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

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Semi Lazy Gamer said:
Microsoft has been asking for more NPU for AI based tech from AMD, which is bottlenecking gaming based improvements.



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yea, I'm not sure if I believe this. at least, not how it's positioned. AMD would gladly do a thing that would make them more money. gaming performance is a secondary bulletpoint for them.
 
Semi Lazy Gamer said:
Microsoft has been asking for more NPU for AI based tech from AMD, which is bottlenecking gaming based improvements.



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oldpuck said:
The same gamers complaining about this we’re bitching about multi core CPUs
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Lol at people complaining about this and saying it’s useless, meanwhile ML technologies like upscaling, frame gen, and RT denoising are becoming more and more important. Nvidia has worse raster performance than AMD, but still wrecks them because of their ML hardware/software and RT performance. AMD dragging their feet on ML hardware is a major reason many current gen console games have such poor image quality and people on the PC side have been begging for a real AMD alternative to DLSS since FSR2 is nowhere near as good. AMD needs to dedicate space on their desktop cards to ML hardware and develop an AI version of FSR in addition to including this hardware on mobile stuff.
 
oldpuck said:
Y’all are making my point :ROFLMAO: You can’t give a simple answer that is also nuanced.

The question was, will handheld Drake be more powerful than SteamDeck and the answer is absolutely not. It’s not a question.

On every single benchmark, AMD outperforms Nvidia on similarly specced hardware.

On single core performance, Steam Deck’s CPU will stomp Drake’s. It benchmarks better and it’s clocked much higher.

On multi-core performance it’s the same. SSD performance? Well ahead. Memory? Lucky if Nintendo is tied.

“How much will it matter” is a much more complicated question.
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A significant issue is... you really do not want to run your Steam Deck at max speed. Aiming for 10W and locking the screen to 40Hz is common to get good battery life. Reviewers and internet debaters will run the Steam Deck at max, even above the official cap of 15W, report the high frame rates and settings, and then lower the settings and down clock the screen and SoC so they can actually enjoy the system. Specially in the LCD model.
 
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oldpuck said:
Y’all are making my point :ROFLMAO: You can’t give a simple answer that is also nuanced.

The question was, will handheld Drake be more powerful than SteamDeck and the answer is absolutely not. It’s not a question.

On every single benchmark, AMD outperforms Nvidia on similarly specced hardware.

On single core performance, Steam Deck’s CPU will stomp Drake’s. It benchmarks better and it’s clocked much higher.

On multi-core performance it’s the same. SSD performance? Well ahead. Memory? Lucky if Nintendo is tied.

“How much will it matter” is a much more complicated question.
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Why do we even compare “raw power” if “how much will it matter” is such an open question now? When does it actually matter? Does “Drake will be less powerful than Deck” actually have any practical implications?

I see Nvidia and AMD GPU performance comparisons and they’re littered with caveats like “without DLSS AMD comes out ahead” and “with DLSS and RT involved Nvidia jumps ahead by a pretty big margin.” Maybe this is important for the PC space where we do see games with poor or no DLSS and RT. But for a console that guarantees its feature set and DLSS availability, the latter statement feels like the only relevant one.

Also with Switch 2 titles being a hypothetical 1080p to 4K on TV, is such a thing even possible on Deck?
 
karmitt said:
Why do we even compare “raw power” if “how much will it matter” is such an open question now? When does it actually matter? Does “Drake will be less powerful than Deck” actually have any practical implications?

I see Nvidia and AMD GPU performance comparisons and they’re littered with caveats like “without DLSS AMD comes out ahead” and “with DLSS and RT involved Nvidia jumps ahead by a pretty big margin.” Maybe this is important for the PC space where we do see games with poor or no DLSS and RT. But for a console that guarantees its feature set and DLSS availability, the latter statement feels like the only relevant one.

Also with Switch 2 titles being a hypothetical 1080p to 4K on TV, is such a thing even possible on Deck?
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largely because we have nothing else to go on but theoreticals. until the system is released and games are compared, it's the best we got

I wouldn't say the "DLSS and RT" is the only relevant statement. we're getting more games with RT and even more games with FSR. DLSS isn't a panacea. it gives better IQ than FSR, but Drake will still have lower input resolutions and people don't care that much about IQ. the performance gains are the same with like for like scaling factors. Nvidia's better RT will close the game some, but just that. it's still power and compute limited.
 
karmitt said:
Also with Switch 2 titles being a hypothetical 1080p to 4K on TV, is such a thing even possible on Deck?
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It can do FSR2/3 to resolutions over 1080p as well. But it would be lower quality and a bigger relative drain on resources.
ILikeFeet said:
DLSS isn't a panacea. it gives better IQ than FSR, but Drake will still have lower input resolutions and people don't care that much about IQ. the performance gains are the same with like for like scaling factors.
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If we're ignoring IQ, then we could do even worse types of scaling for even cheaper, like FSR1. Better IQ means bigger performance gains if you don't have to do like-for-like scaling factors.
 
JoshuaJSlone said:
If we're ignoring IQ, then we could do even worse types of scaling for even cheaper, like FSR1. Better IQ means bigger performance gains if you don't have to do like-for-like scaling factors.
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I meant that in comparison to other systems using FSR while Drake uses DLSS. while you can go lower in the resolution with DLSS for more performance, because we're already seeing PS5/Series games go low, those versions aren't afraid to go low either.

that said, there's more to cutbacks than resolution, so it's not gonna matter that much unless they can't squeeze blood from further lowering settings and frame rate. so there's probably gonna be a floor of some sort
 
0
I apologize for the question if it’s poorly worded, or if it doesn’t really make sense. Assuming that one day the game consoles, including Nintendo’s, will be replaced by cloud gaming services, depending on what hardware the games will be developed?

Would this mean the end of an integrated approach or would it simply mean that the hardware would be dematerialized for us but would continue to be developed somehow as a console? Can we imagine that Nintendo only sells a controller like Google did with the stadia but is still affected by hardware limitations including in the hypothesis of a dematerialized service?

I have a hard time imagining how this can be constantly presented as the future of the industry when I can’t imagine the costs or the revenues of such a model. I mean a switch entirely to cloud gaming is how much costs compared to developing a console, and what revenue perspective does it really offer you to push games that client will not own in fact? I have no idea. Yet I feel like I’ve been hearing from everybody for 10 years that this is the future.
 
boodream said:
I apologize for the question if it’s poorly worded, or if it doesn’t really make sense. Assuming that one day the game consoles, including Nintendo’s, will be replaced by cloud gaming services, depending on what hardware the games will be developed?

Would this mean the end of an integrated approach or would it simply mean that the hardware would be dematerialized for us but would continue to be developed somehow as a console? Can we imagine that Nintendo only sells a controller like Google did with the stadia but is still affected by hardware limitations including in the hypothesis of a dematerialized service?

I have a hard time imagining how this can be constantly presented as the future of the industry when I can’t imagine the costs or the revenues of such a model. I mean a switch entirely to cloud gaming is how much costs compared to developing a console, and what revenue perspective does it really offer you to push games that client will not own in fact? I have no idea. Yet I feel like I’ve been hearing from everybody for 10 years that this is the future.
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I assume most of us will be dead before that becomes practical. 10 years is way too optimistic of a timeframe.
 
boodream said:
I apologize for the question if it’s poorly worded, or if it doesn’t really make sense. Assuming that one day the game consoles, including Nintendo’s, will be replaced by cloud gaming services, depending on what hardware the games will be developed?

Would this mean the end of an integrated approach or would it simply mean that the hardware would be dematerialized for us but would continue to be developed somehow as a console? Can we imagine that Nintendo only sells a controller like Google did with the stadia but is still affected by hardware limitations including in the hypothesis of a dematerialized service?

I have a hard time imagining how this can be constantly presented as the future of the industry when I can’t imagine the costs or the revenues of such a model. I mean a switch entirely to cloud gaming is how much costs compared to developing a console, and what revenue perspective does it really offer you to push games that client will not own in fact? I have no idea. Yet I feel like I’ve been hearing from everybody for 10 years that this is the future.
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The nature of internet connections makes this unviable for a long, long time.
 
boodream said:
I apologize for the question if it’s poorly worded, or if it doesn’t really make sense. Assuming that one day the game consoles, including Nintendo’s, will be replaced by cloud gaming services, depending on what hardware the games will be developed?

Would this mean the end of an integrated approach or would it simply mean that the hardware would be dematerialized for us but would continue to be developed somehow as a console? Can we imagine that Nintendo only sells a controller like Google did with the stadia but is still affected by hardware limitations including in the hypothesis of a dematerialized service?

I have a hard time imagining how this can be constantly presented as the future of the industry when I can’t imagine the costs or the revenues of such a model. I mean a switch entirely to cloud gaming is how much costs compared to developing a console, and what revenue perspective does it really offer you to push games that client will not own in fact? I have no idea. Yet I feel like I’ve been hearing from everybody for 10 years that this is the future.
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I don't see consoles being replaced by Cloud service like the defunct Stadia. In reality, there's much less hype around cloud gaming now than a few years ago.
But I do see traditional gaming being disrupted by Generative AI services, which I guess you kinda can make the argument that they are also cloud services.
 
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karmitt said:
Why do we even compare “raw power” if “how much will it matter” is such an open question now? When does it actually matter? Does “Drake will be less powerful than Deck” actually have any practical implications?

I see Nvidia and AMD GPU performance comparisons and they’re littered with caveats like “without DLSS AMD comes out ahead” and “with DLSS and RT involved Nvidia jumps ahead by a pretty big margin.” Maybe this is important for the PC space where we do see games with poor or no DLSS and RT. But for a console that guarantees its feature set and DLSS availability, the latter statement feels like the only relevant one.

Also with Switch 2 titles being a hypothetical 1080p to 4K on TV, is such a thing even possible on Deck?
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I know pretty much all of the consoles state they can handle FP16 operations, but seeing as developers actually used this function on Switch to punch above its weight. I can see Switch 2 games also using mixed precision a lot to get closer to the other systems in image quality and performance.

To me unless Valve are making Steamdeck exclusive games, I don't expect anyone to take full advantage of their hardware this way, or the Series S for that matter...

This is why I find the balancing items such as the FDE, amount of cache available, memory bandwidth, storage speed, (CPU/GPU clock speeds) and RAM amounts the interesting finds. The more concrete details we get about all of these elements to minimize total system bottlenecks, it will give a better idea of how capable this device will actually be in real world gaming applications vs the theoretical.
 
karmitt said:
Why do we even compare “raw power” if “how much will it matter” is such an open question now?
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Yeah, even graphics card reviewers are asking these questions. The standard way of talking about this stuff doesn't make sense anymore. But no one can quite agree on the correct replacement, and when you're talking about something like a benchmark, the whole point is it's standardized.

karmitt said:
When does it actually matter? Does “Drake will be less powerful than Deck” actually have any practical implications?
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I’ve got an example that might be illuminating.

Control has a custom Steam Deck setup and it’s great. Mix of medium/low/high settings that runs at native resolution and is a rock solid 30fps. I played the whole game that way and loved it.

Drake could definitely top it. FSR makes the game look like a pixelated mess, but DLSS looks good, and the basic RT settings are right up Drake’s alley. You could absolutely put together a prettier version of Control running 30fps on Switch 2.

After I beat the game, I decided to run some benchmarks because I’m a giant fucking nerd. I pushed every single setting down as low as it could go and went into a firefight that generally tanks the frame rate.

It was fucking fantastic. The game was hitting 90fps most of the time and 75+ in combat. The resolution was 540p but with the frame rate that high, popping and fizzing from low res goes away, and it felt really smooth. Made me want to replay the game from the top.

Drake would struggle with this. A 30% raster perf drop would mean my ultra high frame rate firefight would become sub 50fps. 540p on a 7 inch screen is going to look much better than on a 7.9 inch screen, and without the high frame rate to smooth it out you would see every pixel artifact.

In a world where consoles are offering “fidelity” and “performance” modes, you’re looking at a wild arena where Nintendo’s bitty handheld can look better that other console’s fidelity mode while not being able to achieve their performance mode.
 
oldpuck said:
Yeah, even graphics card reviewers are asking these questions. The standard way of talking about this stuff doesn't make sense anymore. But no one can quite agree on the correct replacement, and when you're talking about something like a benchmark, the whole point is it's standardized
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I just missed the days of how many gamecubes duct tape together as measurement of of power. But I guess "real world" use is just fine enough.
 
omniryu said:
I just missed the days of how many gamecubes duct tape together as measurement of of power. But I guess "real world" use is just fine enough.
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I've mentioned it before, but there was legitimate debate about whether or not the N64 was truly next gen because it wasn't a "real" 64 bit console, and it would fail like the Jaguar.

Technology is more interesting than fans want it to be.
 
oldpuck said:
I've mentioned it before, but there was legitimate debate about whether or not the N64 was truly next gen because it wasn't a "real" 64 bit console, and it would fail like the Jaguar.

Technology is more interesting than fans want it to be.
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Really? I had no idea that someone even would have thought that would be the case.
 
It seems to me that it is more likely that traditional consoles and pay-to-play games will be replaced by smartphones and service-based games than that cloud services will replace traditional consoles (both of which are of course unlikely, as service-based games have so far not been able to prove that their design concepts are good enough to be reliable).
 
boodream said:
I apologize for the question if it’s poorly worded, or if it doesn’t really make sense. Assuming that one day the game consoles, including Nintendo’s, will be replaced by cloud gaming services, depending on what hardware the games will be developed?

Would this mean the end of an integrated approach or would it simply mean that the hardware would be dematerialized for us but would continue to be developed somehow as a console? Can we imagine that Nintendo only sells a controller like Google did with the stadia but is still affected by hardware limitations including in the hypothesis of a dematerialized service?

I have a hard time imagining how this can be constantly presented as the future of the industry when I can’t imagine the costs or the revenues of such a model. I mean a switch entirely to cloud gaming is how much costs compared to developing a console, and what revenue perspective does it really offer you to push games that client will not own in fact? I have no idea. Yet I feel like I’ve been hearing from everybody for 10 years that this is the future.
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Cloud gaming being the future is something mostly pushed by analysts and cloud providers with servers they want to rent out. It's not really an especially workable model.
 
Alright, time to unignore the thread! Yes, the delay/Q1 2025 news broke me. That took a while to get over lmao

Here's something I believe hasn't been asked much about the Switch 2 during these... 2628 pages, mostly because it's probably hard to actually answer?

Will the successor be as beautifully quiet as the Switch is? I ask this because I've noticed that the thing that bugs me the most with anything gaming hardware related is fan noise. I know for a fact that I prefer playing on Switch rather than PS5* because of the noise differential (even when it's only truly a problem during those rarer ultra quiet moments, such as BGM-less cutscenes).

Any way of narrowing down our possibilities? I see that the Deck for instance is quite loud (way too loud for my liking), and if I understand correctly that can be mitigated by lowering the TPD. Hence power-draw could be an indicator? I dunno I'm all ears.

*I've never checked but I'm pretty sure I got a Nidec fan, so if your PS5 is dead quiet you probably got one of the other 2 fans. And yes, for those who didn't know the PS5 has a fan lottery problem.
 
Vernal said:
Alright, time to unignore the thread! Yes, the delay/Q1 2025 news broke me. That took a while to get over lmao

Here's something I believe hasn't been asked much about the Switch 2 during these... 2628 pages, mostly because it's probably hard to actually answer?

Will the successor be as beautifully quiet as the Switch is? I ask this because I've noticed that the thing that bugs me the most with anything gaming hardware related is fan noise. I know for a fact that I prefer playing on Switch rather than PS5* because of the noise differential (even when it's only truly a problem during those rarer ultra quiet moments, such as BGM-less cutscenes).

Any way of narrowing down our possibilities? I see that the Deck for instance is quite loud (way too loud for my liking), and if I understand correctly that can be mitigated by lowering the TPD. Hence power-draw could be an indicator? I dunno I'm all ears.

*I've never checked but I'm pretty sure I got a Nidec fan, so if your PS5 is dead quiet you probably got one of the other 2 fans. And yes, for those who didn't know the PS5 has a fan lottery problem.
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I don't see why not. But of course impossible to know if there's any fan lottery or other issues.

I believe Nintendo will very much stick to the proven formula.
 
boodream said:
I apologize for the question if it’s poorly worded, or if it doesn’t really make sense. Assuming that one day the game consoles, including Nintendo’s, will be replaced by cloud gaming services, depending on what hardware the games will be developed?

Would this mean the end of an integrated approach or would it simply mean that the hardware would be dematerialized for us but would continue to be developed somehow as a console? Can we imagine that Nintendo only sells a controller like Google did with the stadia but is still affected by hardware limitations including in the hypothesis of a dematerialized service?

I have a hard time imagining how this can be constantly presented as the future of the industry when I can’t imagine the costs or the revenues of such a model. I mean a switch entirely to cloud gaming is how much costs compared to developing a console, and what revenue perspective does it really offer you to push games that client will not own in fact? I have no idea. Yet I feel like I’ve been hearing from everybody for 10 years that this is the future.
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Cloud is not viable because it offers literally no benefits to end users and mostly drawbacks.

1) It brings back issues not seen since receiving RF signals to TVs in the 40s-90s, i.e. unstable, variable quality connections, and there are too many user-facing issues that will arise from forcing it on customers
2) Most potential customers already have plenty of offline computing power at least somewhere in their home, either a phone/tablet or better. If the appeal of cloud is "oh you can run these high end games on even a phone/tablet display", then that is completely undercut by the fact that phone/tablet displays actually have viable computing power anyway, and are already running high production value games like Fortnite, Genshin, etc
3) The enthusiast sector is completely reliant on user access to local data, they would revolt instantly if they were told user modification is going away, just like how user revolt killed the Windows UWP format, another initiative whose "benefits" were at the cost of removing user modification

The most obvious sign that cloud has no viable short or medium term future is that the two platform holders who have the most long-term view of the industry (Nintendo and Valve, where public shareholders have either limited or no say in their strategy) are not looking at cloud as viable at all. For the other companies, cloud is a potential avenue in terms of reducing manufacturing costs (you're just selling a dumb terminal with ethernet/wifi to users) and enforcing an egregious anti-piracy strategy (via non-ownership of the game), but thankfully whichever company does this will be crucified by customers in the way Microsoft destroyed their console business with Xbox One.
 
There's practically a 1,000% chance Nintendo will release Metroid Prime 4 for the switch as well as switch 2. A bit of a shame only because Nintendo's track record with simultaneous multi-console releases is pretty poor in regards to giving the newer console version any major graphical upgrades. Granted the two examples that we have, Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild, were both on systems that weren't too far apart in terms of power (especially in Twilight Princess' case). In both those situations all we got was basically a resolution upgrade. Of course, the difference now is that switch 2 will have the greatest jump in technology since the N64 to GameCube. So now Nintendo will have tons of power left over that they more than likely won't utilize. We’ll probably get a 1440p or at best 4K version. And if we're really lucky Nintendo may add some RT, as a treat.

Hate to sound pessimistic but I'm not really expecting too much sadly. Hopefully Nintendo will surprise.
 
I've just finished watching Nintendo Forecasts latest video about the costs the Zelda BoTW and ToTK. He had a Miyamoto quote in it that got me thinking about if Nintendo had a minimum sales target for hardware. The quote was "... or basic premise is to create software that will sell ... 2 million ..."

While there's no equivalent of big hits subsidising sales flops, I wondered what Nintendo's minimum sales target for hardware was, that they used to judge how much they could invest in hardware. I guessed a figure of maybe 50 million units, but that's just a guess based on previous sales. Does anyone else think similar or different?
 
TSR3 said:
I've just finished watching Nintendo Forecasts latest video about the costs the Zelda BoTW and ToTK. He had a Miyamoto quote in it that got me thinking about if Nintendo had a minimum sales target for hardware. The quote was "... or basic premise is to create software that will sell ... 2 million ..."

While there's no equivalent of big hits subsidising sales flops, I wondered what Nintendo's minimum sales target for hardware was, that they used to judge how much they could invest in hardware. I guessed a figure of maybe 50 million units, but that's just a guess based on previous sales. Does anyone else think similar or different?
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Watched it yesterday. Aside from the glaring misunderstanding of what Havok is, good video.
 
IMO what makes a piece of hardware more "powerful" is not based solely on raw horsepower and should also take hardware features into account. I would consider Drake more powerful than Steam Deck, but it's all just semantics really. It's like SNES vs. Mega Drive again; technically the Mega Drive has an advantage in raw power (though MUCH smaller than people make it out to be), but the SNES has a lot of graphical features that give it an advantage over the Mega Drive.
 
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PedroNavajas said:
And they no longer want to rent those servers for low profit game streamin as now they have the hot AI market.
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I don't remember where I got it from but the electric bill for a GPU was running 180 a month while the CPU is around 3.80.
I think which is ok for AI but not for gaming and their subscription model. Maybe if they use a mobile GPU like what's in the Switch 2 it will be cheaper but.... at that point, you might as well download the game.
 
Individualised said:
IMO what makes a piece of hardware more "powerful" is not based solely on raw horsepower and should also take hardware features into account. I would consider Drake more powerful than Steam Deck, but it's all just semantics really. It's like SNES vs. Mega Drive again; technically the Mega Drive has an advantage in raw power (though MUCH smaller than people make it out to be), but the SNES has a lot of graphical features that give it an advantage over the Mega Drive.
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Just like cars, honestly. People always quote horsepower because it's an easy number to point to but there are so many other things that influence a car's performance (the car's overall weight, where in the rev range the engine makes its power, transmission gear ratios, wheel size/weight, etc) that cars with less horsepower can be just as fast (or faster!) than cars with more.

Every time people have brought up the TFLOPs comparison I've thought about how in the early 90s Toyota released the 320hp Supra against the 405hp Corvette ZR1 and despite the almost 100hp difference they both ran a 13-second quarter mile.

Even if Drake runs the same or slightly less overall power numbers, that's nowhere near the full story.
 
I think Nintendo probably doesn't have a minimum sales goal, it's just that if there's a series that averages only 300,000 copies sold over a long period of time, it risks being forced to terminate, which used to be the case with Fire Emblem, and Fire Emblem Awakening used to be built to be the last entry in the series
 
The huge success of botw should have convinced Nintendo that the kind of foolproof instruction from the wii era doesn't do much more for sales results, and that this same foolproof instruction is against Nintendo's longstanding design philosophy (which Jonathan Blow also criticized over a decade ago)
 
Vernal said:
Alright, time to unignore the thread! Yes, the delay/Q1 2025 news broke me. That took a while to get over lmao

Here's something I believe hasn't been asked much about the Switch 2 during these... 2628 pages, mostly because it's probably hard to actually answer?

Will the successor be as beautifully quiet as the Switch is? I ask this because I've noticed that the thing that bugs me the most with anything gaming hardware related is fan noise. I know for a fact that I prefer playing on Switch rather than PS5* because of the noise differential (even when it's only truly a problem during those rarer ultra quiet moments, such as BGM-less cutscenes).

Any way of narrowing down our possibilities? I see that the Deck for instance is quite loud (way too loud for my liking), and if I understand correctly that can be mitigated by lowering the TPD. Hence power-draw could be an indicator? I dunno I'm all ears.

*I've never checked but I'm pretty sure I got a Nidec fan, so if your PS5 is dead quiet you probably got one of the other 2 fans. And yes, for those who didn't know the PS5 has a fan lottery problem.
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T239 at 4NM with an original Switch fan would be capable of being just as quiet because at expected performance the TDP is pretty similar.

I wouldn't expect it to get worse, to say the least.
 
Aufhebung RPG said:
I think Nintendo probably doesn't have a minimum sales goal, it's just that if there's a series that averages only 300,000 copies sold over a long period of time, it risks being forced to terminate, which used to be the case with Fire Emblem, and Fire Emblem Awakening used to be built to be the last entry in the series
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They most likely do have minimum sales goals though these will be dependent on circumstance & IP. The bigger issues for a Nintendo IP are lack of a company voice, resources, gameplay identity; if you are stagnating or declining then good luck convincing anyone.
 
Tentacle-tropes said:
They most likely do have minimum sales goals though these will be dependent on circumstance & IP. The bigger issues for a Nintendo IP are lack of a company voice, resources, gameplay identity; if you are stagnating or declining then good luck convincing anyone.
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It's a complex issue, I think "chronically sluggish and stagnant" is a better way to describe games that didn't live up to Nintendo's expectations, not forgetting that Zelda was a game that averaged less than 5 million copies sold before BOTW, and according to the usual thinking, the series was stopped a long time ago for such a huge investment with such a small return.It was stopped a long time ago, but in fact it wasn't stopped and has survived to this day.
 
Aufhebung RPG said:
If drake can't turn on dlss in portable mode does that mean we're stuck with 800-900p resolution?
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Even in such a theoretical case... depends. It's still waaaaay more powerful than Switch, which had plenty of games over that resolution. I sure played at 1080p with the first sub-teraflop PC GPU I bought in 2010.
 
ArchedThunder said:
Lol at people complaining about this and saying it’s useless, meanwhile ML technologies like upscaling, frame gen, and RT denoising are becoming more and more important. Nvidia has worse raster performance than AMD, but still wrecks them because of their ML hardware/software and RT performance. AMD dragging their feet on ML hardware is a major reason many current gen console games have such poor image quality and people on the PC side have been begging for a real AMD alternative to DLSS since FSR2 is nowhere near as good. AMD needs to dedicate space on their desktop cards to ML hardware and develop an AI version of FSR in addition to including this hardware on mobile stuff.
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Just FYI but this is about AMD increasing the size of their NPU to match MS requirements due to their AI PC push that will start this year.

The NPU isn't used on gaming at all. Just for your usual ChatGPT Co-Pilot Windows AI stuff.

For what's worth, AMD might or might not implement Tensor like stuff in future RDNA arch (Specially with the ROCM push on consumer cards). But, so far, it's something they're wholly uninterested and isn’t being implemented in neither RDNA 3.5 or RDNA 4.

And yeah, this NPU push is another disasterful MS endeavor and the whole PC market suffers as a whole. Strix Point was supposed to offer a generational leap in Graphics due to a bigger RDNA 3.5 16 CU iGPU that would be aided by the SLC. And the Zen 5 cores would also greatly benefit from it due Zen Mobile implementation having halved L3 cache compared to Desktop.

While the final Strix Point product will still be a generational leap due to Zen 5 imense leap in performance per core and performance per watt and RDNA 3.5 fixing RDNA 3 and backporting some RDNA 4 changes, an SLC would be a game changer. Instead, we get a dead silicon IP that's useless for the general consumer in 90% of the cases.

Edit: AMD dropped the SLC because Strix Point is already quite big (~225mm²). So increasing the NPU meant they had to cut somewhere as to not balloon even more their SoC die size.
 
Aufhebung RPG said:
Native 720p resolution is no longer sufficient for today's visuals, my personal expectation for switch2 portable mode is native 800-900p resolution, boosted to 1080p via dlss
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pretty irrelevant what's acceptable because the wider audience isn't that fussed about it. we're even seeing 720p in PS5 and Series X games and 540p in Series S games. drake in portable will fare far better with these resolutions
 
Aufhebung RPG said:
Native 720p resolution is no longer sufficient for today's visuals, my personal expectation for switch2 portable mode is native 800-900p resolution, boosted to 1080p via dlss
Click to expand...
720p with DLSS to 1080p is... Pretty great, though? Especially on a 7.91" display, games could probably get away with 480~540p before DLSS if they're demanding. Heck, some late generation games might just have to sin, and do a 360p render with 720p output mushed up onto a 1080p display. I'd rather it be blurry than not be there at all.
 
Aufhebung RPG said:
Native 720p resolution is no longer sufficient for today's visuals, my personal expectation for switch2 portable mode is native 800-900p resolution, boosted to 1080p via dlss
Click to expand...
Some games will be 1080p native, others will be 900p - 800p DLSS to 1080p, some might be 720p, 540p or even 360p and DLSS to 1080p.

That's the magic of a console with DLSS. Even if the game native rendering is below the screen resolution (1080p for Switch 2), DLSS will make it so that it's boosted to the native resolution of the screen.

The expectation should be that the days of games running at below native res are over because rendering all the pixels by itself kinda becomes irrelevant with an ML upsampler.
 
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