can get similar APUs from AMD and MS already has all its games playable on PC, Sony is probably not far behind, they would have a lot of software ready to go for day 1.
 
Last edited:
Concernt said:
7.91" of screen, unless the bezels grow significantly, wouldn't mean a device that's much larger than the existing Nintendo Switch. The difference in thermals presented by this change in size cannot, physically, overcome a disastrous increase in power consumption without melting. Nvidia hasn't broken physics.

Remember also that a bigger battery means LESS space for the cooling system, it's all a balancing act. If the battery has to get bigger, you've lost what little thermal leeway an increased size has given you.

The counterpoint is of course, increase thickness... And become a Steam Deck? This is the next generation of Nintendo handheld, this is the next Pokémon machine, this is the next Animal Crossing's home. Games targeted at four year olds on a device as big and heavy as a Steam Deck sounds like a disaster. I have some confidence in Nintendo, enough to be sure they wouldn't do such a thing. It's still a portable, it's still a Nintendo handheld, at the end of the day, and it has to look and act like one, realistically.

8nm isn't necessarily pie in the sky, though it does seem unlikely, but what it doesn't necessarily do is mandate or dictate a particular size. Given how effective, genuinely, the original Nintendo Switch cooling system is for its size, and the fact 8nm T239 would fit on comparably sized substrate to Tegra X1, an 8nm T239 could work in a Switch body- but at sacrifice of performance they appear to be adamant about across leaked target tests and developer demonstrations targeting 4K60 and the full suite of UE5 features, even if not necessarily simultaneously.
Click to expand...

lol I don't think even 2% of Animal Crossing or Pokemon's actual player base is 4 years old.

4 year olds use devices like this all the time though:

71-3SGw5TjL._AC_SX679_.jpg


Maybe Nintendo's internal research has shown them that the size of the system is really not important. That obsession for smaller and smaller electronics I think is a very 1990s/2000s philosophy, these days many people want larger and larger phones, tablets, portable game consoles, etc. etc. When offered small sized ones (like the Switch Lite), those models often sell worse.
 
Machrider said:
lol I don't think even 2% of Animal Crossing or Pokemon's actual player base is 4 years old.

4 year olds use devices like this all the time though:

71-3SGw5TjL._AC_SX679_.jpg


Maybe Nintendo's internal research has shown them that the size of the system is really not important. That obsession for smaller and smaller electronics I think is a very 1990s/2000s philosophy, these days many people want larger and larger phones, tablets, portable game consoles, etc. etc. When offered small sized ones (like the Switch Lite), those models often sell worse.
Click to expand...
That device is mostly either hollow or plastic. A big hulking game machine uses that space for cooling systems and components made of metal.

It's a total false equivalency, it's just not an honest comparison.

"Small" is relative, but it's similarly dishonest to suggest it's an "obsession". It's not, it's a PRACTICAL REALITY. Some people have small hands, small apartments, or small bags! Denying that those people exist and want a device they can comfortably use and carry around is, well, it would be bad for a balance sheet of a company depending on selling portable systems, and I think Nintendo likes to keep their sheets, well, balanced. 😅

And just because you think that young children aren't part of Nintendo's target demographic doesn't mean they suddenly... Stop existing? Young children are part of Nintendo's target demographic, and always have been, and they are a pretty significant demographic Nintendo actively works to please and make games for. What, is Princess Peach Showtime meant primarily for twelve year olds?
 
Last edited:
Concernt said:
That device is mostly either hollow or plastic. A big hulking game machine uses that space for cooling systems and components made of metal.

It's a total false equivalency, it's just not an honest comparison.

"Small" is relative, but it's similarly dishonest to suggest it's an "obsession". It's not, it's a PRACTICAL REALITY. Some people have small hands, small apartments, or small bags! Denying that those people exist and want a device they can comfortably use and carry around is, well, it would be bad for a balance sheet of a company depending on selling portable systems, and I think Nintendo likes to keep their sheets, well, balanced. 😅

And just because you think that young children aren't part of Nintendo's target demographic doesn't mean they suddenly... Stop existing? Young children are part of Nintendo's target demographic, and always have been, and they are a pretty significant demographic Nintendo actively works to please and make games for. What, is Princess Peach Showtime meant primarily for twelve year olds?
Click to expand...

I mean potentially sure, Princess Peach's actual majority buying demographic may actually be a lot older than even 12 years old. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Nintendo can make a Switch Lite 2 later on for people who really can't live without a smaller device, the fact of the matter is today people, even children use large portable electronics fairly easily without much fuss.

The Switch already is proof of that, if you showed someone a Nintendo portable that large 15 years ago they'd have had a coronary and said it's massively oversized. Times change, Apple especially whether people like it or not has completely changed the 90s-2000s concept of "smaller is better" into "I want the biggest screen size" of modern day.

If the report of 7.91 inch screen is true, we are looking at a pretty hefty device either way, so it doesn't look to me like Nintendo is really that concerned with the size of the device having to be as small as possible.
 
Thraktor said:
It wouldn't surprise me if the best multi-threading implementations were in custom engines by relatively small developers. When there are only a handful of people responsible for the entire engine, it's a lot easier for one person to get pissed off at how difficult it is to get good thread utilisation out of the current implementation and say "fuck it, I'll just rewrite the whole thing". Of course game engines these days are more typically big projects with many stakeholders, and the bigger the software project and the more people it impacts, the more likely it is to be stuck with legacy solutions past their use-by date. The cost of actually rewriting Unreal Engine's threading and task handling code from scratch is likely pretty trivial by Epic's standards, but the cost of everything else around that would be far from it.
Click to expand...
I have a toy engine written in Python where I just test out ideas, mostly from this thread, about how far you could push a from scratch engine that only ran on Nintendo's new hardware.

OldPuck's Powerful Yet Unusual, Nvidia Optimized, Multithreaded Engine (otherwise known as OPP.Y.U.NO.ME) uses a work-stealing alogrithm for everything, and it's hella fast, even running in an interpreted language. But it uses fences to manage the dependency tree. That gives you crazy fast max speed, but it also makes it easy for one subsystem to bring the whole thing back down to single threaded by accident.

Edited to add: this is not actually the name of the engine, which has just been called "renderer" since it started as a rendering experiment, but I'm now seriously considering a rename...
 
Last edited:
Machrider said:
If the report of 7.91 inch screen is true, we are looking at a pretty hefty device either way, so it doesn't look to me like Nintendo is really that concerned with the size of the device having to be as small as possible.
Click to expand...
In theory, as long as the device doesn't exceed 600 grams, there shouldn't a problem. Why the specific number? That's 69 grams less than the Steam Deck and I wanted to be funny.

Seriously though, the Switch's heaviest version is 420 grams (OLED with Joy Cons). Assuming the increase in weight is 1inch:60grams, that's around 474 grams, but it'll likely be in the range of 530 grams or something akin to that due to the internals. That shouldn't be too bad, it's significantly off the Steam Deck's manageable but "too much for some people" weight. The main concern, namely for Nintendo, is thermals, at least as far as I can tell.
 
7hatDeadCat said:
i dont think itll be 8nm, but i also think that we could see a more powerful docked mode. if the heatsink is engineered well enough, is there any reason to not let it run free?
Click to expand...
I think the switch 2 Dock has so much potential,
like having the capability of 4K DLSS, higher Framerate.

Like i'm mostly curious how well the dock will be, if it'll be in ps4 pro or Xbox series S level of performance.
 
Steve said:
I think the switch 2 Dock has so much potential,
like having the capability of 4K DLSS, higher Framerate.

Like i'm mostly curious how well the dock will be, if it'll be in ps4 pro or Xbox series S level of performance.
Click to expand...
I'm not so worried about 4k. I'm worried about handling Texture and Lighting in newer engines and being able to keep a steady framerate. If all DLSS does is help keeping a steady 30fps at 720p and/or 1080p on newer games, I'm pretty happy.
 
bmfrosty said:
I'm not so worried about 4k. I'm worried about handling Texture and Lighting in newer engines and being able to keep a steady framerate. If all DLSS does is help keeping a steady 30fps at 720p and/or 1080p on newer games, I'm pretty happy.
Click to expand...
I had a talk with a friend over the upscaled games and honestly I don't think anyone should really complain about DLSS unless it's egregiously added. Pretty much, if the image quality is indistinguishable between the native and upscaled version of the game, who would care? If DLSS is used to maintain steady framerates, that's an excellent bit of news.

That said, someone out there is going to point and laugh at the Switch saying "Aha, it isn't utilizing native resolution", and that thought made me realize how good of an idea it was to delete Twitter.
 
SoldierDelta said:
That said, someone out there is going to point and laugh at the Switch saying "Aha, it isn't utilizing native resolution", and that thought made me realize how good of an idea it was to delete Twitter.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty much down to this and reddit anymore. It also helps that I don't give a shit about AAA games.
 
ILikeFeet said:
if allowed gpus will use max power regardless. so counting or not counting RT or tensor cores is irrelevant.
Click to expand...

But it could be relevant for the GPU clock, no? If the RT and TC would use more power, then the GPU's clock could decrease.

Anyway, I don't even know if it would make sense to say RT/TC blocks would make a difference in this case, because I don't know if they all work at the same time (I thought that, in the pipeline, the RT and TC blocks would work after the CUDA cores were done, so it wouldn't be about power consumption but milliseconds budget for the frame)

Well, I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore LOL but I still don't understand from where the information of RT and TC disabled came from, I couldn't find it. If it doesn't matter at all for power consumption and the CUDA cores clock, then the MX570 actually makes it look like SEC 8nm could work in the end...
 
ziggyrivers said:
There’s always tabletop mode if its too heavy
Click to expand...
People in that position probably just... Won't buy it, such is the problem. People want to use their handhelds in handheld mode. Nintendo is probably keeping the comfort of its handheld in mind.
 
Steve said:
Wonder if it'll be like the PS portal or a regular type of handheld.
Click to expand...

I think Phil Spencer liked some tweets referencing the need for a Microsoft version of the ROG Ally ... so I'm assuming like a Steam Deck or ROG Ally. Basically all their games would already work right out of the box.
 
I mean more direct competition might be good for Nintendo, or maybe put another way, good for fans of the Nintendo Switch (maybe not so much for Nintendo exactly).

It'll probably force Nintendo to work a bit harder and maybe even compel them to release an actual Switch 2 Pro this time around instead of 8 full years without a hardware upgrade.

Wouldn't be surprised if eventually Sony has one too, looking at the ROG Ally and devices like that, you just know AMD would sell the same or similar (future iteration) chips of that nature to MS and Sony too and if your games already run on a PC platform, there's really not even a "porting" process to go through.
 
Interesting part is if they're trying to maintain compatibility with current gen xbox in some fashion. They're probably going with series S ram amounts and less GPU. I don't know if they can cut out CPU.
 
Steve said:
Wonder if it'll be like the PS portal or a regular type of handheld.
Click to expand...
Iirc, someone was talking about something akin to Steam Deck but from Microsoft. They were making updates for Windows for the ROG Ally to have a SteamOS-like option to choose from installed games, so maybe that's where they're going. I'd trust Microsoft to add to the competition of the already cramped PC Handheld space.
 
robertman2 said:
zero chance in hell this thing is anything other yet another Xbox disaster.
Click to expand...

Portable GTA VI could be interesting ... though I suppose Steam Deck 2 will do that too. XBox will mean it's a wide release though and in all retailers with a real marketing budget. Think this product category could get crowed fast Switch 2, XBox Deck, Steam Deck 2, ROG Ally 2, maybe eventually Playstation Deck.
 
robertman2 said:
that won't be enough, especially if Switch 2 gets the game.
Click to expand...

I mean it'll have all the 3rd party games + MS' (now) massive 1st/2nd party catalog pretty much day 1.

The problem with devices like PSP and Vita was always that they couldn't actually run the "real" console games and had to run bespoke, watered down spin-offs of main franchises which required time for a lesser experience and the library had to start from 0.

But a Steam Deck style device from MS wouldn't have those issues, it would probably have games like GTAVI, Marvel 1943, etc. ready to go on top of all the existing PC games which number in the the thousands.

Steam Deck 2 in itself was always probably going to be a whopper of a device, especially since it looks like it'll basically have Sony and MS games.
 
robertman2 said:
zero chance in hell this thing is anything other yet another Xbox disaster.
Click to expand...

Or not? The Series consoles aren’t themselves a disaster in any way. Series X is probably the best home console I’ve ever owned. There are countless factors that have led to the platform doing poorly this generation, but it’s in poor spirits to condemn their next efforts before they’ve even happened.

I’m hopeful they stick the landing and put pressure on Nintendo and Sony.
 
Because of the VM nature of xbox consoles, could MS pull off a handheld that doesn't require the series s builds to be patched out to run on it?
 
0
Reader mode
You must log in or register to reply here.
Please read this new, consolidated staff post before posting.

Furthermore, according to this follow-up post, all off-topic chat will be moderated.
Last edited:


Back
Top Bottom