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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)
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John Omaha
Moblin
The pics you posted are way too big for the display size the Switch 2 will have anyway.
Concernt
Optimism is non-negotiable
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What does this mean? Those images change size depending on the device and browser they're viewed in. Almost all online images do. I view them on a tiny, high resolution screen, so for me they were a bit smaller than a 3DS top screen. Images don't really have a "size", just a resolution. On a 1080p panel, that 1080p sample image will fit it perfectly.
And Nintendo Switch already HAS No Man's Sky.
MP!
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Me tooEither sacrifice visuals, or use the technology that means we don't have to while still looking really nice... crisis averted!
720p DLAA
vs
540p->1080p DLSS
I'd take the second any day.
All day every day
Exactly that, they're gonna use FSR 3.0 because they're abandoning Nvidia and moving to AMD.
MP!
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OP
OP
I know that's a joke, but I believe LiC mentioned that DLSS 3 support isn't present on NVN2.
So assuming that the performance of the OFA (Optical Flow Accelerators) on Drake's GPU is reasonably close to the performance of the OFA on Ada Lovelace GPUs (which could be the case since Drake's GPU inherits the OFA from Orin's GPU), and unless Nintendo and Nvidia do decide to add DLSS 3 support on NVN2 later, FSR 3.0 could be the only way that frame generation could be used on Nintendo's new hardware.
(Of course, whether frame generation is beneficial for Nintendo's new hardware is a different discussion altogether.)
kasparov77
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Question: does FSR 3 require new GPUs or is it just a matter of "it's too slow on older hardware for it to work properly"?
What about FSR 2?
What about FSR 2?
OP
OP
Or maybe FSR 3 is so good there's practically no advantage to DLSS. Even on Nvidia hardware.
D
Deleted member 2
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Good god, enough with the complaining about imaginary groups of people
Will they really be the FIRST people to scream on the internet how good 1080p looks? Really? The first? All of them will be first in line? You know this?
Mr Swine
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That would probably never happen as FSR 2.2 is still not on par with DLSS 2.5.1 on same quality settings.
I think that DLSS Performance is on par/better than FSR 2.2 quality and faster too.
Now begs the question if games that get ported while running on older DLSS will get the latest DLSS treatment
Stefan51278
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I heard from the GPU-rumor-mill that FSR3 is still planned to release on a broad set of hardware, but it could be a similar situation to Intel XESS that the Speedup is not that big without AMD-Hardware. But these are all educated guesses with some sources, no hard information released yet.
That is all great, but I would prefer staying at 720p or 800p, saving battery life and have a longer time with native resolutions after the launch of the hardware. Upscaling will come into play anyway and maybe we shouldn't plan to start with it from day one in the handheld mode. We are right now in the 7th year of the current hardware cycle and even Nintendo uses upscaling in handheld-mode in more games than they don't. It's not pretty. I would invest the budget for the display in launching with OLED from day one and also going for Variable Refresh Rate to mitigate smaller fps-dips or frametime-hickups in handheld-mode. This would make the feel-good-phase after the launch even longer, especially if they go for two non-perfomance-hardware-updates like they did with the current Switch.
Edit: A lower clocking GPU in handheld mode could increase the clock of the CPU. If they go for one stable clock in both modes the handheld mode determines the frequency of the CPU.
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Literally no one knows
ziggyrivers
thunder
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Hopefully it stops happening, even though they kinda got away with it. But if it does happen again, I think the European Union would more than likely strike again
kvetcha
hoopy frood
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Hall-Effect sticks. You can buy third-party replacements right now that take care of it.
D
Deleted member 1141
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I hate to be this guy, but Nintendo will prioritize battery. Also, I'm gonna be that guy and say the screen to pixel ratio, 720p is fine. For handheld, focus should be on battery life and putting less strain on the device overall. This will not affect docked mode in any reasonable manner other than limitations of the form factor, which the screen/resolution of handheld mode won't.
ziggyrivers
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Nintendo will prioritize battery. Two or four years later, they’ll release an OLED-ish revision with a 1080p panel that’s $50 more 
The Wii U Gamepad manages to be as low latency as it is because the it monopolises the console's entire 5ghz wifi capability to itself via an ad-hoc connection. Combined with the low res, chroma-subsampled base image plus, I'm guessing, quick hardware compression/decompression, plus the fact the gamepad is doing almost nothing else and you can start to see how they were able to keep the latency so low.
Of course that all came with a bunch of compromises. No 5ghz wifi for networking, lower res than most other screen casting solutions of the day, 60hz max despite the low res and extremely limited tolerance for signal degradation (aka a very short range).
As far as I'm aware all other screen casting methods stream the image over shared, regular network traffic through the router. I'll be very surprised if any such system is able to match the Wii U's latency anytime in the near future.
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Unless the old PC DLSS DLLS were directly compatible, probably wouldn't make sense for them to remain unchanged.
What will be possible on Redacted is much better than anything current Switch games are doing. It's just tech they have access to that makes things look/run better. Anyone choosing not to use it is just choosing to throw performance away. Choosing not to use it at launch so it can be pulled out like a rabbit out of a hat for tougher games later seems silly to me. If they'd had what they used with Xenoblade 3 or TOTK back when making Xenoblade 2 or BOTW, absolutely it would've been used.
Thraktor
"[✄]. [✄]. [✄]. [✄]." -Microsoft
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If [redacted] were just a portable device, I'd agree with those arguing for a 720p display. The jump in fidelity isn't that big at a ~7" screen size, and with a limited performance budget there's a good argument for spending it on prettier pixels instead of more pixels.
However, [redacted] is (almost certainly) not just a portable device. As a hybrid, they have to balance performance and output resolution in two different modes, and therein lies the issue for a 720p screen.
Here are three statements that I think are reasonable to make about Nintendo's next system:
You might guess where I'm going with this: if [redacted] can output anything remotely resembling 4K in docked mode, then it should be able to output 1080p in portable mode. If a game can, with DLSS or not, output a 1440p image in 16.7ms in docked mode, then with GPU clocks cut in half, it should be able to render an equivalent 1080p image in 16.7ms in portable mode.
If the three points above are true, which I believe they are, then it strongly points to a 1080p display in the new device. A 720p screen would either leave a load of performance underutilised in portable mode, or result in developers putting in a lot of extra effort to add graphical effects which are only used in portable mode to use up that performance, despite the smaller screen and lower resolution meaning these effects would be less noticeable in portable than docked mode.
This comes up a lot, but the impact on battery from the screen resolution is far smaller than people think.
It makes a difference in smartphones, but they're very different in two main ways. Firstly, they use variable clock speeds on their GPUs via DVFS, which means clock speeds (and therefore power consumption) goes up and down as usage goes up and down. If the device needs to render twice the pixels, it has to bump up the clock speed of the GPU to do twice the work, and therefore consumes more power. By comparison, [redacted]'s GPU will have a fixed clock speed in portable mode, built around a fixed power budget. Assuming developers aren't letting the GPU sit idle, it will consume however much power it's designed to consume, irrespective of the display it's outputting to. Increasing or lowering the display resolution will have no impact on GPU power draw, unlike on a smartphone.
Secondly, smartphones spend most of their time relatively idle, as users scroll through websites or emails or social media posts or whatever. The power draw of a smartphone in this kind of usage is way lower than what Switch or [redacted] will draw, by around an order of magnitude. As such, the power draw difference from the display itself has a much larger effect on the battery life of a smartphone than a more power hungry device like the Switch. I can't find good numbers on the impact of resolution on power consumption of modern smartphone display panels, but this older Anandtech article compared the displays on the Galaxy S5 and S5 LTEA, which used 1080p and 1440p OLED displays respectively. The increased power draw from the 1440p display was found to be around 70mW. On a smartphone, that could be 10% of the total power draw under typical use, which is quite meaningful. On a Switch, that would be around 1% of total power draw. The number there is from older displays, with different resolutions and screen sizes, but even accommodating for that, it's very unlikely that there's much more than a 1% impact on battery life from using a higher resolution display.
However, [redacted] is (almost certainly) not just a portable device. As a hybrid, they have to balance performance and output resolution in two different modes, and therein lies the issue for a 720p screen.
Here are three statements that I think are reasonable to make about Nintendo's next system:
- It will output games at "4K" in some capacity.
- Docked GPU clocks will be no more than around 2x higher than portable clocks.
- Nintendo will want GPU performance in each mode to be roughly proportional to the expected rendering resolution.
You might guess where I'm going with this: if [redacted] can output anything remotely resembling 4K in docked mode, then it should be able to output 1080p in portable mode. If a game can, with DLSS or not, output a 1440p image in 16.7ms in docked mode, then with GPU clocks cut in half, it should be able to render an equivalent 1080p image in 16.7ms in portable mode.
If the three points above are true, which I believe they are, then it strongly points to a 1080p display in the new device. A 720p screen would either leave a load of performance underutilised in portable mode, or result in developers putting in a lot of extra effort to add graphical effects which are only used in portable mode to use up that performance, despite the smaller screen and lower resolution meaning these effects would be less noticeable in portable than docked mode.
This comes up a lot, but the impact on battery from the screen resolution is far smaller than people think.
It makes a difference in smartphones, but they're very different in two main ways. Firstly, they use variable clock speeds on their GPUs via DVFS, which means clock speeds (and therefore power consumption) goes up and down as usage goes up and down. If the device needs to render twice the pixels, it has to bump up the clock speed of the GPU to do twice the work, and therefore consumes more power. By comparison, [redacted]'s GPU will have a fixed clock speed in portable mode, built around a fixed power budget. Assuming developers aren't letting the GPU sit idle, it will consume however much power it's designed to consume, irrespective of the display it's outputting to. Increasing or lowering the display resolution will have no impact on GPU power draw, unlike on a smartphone.
Secondly, smartphones spend most of their time relatively idle, as users scroll through websites or emails or social media posts or whatever. The power draw of a smartphone in this kind of usage is way lower than what Switch or [redacted] will draw, by around an order of magnitude. As such, the power draw difference from the display itself has a much larger effect on the battery life of a smartphone than a more power hungry device like the Switch. I can't find good numbers on the impact of resolution on power consumption of modern smartphone display panels, but this older Anandtech article compared the displays on the Galaxy S5 and S5 LTEA, which used 1080p and 1440p OLED displays respectively. The increased power draw from the 1440p display was found to be around 70mW. On a smartphone, that could be 10% of the total power draw under typical use, which is quite meaningful. On a Switch, that would be around 1% of total power draw. The number there is from older displays, with different resolutions and screen sizes, but even accommodating for that, it's very unlikely that there's much more than a 1% impact on battery life from using a higher resolution display.
John Omaha
Moblin
Yes and no - I have often resized images for readability when posting. Not the best wording on my part, though.
What I meant was that the differences between the two images are noticeable when viewed at full resolution and on a bigger display, but that they become much more subtle at the Switch 2’s most probable display size (7-8 inches).
I don’t have a strong opinion on 720p vs 1080p for the Switch 2’s display, but the former is hardly a dealbreaker.
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OP
OP
pelusilla6
Bob-omb
Whats good battery life for you?
Im good with 3h tbh
Im good with 3h tbh
OP
OP
Minimum of 3 hours.
Stefan51278
Piranha Plant
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Yeah, for big games this can be a good strategy, especially for preventing fps-lows when most of the game runs fine. In reality I'm playing Metroid Prime, a remaster/remake of a 21 year old game and even this runs on sub-native resolutions. We have to realize that even the best upsampling-solution (even those calling their output "better than native") is not better than a native resolution and artifacts can kill the immersion for the player.
Upsampling works better when the input-signal already has a high resolution and I think going for 720p in mobile, WQHD in docked mode and upsampling to UHD would be a good compromise. The power consumption ratio mobile vs. docked will be a bit higher (not double, we had long posts about the frequency/power draw/efficiency-curves before), but that will reduce the size of the battery needed. Using the dedicated cores for DLSS in mobile would reduce that same battery life, this is not a simple checkerboard-rendering which costs next to no power.
In the end we have a mobile device which needs to be able to play some magic-downsized-ports from PS5/Xbox Series X (which launched four years earlier) to be a success. Some newer technology could be used (better fabrication process, more recent upsampling, more efficient RT-Cores) but in the end this is an uphill-battle for Nintendo. The current Switch was an easier task because the CPU of PS4/Xbox One was something I would call "a board with battery, but not a powerful CPU"…PS5 and Xbox Series X have eight Zen2-Cores, File Decompression Engines, SSDs, 3D-Audio and more baked into their chips. It's not an easy task to make the competing mobile device, which also has to be cheaper and not the size and weight of a SteamDeck. Going with a 1080p-Display would take power and cost budget which is both needed elsewhere.
D
Deleted member 887
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Sure, that makes sense.
I’m sure it’s just me being an old man, but I personally tend to prefer a sharp, aliased look in a video game. In stills it never looks as good, but in motion I find it easier to read.
Where aliased images fall apart, for me, is temporal stability. Distant campfires popping in and out of existence in Tears can make navigating from the sky difficult, and moire effects I find extremely distracting. DLSS is really good at this, which tends to be the best of both worlds.
The downside is where DLSS introduces new kinds of temporal instability. Every camera cut causes the upscaler to start over, so you see the underlying low res image. Ghosting around fast moving objects. Strange interactions between masked off particles and UI elements.
I can’t tell you with 100% certainty which of these I would prefer. I am almost exclusively a handheld player, I don’t have a way of comparing and contrasting the two situations in motion and in gameplay.
As a handheld player there are about a thousand last gen games I would love to get a crack at that I’ve never touched, and I’d love to do it with no compromises to rendering features. And a thing I am 100% certain about is that not every port is going to get the Panic Button treatment with a bespoke renderer and post-processor. DLSS integration is not a given on any of these games.
Which is why I'm obsessed with the perf-to-pixel ratio. Maybe we really do get to a point where REDACTED is as powerful as the PS4 in handheld mode, in which case, bring that 1080p screen on, I don't care. But if not, then I would prefer those games to be a clean 720p, otherwise identical to the TV versions.
lattjeful
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This is where I'm at on the screen debate. If the 1080p screen can be used with minimal compromise, by all means give it. But if it's like current Switch games in portable, where you're lucky to get any game at the screen's native res, I'll take the 720p screen for the sake of getting something at native.
why not?how about a 900p screen
ziggyrivers
thunder
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In before someone suggests the successor will have two skus at launch:
• 720p screen
• 1080p screen
• 720p screen
• 1080p screen
OP
OP
If Nintendo's willing to pay extra for a custom ~900p display with perhaps VRR support, then I don't see why not. (There probably won't be any significant price reductions as time passes since Nintendo's probably the only customer, and Nintendo doesn't sell smartphone amounts of units.)how about a 900p screen
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I’m fine with a minimum amount of 3H (rated)
OP
OP
Nintendo releases a Lite model equipped with Drake and a 720p display.
Checkmate.
kvetcha
hoopy frood
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needless complication of the supply chain, imo
ditch the vrr support and sure. I don't see Nintendo giving a shit about VRR to be honest. better to just get the panel to support stuff like 40hz and fall back on double buffering or triple buffering
Concernt
Optimism is non-negotiable
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Yeah, on my screen these samples are literally postage stamp sized and I can CLEARLY see a difference.
ShadowFox08
Paratroopa
Oh, you're okay with 3hrs now? Hmm.
As much as I don't mind a 720p screen for better battery life (and preferred it), 1080p is the next logical evolution to have it (or at least 900p) on a Nintendo console. I know it's gonna constantly be compared to steam deck, and quite frankly I don't know how well/bad 720p games will look on a 6- 7" 1080p screen, but at least there's DLSS.
In 1-2 years time (and I imagine the steam successor), all portable handhelds will be in 1080p, not just ASUS rally.
Concernt
Optimism is non-negotiable
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The jump in power is so, so much bigger than the difference in pixel count from 720p to 1080p, and that's ON TOP of hugely improved capabilities around upscaling. It doesn't take up much energy either. It's NOT a compromise.
If the sharp rumor is Nintendo, we should expect a non standard display. Or they woudnt have been involved since the R&D stage.
And I doubt a non standard resolution is such a big deal for a device that potentially sells 100 million over its lifetime. Nieche devices like the steam deck has one.
Ghostsonplanets
Ghost in the Sales
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3H - 6H minimum
4H - 8H would be the best to me.
D
Deleted member 887
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I'm not entirely sure this holds up. If you ignore DLSS entirely, yes, this follows, but if you include DLSS, it gets trickier.
If docked mode is targeting DLSS 4k Performance Mode as a base, then that means rendering a 1080p image, and applying a 4x upscale. GPU rendering scales pretty linearly, so with half that level of performance, that means rendering a base 720p image. The question is, "how much DLSS can we get in handheld?"
The problem is figuring out how DLSS scales in this case, and there just isn't a lot of useful data on low end devices. You can look at the available data and get two wildly different estimations. I know because @Paul_Subsonic and I both did it. I came out with DLSS running pretty okay in 4k docked mode, but falling apart in handheld, Paul got really decent numbers with a 1080p upscale in handheld mode, but the 4k upscale in docked got real dicey.
In retrospect, I think we were both wrong in a sort of obvious way, and maybe I should go back and look at the numbers a third time now that (I think) I've figured out what's going on with them. But it's not clear at all how DLSS will behave between the two modes.
Still, my thing is, we're still fundamentally dealing with 1080p as the core docked target. Without DLSS, 1080p is going to nicely integer scale on 4k screen. But the half-res 720p handheld mode will not nicely integer scale onto a 720p screen. I'm not assuming the majority of the [redacted] library is going to use DLSS, anymore than I expect the majority of the Switch library to use variable rate shading. I don't want DLSS to be a requirement for PS4-era games to achieve parity in handheld mode, when even pessimistic estimates put docked mode well ahead of the PS4.
Which is why I said if handheld mode really does go head-to-head with PS4 in raw raster perf, then bring that 1080p screen on
Intoxicate
The best is yet to come...
I don’t see any benefit going 1080p. 95% don’t care as long as good contrast and color gamut. I’d rather take full Switch compatibility than slightly sharper screen for the Redacted games (and bad scaling for original Switch games). If one wants higher resolution than please 1440p for proper integer scaling.
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My reasoning for why not to go to 1080p funnily enough has more to do with the memory bandwidth Situation….
Higher resolutions tend to demand more memory bandwidth
Higher resolutions tend to demand more memory bandwidth
Concernt
Optimism is non-negotiable
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Nintendo increases the screen resolution every single generation. The device will be designed with its own games in mind first and foremost, with last gen compatibility probably further down the list compared to the improved market appeal of better resolution.
True, but I wonder, would 1080p from DLSS Performance (540p native) require less memory bandwidth than straight-up 720p native? Like, how much bandwidth does DLSS Performance require?My reasoning for why not to go to 1080p funnily enough has more to do with the memory bandwidth Situation….
Higher resolutions tend to demand more memory bandwidth
Mr Swine
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That will be a big problem with the 85+GB/s bandwidth in portable mode. Although Drake is based on an architecture that is very much made with limited bandwidth in mind (Ada being a natural evolution with much bigger cache) it will fare worse than PS4 but a lot better than Xbone
They inchreased the screen resolution every gen so far, because they been miles away from dimishing returns territory. They arguably still may have one more gen left before the perceived returns are too negligible, but it doesn't make sense to keep increasing resolution forever.
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