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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)
- Thread starter Dakhil
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Stinkmeiser45
Piranha Plant
I don't know why people assume Zelda will launch with Drake.
First, a lot of people would be very angry because they got the "inferior" version, because most probably will not upgrade to Drake for a while and wont want to wait years to buy this. You cant compare this to the Wii U because only 12m people bought that. Nintendo would be making a lot of people angry for no particular reason.
But I also don't think it would be a very good system seller for drake. Drake is much stronger than the switch. Even if they boost the footage we've seen up to 4k, that is going to severely undersell what the device can do. You want your release title to push the hardware, to impress upon consumers the benefits of this new device. And just taking a standard switch game and making it 4k is a really low bar for the drake, which could probably do that without even using DLSS. If this is in fact a pro device and not a successor then at least launch with a big third party game the switch cant run like Elden Ring.
First, a lot of people would be very angry because they got the "inferior" version, because most probably will not upgrade to Drake for a while and wont want to wait years to buy this. You cant compare this to the Wii U because only 12m people bought that. Nintendo would be making a lot of people angry for no particular reason.
But I also don't think it would be a very good system seller for drake. Drake is much stronger than the switch. Even if they boost the footage we've seen up to 4k, that is going to severely undersell what the device can do. You want your release title to push the hardware, to impress upon consumers the benefits of this new device. And just taking a standard switch game and making it 4k is a really low bar for the drake, which could probably do that without even using DLSS. If this is in fact a pro device and not a successor then at least launch with a big third party game the switch cant run like Elden Ring.
Tentacle-tropes
Kremling
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Well... yeah, I don't think Nintendo's going to say "BOTW2 only! Third parties go away!"
Stinkmeiser45
Piranha Plant
I probably should have phrased it better. What I mean is I don't think Nintendo is specifically trying to line up the BotW 2 launch date with Drake, for the reasoning that it wouldn't be a good system seller anyway. I think it's been delayed simply because it's not done.
The big thing for me regarding BotW 2 is that it's clearly a switch game. It's not a Drake game that had cut backs to run on the switch, it is a switch game that may later see improvements (primarily resolution and/or framerate) on the drake. And so it doesn't strike me as Nintendo using this to sell their next device.
Stinkmeiser45
Piranha Plant
I don't see how that leak could possibly be true. Whether the drake is coming late this year or early next year it's obviously not in production yet, so how could a factory leak it?
MP!
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Making people angry is never a good reason not to release a product and make tons of money
Dark Cloud
Warpstar Knight
Next week Nintendo is going to talk. The answer will become clearer.
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Prototyping and preproduction testing? i.e. the exact same thing we saw with the Switch Lite leak back in April 2019.
Awesomegames23
Irony
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Yeah, nintendo may want a few hundred so they can break them via destructive testing to get material strength data.
Future Boy Nemo
Daydream Believer
As you said yourself, BOTW2 won't be a cut down game on Switch, as Switch is its primary target. A Drake version might be prettier, but the Switch version won't be missing anything that it wouldn't have lacked anyway. The people who care about playing Zelda day one at the highest resolution and frame rate are exactly the sort of people who buy consoles early in their life cycle. People who waited until 2020 or later to buy a Switch were fine not playing BOTW in 2017, after all, and now they'll be able to play the sequel right when it comes out, with performance likely similar to the first game.
Even when next-gen (now current, I suppose) updates for games like GTA V and Witcher 3 are announced ahead of time, those games continue to sell well despite players knowing a better version is coming.
Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but was there any outcry from PS4 players that Sony is published PS5 versions of Horizon 2, Miles Morales, or GoW Ragnarok? Because if anything I've (anecdotally) seen the opposite plenty of times, a minority of PS5 players complaining that crossgen is holding games back.
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I mean, there's no may about it. This is exactly what they always do with new hardware, the proof is in that April 2019 leak of the Switch Lite backplate.
And in April 2022 we have a leak about a new Switch backplate or back piece.
YolkFolk
Tingle
Didn’t the PS4 get ‘inferior’ versions of Horizon 2, GT7 and other games?
Blue Monty
Inkling
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There wasn't any outcry from PS4 players, why they would complain when getting the games is more than they expected? GT7 was announced as PS5 exclusive first and all these games were expected to also be PS5 exclusive so getting them was good enough. In this case is different but I don't think is anything major if the performance of BOTW 2 it's not affected by the Drake being the target platform and BOTW 2 running badly on the Switch due to it.
D
Deleted member 887
Guest
Because a factory works for months before production to build preproduction prototypes and verify assembly lines. My step-dad was a machinist and the garage would be strewn with molds and tooling for The Next Hot Christmas Toy as early as March.
As @Skittzo points out, this happened with the Lite. There were a number of backplate leaks on Twitter that were mostly ignored as fakes till the Lite actually hit. Even worse than that, they were considered such obvious fakes that they didn't get a lot of press, and they didn't resurface till a couple months ago.
There are multiple indications that "mass production" is in the nearish future. If the hardware is announced in the next six months, all those things will go together and make it "obvious" it was coming. If it doesn't then in retrospect it will all be "obvious" the leaks were fake or the signs misinterpreted. Right now, things are fuzzy.
I wasn't following the Nintendo fan scene much in the Wii->Switch era, so I have no sense how much chatter there was about the DSi/New 3DS in advance of the announcement, so I don't have anything to compare the current level of rumor to.
I do think that this thread, this community is in a very odd place. Usually, groups like us, the Nintendo tech nerds, are gaming out the specs of the hardware we know is coming, trying to figure out what Nintendo's game is. Now we have multiple consistent stories about the nature of the hardware, up to and including a data breach from Nvidia that ties together all the previous rumors nicely - but we know little about how imminent that hardware is.
The revision/successor/name/timing discussion can get tiresome, but it's the natural consequence of this weird moment. I feel pretty sure that something will give soon - either there has been a significant blow to Nintendo's Fall 2022 schedule (which I think will start filtering down in dev-related chatter) or that is on schedule and production leads to chatter from manufacturers.
The disappointment for me, personally, won't be if the hardware doesn't release soon. It will be if it does and it goes the way of the New 3DS, where the additional power does little for the games I actually play. While May is pretty quiet, the next 12 months are going to be full of games I want to play on my Switch, my investment is mostly in just in playing the speculation game, using my (non-gaming related) technical knowledge to suss out the wheat from the chafe and see how much we can get right.
Awesomegames23
Irony
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It could even be the same person leaking these parts too.
D
Deleted member 645
Guest
Is there a new leak or rumor?
Kevin
Chain Chomp
Just dust and echoes lol. No news in a very long time.
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We're just discussing the rumor from China from a few weeks ago about a new Switch back piece noticed in a factory that makes back parts for Nintendo.
... are... you actually reading the thread? Or this page even?
Yes, there was absolutely a rumor from just a few weeks ago about a new Switch backpiece from a factory in China, originating from a Chinese forum. Is it a reliable rumor? Who the hell knows. But it's a rumor.
Kevin
Chain Chomp
Right that was weeks ago with no follow up. I thought the poster was asking about recent rumors as in the last week or so. Sorry for the confusion.
kvetcha
hoopy frood
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If you ignore that this is literally what Nintendo did with BotW, a Wii U game.
MP!
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And twilight princess
A GameCube game for Wii
SiG
Chain Chomp
“How much Nintendium do you think they’ll utilize this time?”
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There was a follow-up post shared just a few days ago but when you said "no news in a very long time" I assumed you meant months.
Anyway with the context of this page I figured they were asking about this particular rumor.
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Hell, base PS4 owners have been getting inferior versions of the games the minority PS4 Pro owners have been getting for the majority of the platform's life.
Stinkmeiser45
Piranha Plant
This is a silly comparison. BotW 2 was announced for the switch years ago. Every piece of marketing has been about it on the switch. If they then make the best way to experience it on the switch 2 people will definitely feel duped. It's not the same as announcing games for both. The arguments I'm making assuming Nintendo doesn't want to piss off their customers, though you seem to think they don't care. Remember, we are not the only audience for Nintendo consoles. Most people will not buy Drake for years after it releases.
Stinkmeiser45
Piranha Plant
I addressed this in my own post which you did not read.
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They launched Twilight Princess on the Wii and Gamecube.
I wouldn't put it past them.
Kevin
Chain Chomp
I apologize I must have missed that. Been fighting off a cold the past week so my mind has been pretty hazy. Do you mind summarizing what was said and your opinion if you feel it's a credible rumor or not?
YolkFolk
Tingle
Don’t agree at all. In fact I’d say you’re completely wrong.
The history of old and new consoles is absolutely full of examples of new consoles getting better versions of games originally announced for older consoles.
BotW2 running at a better resolution on a Switch successor isn’t going to piss anyone off. Switch will still be getting the game and run it as well as it always would have done and on day 1.
If people can have the option of running an even nicer version of the game then that’s more of a positive. Put it this way, they‘ll be more people moaning about having to play the game at 720p then there would be about a 4K version of the game being available.
We also haven’t seen any gameplay segments longer than a handful of seconds. The game hasn’t really even had a proper reveal yet for all intents and purposes.
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YolkFolk
Tingle
And what an absolutely brilliant decision that was.
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Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)
6 SM 768 GHz GPU, 4 A78 1Ghz CPU and 88 GB/s bandwidth Drake/Switch 2 confirmed! Those specs PLUS DLSS i mean ...i know these specs have been put out as a joke but how would this configuration look in comparison to a PS4/ PS4 PRO? I will actaully limit my expectations to this, if it gets...
famiboards.com
I have no idea if it's credible or not. There are no major red flags that it's fake but that doesn't mean too much.
While I agree with the general reasoning, it is important to point out that in both cases, the difference in power between the consoles was relatively modest if not marginal.
When it comes to comparing the switch with the rumored next device, the jump seems to be nothing short of gigantic; that new console being possibly within striking distance of an Xbox series S. Releasing a Zelda game developed for a 2015-2016 mobile chip to showcase that new monster would be a bit odd in that regard. Not impossible though; they could decide to go balls to the wall and have that new Zelda running at 4k/RT/60fps or whatever bells and whistles one can think of. Or else, it's just not that powerful; maybe closer to an Xbox 1 or something like that.
If the device is really a monster, I'm expecting it to release end of 2023, early 2024. If it's a more modest upgrade (which I don't believe), then I guess that early 2023 alongside Zelda ain't impossible.
Crusters
Koopa
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They sure did, but I am wondering why we are not using the obvious example of botw?
I mean it is known that Nintendo removed game pad features, so as to make the two versions have parity when they decided the game would launch on switch as well. And of course the switch version ran at a higher res
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Serif
𝕽𝖊𝖓𝖊𝖌𝖆𝖉𝖊 𝕬𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖑
Even though the power gaps between GCN/Wii and Wii U/Switch are not as large as Switch/Drake, there were still visual differences between GCN and Wii ports of TP and between the Wii U and Switch ports of BotW, that were in favor of the newer console. Even though the GCN could do anamorphic widescreen, they only had that option for the Wii port. The Switch port of BotW was 900p vs the Wii U's 720p. Not to mention the IR aiming of the Wii or the faster loading of the Switch. If Drake's BotW2 ends up being 4K 60 with HDR, added effects, and higher-res textures, I don't think it will undersell the capabilities of Drake provided there are other titles that can serve as showcases (like the third-party ports Nate mentioned a while back).
davec00ke
Octorok
The next Switch won't be close to Xbox Series S. It will be miles behind in cpu power, the best we can hope for is it will be as powerful as the PS4.
Alovon11
Like Like
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Do you know the A78 CPU Cores are better IPC-wise than Zen2?
the only thing that would keep it worse than the Series S|X/PS5 CPUs is it not being clocked as high and lack of multithreading and even then it would be many times better than the Switch's current CPU and the PS4/Xbone CPU.
And again, the NVIDIA hack exposed the actual GPU specifications for Drake, and those specs are well beyond the PS4's in even worst-case scenarios when docked.
Especially considering a TSMC node is more likely with NVIDIA's large spending on TSMC supply and how Orin power characteristics work on Samsung 8N.
The GPU even at 768MHz would be 2.3TFLOPs, and Ampere TFLOPs are equivalent to GCN TFLOPs, so yeah.
And that's not even mentioning how Ampere supports features like Tile-Based Rasterization, DX12 (which means similar APIs.etc would work for it), and ditto on DLSS and Ray Tracing.
Also fun fact, AMD's Ray Accelerators are crippled without Infinity Cache, how much so?
0.25 RTFLOPs/Ray Accelerator is how the math works out based on Microsoft's touting of the Series X's performance for Ray Tracing.
Ampere is 0,93RTFLOPs/RT Core flat-out.
So PS5 should be 9 RTFLOPs, Drake would be 11.6RTFLOPs
Drake would Ray Trace better than PS5.
So TL;DR
- CPU: Way better than Last Gen systems, and considering I doubt they will maximize the usage of the Next-gen CPUs for a long time, a CPU a bit weaker likely wouldn't hurt much unless you want 120Hz.
- GPU: PS4+ level at worst, and if they are going with something like TSMC 5N/4N then that could shoot to a clock high enough to surpass the PS4 Pro BEFORE DLSS and therefore be right on the tail of the Series S.
- That is a can-be, but even then a PS4+ GPU in the case of 768Mhz docked would push well past the PS4 Pro and by proxy the Series S after DLSS.
- Also it can RTX better than the PS5 because Console RDNA2 doesn't have Infinity Cache to help AMD's shit-implementation so yeah.
Serif
𝕽𝖊𝖓𝖊𝖌𝖆𝖉𝖊 𝕬𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖑
You should post this in the "Nintendo should make a powerful console" thread.
My question is how tech from x box series s can fit in switch which is what, 10 times smaller in size AND have good battery life AND not be super expensive. I am preparing for a modest upgrade model in 2023 but if it is something close to what you guys are discussing then hats off to Ninty! I'll be the first in line in both cases anyway
Look over there
Bob-omb
A little tangential, but this is probably the most 'fitting' sort of thread for this question...
So with the Yuzu emulator, the devs had to come up with a way to deal with calls to NVDEC for in-game video decoding. They eventually did so (thanks FFmpeg for video decoding on PC!).
The question that comes to mind then, is what about DLSS calls for the prospective future Drake emulator? What happens? What's the prospective solution? What about on hardware without RTX GPUs?
...aw shit, going down the mental rabbit hole in the middle of this post:
H.264 decoding would get handled by either hardware (practically no stress at this point) or software (ehh, shouldn't be bad by now?). But given that current NVDEC supports AV1 decode as of desktop Ampere and latest NVENC supports AV1 encode as of Orin, there is a possibility of developers being able to encode their in-game videos in AV1. Given that hypothetical, for a prospective future Drake emulator to handle NVDEC calls to decode AV1, what would be the ramifications? Turing & older/RDNA1 & older users need more CPU grunt to handle software decode?
So with the Yuzu emulator, the devs had to come up with a way to deal with calls to NVDEC for in-game video decoding. They eventually did so (thanks FFmpeg for video decoding on PC!).
The question that comes to mind then, is what about DLSS calls for the prospective future Drake emulator? What happens? What's the prospective solution? What about on hardware without RTX GPUs?
...aw shit, going down the mental rabbit hole in the middle of this post:
H.264 decoding would get handled by either hardware (practically no stress at this point) or software (ehh, shouldn't be bad by now?). But given that current NVDEC supports AV1 decode as of desktop Ampere and latest NVENC supports AV1 encode as of Orin, there is a possibility of developers being able to encode their in-game videos in AV1. Given that hypothetical, for a prospective future Drake emulator to handle NVDEC calls to decode AV1, what would be the ramifications? Turing & older/RDNA1 & older users need more CPU grunt to handle software decode?
Alovon11
Like Like
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But it is running on a more efficient uArch and might be running on a better node.
Ampere on Samsung 8N keeps up with RDNA2 on TSMC7N, and RDNA2 with Infinity Cache is more efficient than RDNA2 without Infinity Cache so the difference is even smaller in that case when compared to Console RDNA2
kvetcha
hoopy frood
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I read it, but I don't think it makes a particularly compelling point considering Ninty's launched two of their past three consoles with a cross-gen Zelda game.
- Pronouns
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That's not really how tech works. Switch itself is much more powerful than, say, a Playstation 2, but it's a lot smaller and uses much less power.My question is how tech from x box series s can fit in switch which is what, 10 times smaller in size AND have good battery life AND not be super expensive. I am preparing for a modest upgrade model in 2023 but if it is something close to what you guys are discussing then hats off to Ninty! I'll be the first in line in both cases anyway
This is because advances in microelectronics generally enable you to do more processing with less energy. This goes for different architectures too, some are much more efficient than others.
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