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

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Sony and MS have done clean generational breaks with Xbox Series and PS5 but that doesn't mean that games wont cross gen for a period of time. We know PS4 software sales are still pretty good across the board. The new systems are still fully backwards compatible and even upgrade last gen titles with enhance performance.

I don't see why calling this the Switch 2 and saying this is a new generation really changes anything about software sales. As ling as ganes are still cross gen they wont be abandoning the original Switch. And I don't see a huge reason to think most games wont be cross gen until at least 2024. If this device were to launch holiday 2023 however, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be considered a full on new gen. They can't drag the current Switch forever. Eventually, there will simply be a need or desire for new hardware.

7 years at that point we know what experiences the Switch can offer and what it can't, developers will eventually want to make games on newer hardware and even if Nintendo doesn't want to the PS5 and Xbox Series will start to garner more and more current gen only support and that will limit developer support for the Switch.
 
Gotdatmoneyy said:
Sony and MS have done clean generational breaks with Xbox Series and PS5 but that doesn't mean that games wont cross gen for a period of time. We know PS4 software sales are still pretty good across the board. The new systems are still fully backwards compatible and even upgrade last gen titles with enhance performance.

I don't see why calling this the Switch 2 and saying this is a new generation really changes anything about software sales. As ling as ganes are still cross gen they wont be abandoning the original Switch. And I don't see a huge reason to think most games wont be cross gen until at least 2024. If this device were to launch holiday 2023 however, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be considered a full on new gen. They can't drag the current Switch forever. Eventually, there will simply be a need or desire for new hardware.

7 years at that point we know what experiences the Switch can offer and what it can't, developers will eventually want to make games on newer hardware and even if Nintendo doesn't want to the PS5 and Xbox Series will start to garner more and more current gen only support and that will limit developer support for the Switch.
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What does “clean generational break” even mean, if you think that’s what ms and Sony are doing?

Cause to me, both of them are more or less iterations, Xbox even more than PS.
 
Hermii said:
What does “clean generational break” even mean, if you think that’s what ms and Sony are doing?

Cause to me, both of them are more or less iterations, Xbox even more than PS.
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I agree PS5 and S/X aren't really "clean generational breaks" in the way they used to be. This generation overall seems more interested in the machines being part of branded environments than being strictly "hardware generations."
And I'd bet Nintendo follows that approach
 
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ILikeFeet said:
We're already seeing Nintendo's games hitting the limits of the current switch. To keep supporting Mariko once the floor has been raised so much is gonna be very difficult. This won't be a Forza Horizon 5 or a Horizon Forbidden West level of difference here. That only works when you have sufficient memory bandwidth and cpu power
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Yeah I will say Nintendo's first-party stuff will likely be "Built for Base Switch, then enhanced for Drake"

This actually gives them a ton of upwards room to enhance things as they want really due to how Drake would run most OG Switch games at 4k 60fps docked natively because of how big the CPU boost is and the 12SM GPU,

So it really is just up to how much effort Nintendo wants to put into upgrading the game for a Drake version (Simple upres, or something like a full-on remaster.etc)
 
Gotdatmoneyy said:
Sony and MS have done clean generational breaks with Xbox Series and PS5 but that doesn't mean that games wont cross gen for a period of time. We know PS4 software sales are still pretty good across the board. The new systems are still fully backwards compatible and even upgrade last gen titles with enhance performance.

I don't see why calling this the Switch 2 and saying this is a new generation really changes anything about software sales. As ling as ganes are still cross gen they wont be abandoning the original Switch. And I don't see a huge reason to think most games wont be cross gen until at least 2024. If this device were to launch holiday 2023 however, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be considered a full on new gen. They can't drag the current Switch forever. Eventually, there will simply be a need or desire for new hardware.

7 years at that point we know what experiences the Switch can offer and what it can't, developers will eventually want to make games on newer hardware and even if Nintendo doesn't want to the PS5 and Xbox Series will start to garner more and more current gen only support and that will limit developer support for the Switch.
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Except Sony and MS did the regular switch between gen with a year of teasing and revealing etc. Those 2 consoles were 7 years old as well and sales were clearly on a downward trend. They also didn't do much to save the boat cause they were getting ready for a new generation. Here, we have Nintendo that just launched a revision a few months ago, hasn't dropped the price once, as the strongest lineup of games and still many to come next year AND they are currently pretty on par with last year number wise, maybe around a 10% drop which is upset by last year's insane first few months. When your system is selling 20+ million consoles and the best of the year is yet to come, there is no way you release a new system. Switch is currently outpacing PS4's best year, it's no year for a successor.

It might end up taking the lead later on, but it will be marketed as a more powerful Switch but from the same family. That's the difference.
 
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Even MVG said Switch 4K makes the most sense for the name. It’s simple and straight to the point. He think it’ll be announced after E3 and released 3-4 months later.
 
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Dark Cloud said:
Even MVG said Switch 4K makes the most sense for the name. It’s simple and straight to the point.
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To reiterate, that name does have some problems. It makes it sounds like just a switch that plays games in 4k. This device is way overpowered to be just thaf. That could have been achieved with 4sm and the double rate tensor cores of Orin.

Yet Nintendo is going with a monster 12sm ampere gpu with RT.

I would go with either Switch 2 or Super Switch.
 
I think the name needs to get the point across that this is a more powerful console. 4k just seems like OLED in my mind, a console name that had ‘Super’ ‘Pro’ ‘Plus’ gets the point across that this is an upgrade in more than just screen.
 
"Ultra" has been growing on me. It clearly signals a big boost while also referencing the tech (UHD) and hearkening back to Ultra 64.

The only problem is the last name they had a console suffix with a U that was a bit of a disaster.
 
I can't imagine Switch 4k, or any conventional naming schemes that other companies use. It will be something unique, or something that calls on Nintendo's own history.
 
Skittzo said:
"Ultra" has been growing on me. It clearly signals a big boost while also referencing the tech (UHD) and hearkening back to Ultra 64.

The only problem is the last name they had a console suffix with a U that was a bit of a disaster.
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Ultra 64 is a very obscure reference that about a dozen people would get.
 
U was a disaster because they didn’t make it very clear from the word go that U has some meaning.😂


U being the shorthand form of Ultra, thus “Nintendo Switch Ultra (HD) Model”

Or “Nintendo Switch U” for short or maybe “Nintendo Switch U(HD) Model”


Yes, HD being added but put in parentheses and made a bit smaller. like a superscript.
 
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I know it's kind of boring but I can really see Nintendo sticking with a numeric moniker for simplicity, it's proven with Sony, and for one other important reason; the Switch concept is here to stay. Perhaps they'll stumble upon a completely new gimmick to create a new console with in the future but for the life of me I don't know what that may be. Maybe we'll see the same Nintendo, or maybe this really is the beginning of a new approach for them. So yea, Switch 2 just makes a lot of sense to me.

Switch 2017
Switch Lite 2019
Switch 2 2022
Switch VR in 2023
Switch 2 Lite 2024
Switch 3 2027?
 
I'm willing to do an avatar bet that it won't be called Switch 2 if it launches this year. There's no way in hell they'd do that with the price needed and the current software slate.

Pick the worst image you can find for my avatar if I'm wrong.
 
Skittzo said:
I'm willing to do an avatar bet that it won't be called Switch 2 if it launches this year. There's no way in hell they'd do that with the price needed and the current software slate.

Pick the worst image you can find for my avatar if I'm wrong.
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This:
mr-bean.jpg
 
Skittzo said:
Deal.

I'll wear that from when it's announced to when it releases if it's revealed as "Switch 2" or "Nintendo Switch 2" this year.
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I like how you specifically mentioned that it has to be this year 🤭

So if it’s called Switch 2 next year, you win 😂
 
Warlord said:
Can anyone comment on these? I feel like their fake (due to the 1080p display), but who knows

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The same WiFi chip being used seems incredibly unlikely. It's straight up garbage. Why would you build this new advanced SoC with Tensor Cores, A78 CPU cores, RT cores....and include some cheap WiFi adapter that's 8 years old?

This new Switch will almost certainly have WiFi 6 support, if not WiFi 6E. Plus newer WiFi radios are far more energy efficient than the one in the current Switch.
 
Skittzo said:
Ah I remember that. There was someone in the discord who "leaked" that and while nobody really bought it it was used as a decent starting point for discussion
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Yeah, they appeared on Discord groups and then went to ERA for discussion a few weeks later.
 
NateDrake said:
Yeah, they appeared on Discord groups and then went to ERA for discussion a few weeks later.
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Kinda funny that the real specs that come out have triple the GPU cores.

Like, nobody in their wildest dreams would've made a fake leak with 12SMs. And with good reason.
 
Warlord said:
Can anyone comment on these? I feel like their fake (due to the 1080p display), but who knows

Click to expand...

There's a possibility the CPU spec is accurate, at least with respect to the number of CPU cores. Of course, frequencies in general can always be tweaked until the very last moment.

Sol said:
The same WiFi chip being used seems incredibly unlikely. It's straight up garbage. Why would you build this new advanced SoC with Tensor Cores, A78 CPU cores, RT cores....and include some cheap WiFi adapter that's 8 years old?

This new Switch will almost certainly have WiFi 6 support, if not WiFi 6E. Plus newer WiFi radios are far more energy efficient than the one in the current Switch.
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A Wi-Fi 6 chip or a Wi-Fi 6E chip won't really help much if the Wi-Fi antennae placement is bad.
 
Dakhil said:
There's a possibility the CPU spec is accurate, at least with respect to the number of CPU cores. Of course, frequencies in general can always be tweaked until the very last moment.


A Wi-Fi 6 chip or a Wi-Fi 6E chip won't really help much if the Wi-Fi antennae placement is bad.
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If the cpu spec is accurate, it’s probably just a lucky guess.
 
Hermii said:
If the cpu spec is accurate, it’s probably just a lucky guess.
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No disagreements from me. But then again, the Cortex-A78 or the Cortex-A78C being used is probably a given since Orin's using the Cortex-A78AE for the CPU. The question is how many CPU cores are going to be used. 4? 6? 8?
 
Skittzo said:
Like, nobody in their wildest dreams would've made a fake leak with 12SMs. And with good reason.
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It's so outlandish, I'm still having a hard time believing it :p . I guess now I know how people who keep saying Zelda is 2023 feel - seeing is believing xD!
 
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Dakhil said:
No disagreements from me. But then again, the Cortex-A78 or the Cortex-A78C being used is probably a given since Orin's using the Cortex-A78AE for the CPU. The question is how many CPU cores are going to be used. 4? 6? 8?
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Before this leak, I would have said 4 or 6 and 4 or 6 sm.

So I guess 12?
 
Hermii said:
Before this leak, I would have said 4 or 6 and 4 or 6 sm.

So I guess 12?
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I was talking about the CPU cores used for Drake, not the amount of SMs used for Drake's GPU. (I believe the Nvidia leaks mentioned Drake's GPU (T239 or GB10F) has 12 SMs.)
And speaking about what Shpeshal_Nick shared, I'd also be surprised if the DLSS model* also uses a 1080p OLED display.
 
Dakhil said:
I was talking about the CPU cores used for Drake, not the amount of SMs used for Drake's GPU. (I believe the Nvidia leaks mentioned Drake's GPU (T239 or GB10F) has 12 SMs.)
And speaking about what Shpeshal_Nick shared, I'd also be surprised if the DLSS model* also uses a 1080p OLED display.
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I just meant that since the gpu is way more powerful than expected, nothing is off the table anymore.
 
ArchedThunder said:
I don’t understand why MVG never brings up translation or partial emulation as an option for backwards compatibility.
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It seems to me that MVG is basically saying he doesn't expect back-compat which is insane. I def expect that. And no, I do not want to double dip on BOTW for a higher res/frame rate experience... I expect that to come with the price of the new console.
 
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Dakhil said:
Fair enough. Anyway, I don't think 12 CPU cores are really feasible without having two separate CPU clusters (one Cortex-A78C cluster and one Cortex-A78 cluster).
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Since Nintendo only apparently trimmed 4SMs from big Orin, cutting say, 4 CPU cores would also stand to reason. Previously I would have assumed we'd be fortunate if they just cut big Orin in half, specs-wise for T239/Drake.
 
Thraktor said:
To follow up on this, I had a play around with MSI Afterburner, hoping to get a few data points, but basically I've only got one usable point. MSI Afterburner doesn't seem to allow you to set the GPU clock to anything below around 1.1GHz, which is a bit frustrating. Understandable, as it's an overclocking tool, not an underclocking tool, but still frustrating as it seems to be a bit of an arbitrary limit (the card itself has a frequency/voltage curve going down as far as 210MHz). It's also quite laborious to actually set a max clock, as you have to tweak a curve point-by-point to set about 50 individual values pixel-perfect.

Anyway, to test things, I did a short run (a couple of minutes) of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition with ultra settings while logging stats via GPU-Z. I then just pulled the average GPU chip power consumption (ie excluding RAM or anything else) figure from the course of the run. My most reliable setting (reliable as in both clock and voltage were stable through the run) was 1155MHz, which ran at a voltage of 712mV, and the average chip power consumption over the run was 61.8W.

The RTX 3070 has 46 SMs, so that would put a very rough estimate of power consumption per SM at 1.343W at 1155MHz.

I feel I should list some caveats at this point:
  • I don't know how accurate the GPU-Z "GPU chip power draw" numbers are
  • We shouldn't expect power consumption to scale precisely linearly with SM count, there's other logic on there than just SMs
  • This is the measurement of a single card, and my particular RTX 3070 may be particularly efficient, or particularly inefficient
  • This is only one game, other games may consume more or less power
  • My system of measurement isn't particularly scientific, I'm just looking to get rough numbers
That said, if we're looking at an 8nm chip, and all 12 SMs were running at 1155MHz, then the very rough estimate of power draw would be 16.1W. This is just the GPU alone, so once you add CPU, RAM, etc, the full system power would be in the 20-25W range, which is quite a big increase over the original Switch. It's very much at the upper end of possibility for an 8nm chip, but it's actually a bit better than I'd expected. I would have said 1GHz was probably around as high as you could hit on 8nm. Again, this is only a very rough estimate, and real-world results on Drake may be very different.

It's difficult to say too much about what power consumption would look like at lower clocks without being able to test them directly. There's a temptation to think that there would be a big increase in efficiency by going lower, but there is reason to doubt that. In particular, the idle voltage of this card is 681mV, where it will drop down to 210MHz. That's not a huge drop from the 712mV we're seeing at 1155MHz, particularly when you consider the card will go up to around 1200mV at peak clocks. This would suggest that, while there's definitely some power to be saved by clocking lower, there isn't room for big voltage reductions and the associated boost to efficiency.
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Part 2 of Thraktor's attempts to underclock his GPU!

So, after investigating a bit more, it turns out that the command line tool nvidia-smi (which you'll probably be familiar with if you've ever used CUDA) allows you to set fixed GPU clocks, and supports clock speeds as low as 405MHz. This is exactly what I was looking for, however after looking at the data it's not behaving quite as I'd like when it comes to voltages, which limits its usefulness for our purposes a bit. Anyway, I figured I'd report my findings here.

For these runs, I set the fixed clock speed on my RTX 3070 using nvidia-smi, performed a benchmark run of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (4K ultra settings with high raytracing and balanced DLSS) and used GPU-Z to log GPU data during the run. Then I took the average GPU chip power consumption (which excludes RAM and other GPU components), and the GPU voltage. The voltage would typically vary a bit, so I took the peak sustained voltage during the run. I also tracked the FPS reported by the Metro Exodus benchmark tool, just to have it. Here's the data I got:

Clock (MHz)Voltage (V)Power Draw (W)FPSW/SMFPS/W
4050.78137.115.090.8070.4067
4950.78141.618.400.9050.4420
6000.78147.322.121.0270.4681
7050.78152.325.731.1380.4916
7950.78156.528.541.2270.5056
9000.78161.532.051.3360.5214
10050.78166.035.141.4350.5323
10950.78170.538.091.5320.5404
12000.78176.141.351.6540.5434
13050.78179.744.441.7330.5575
13950.79387.646.681.9050.5326
15000.837102.549.712.2270.4851
16050.868120.452.302.6170.4344

Now, if you look at the voltage column, you'll probably notice the issue. Below 1.3GHz, when I set a clock speed using nvidia-smi, the voltage doesn't drop lower than 781mV. This contrasts to the behaviour when I limit clock speeds using MSI Afterburner, where I managed to run at 1155MHz at 721mV. I added the higher-clocked runs to test this, and it looks like everything at and above 1.3GHz is running the same voltage as I see on the default voltage curve in Afterburner, but below this point nvidia-smi seems to set 781mV as a limit for some reason. The nvidia-smi tool itself doesn't allow you to directly control voltages, so I'm not sure if there's a way I can work around this.

As a result of this voltage limitation, every clock speed below 1.3GHz is consuming more power than it should, were it at optimal voltage. If we compare to my previous 1155MHz/721mV run which ran at about 62W, the same clock here would consume over 10W more, due to the higher voltage. So effectively this is reasonably accurate for the range of frequencies that Nintendo would never use, but inaccurate in the range of actually plausible frequencies!

In any case, this is actually a useful instruction on how hitting a voltage floor impacts power efficiency. The last column is FPS/W, which is a measure of efficiency. If you read this from the bottom up, you can see as clocks drop from 1.6GHz down to 1.3GHz efficiency improves quite a lot, as the reduced voltage means power consumption is dropping faster than performance is. However, below 1.3GHz the voltage is static, so efficiency gradually gets worse as you go below that point. You still save power by dropping clock speeds, but you're giving up more performance than you're saving in power consumption.

This is why I suggest that Nintendo might disable some SMs in portable mode. The actual peak of performance per Watt will be at a much lower frequency than we've got here, probably in the 400-600MHz range, but there is a point where clocking down actually loses efficiency, and if they're not capable of running all 12 SMs at that peak efficiency clock in portable mode, then they'll get better returns by disabling SMs than clocking lower.
 
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