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

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I'd be pretty surprised if it's still a 720p screen tbh. That's a line of thinking that made sense for a pro console, but not a successor. Feels like reliving the NX/early Switch discussions when the idea of a 540p screen was a pretty consistent talking point.
 
Instro said:
I'd be pretty surprised if it's still a 720p screen tbh. That's a line of thinking that made sense for a pro console, but not a successor. Feels like reliving the NX/early Switch discussions when the idea of a 540p screen was a pretty consistent talking point.
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Yeah, a 1080p screen with Drake is the equivalent of a 540p screen on Tegra X1. Exactly a quarter of the maximum TV output resolution. It makes sense. More sense than 720p, anyway.
 
Instro said:
I'd be pretty surprised if it's still a 720p screen tbh. That's a line of thinking that made sense for a pro console, but not a successor. Feels like reliving the NX/early Switch discussions when the idea of a 540p screen was a pretty consistent talking point.
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Arguably 540p would have been a better choice for a lot of games. There are so many games on Switch that doesn't hit native res.
 
Hermii said:
Arguably 540p would have been a better choice for a lot of games. There are so many games on Switch that doesn't hit native res.
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I think this is missing the forest for the trees. The HEADLINING games, Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears, all hit 720p in handheld mode.

When you increase the screen resolution, you don't stop developers from using lower resolutions. When you decrease it, you DO stop developers using HIGHER resolutions.

720p gives you more flexibility, and moreover, you don't cowtow to a handful of large scale games at the expensive of smaller scale games that do hit 720p or close enough, which is the vast, vast majority of games available, especially first party.
 
Hermii said:
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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Although I agree with you, considering Nintendo’s history and other technical arguments brought up by oldpuck and Thraktor, I think it makes sense and Concernt definitely has a point there.
 
Concernt said:
Yeah, on my screen these samples are literally postage stamp sized and I can CLEARLY see a difference.
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Postage stamp sized? No, you can't.

You can just say you prefer 1080p without overexaggerating. Again, I'm not even against the idea if it doesn't drastically impact power consumption compared to 720p.
 
900p seems like a resolution someone would pick if they specifically wanted to make content stuck at 720p scale worse.
ReddDreadtheLead said:
My reasoning for why not to go to 1080p funnily enough has more to do with the memory bandwidth Situation…. :p

Higher resolutions tend to demand more memory bandwidth 😬
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Is that really a concern when it's running the same games that will (mostly) already be doing more than 1080p docked? At least on Switch isn't it the case that memory bandwidth doesn't drop much in portable mode, which has made it more a bottleneck in docked mode?
 
Concernt said:
The jump in power is so, so much bigger than the difference in pixel count from 720p to 1080p
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Well, you don't want it to match the increase in pixel count. You want it to vastly exceed it. Otherwise 100% of your performance is spent on just uprezzing, no change in rendering techniques or level of detail.

Concernt said:
, and that's ON TOP of hugely improved capabilities around upscaling. It doesn't take up much energy either. It's NOT a compromise.
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It is. Everything is. But they're referring to compromises in games. Either the pixel/perf ratio beats the PS4, or PS4-era ports will be compromised. That's it, its just math.

Concernt said:
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.
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I don't think you're necessarily wrong about predicting Nintendo's intent, or what the outcome will be, but that's different with discussing what, technologically, that means, which is in turn different from stating our preferences.
 
kvetcha said:
It seems very much aimed at developers and enterprise contexts. The price will come down to consumer levels over time if the category is successful.

It certainly gives me gadget lust. What an insane bit of engineering.
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With a battery dongle dangling down your back? And no USB-C? What engineering...
 
kvetcha said:
It seems very much aimed at developers and enterprise contexts. The price will come down to consumer levels over time if the category is successful.

It certainly gives me gadget lust. What an insane bit of engineering.
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It seems to incorporate some really smart hardware design and UI choices. Also like having all Apple apps somewhat ready is insane. Certainly a product like this will be too expensive for me for the next 3 years but I really want to try it out how well it works. Fomo will be real for this one and sell better than we might think for that price point (if it is in RL at least almost as good as shown in the presentation of course)
 
kvetcha said:
It seems very much aimed at developers and enterprise contexts. The price will come down to consumer levels over time if the category is successful.

It certainly gives me gadget lust. What an insane bit of engineering.
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Yeah, my first though was the Quest Pro (I think that's the model) that was 1.5k, who's target was business people.
 
SirArthur said:
Yeah, my first though was the Quest Pro (I think that's the model) that was 1.5k, who's target was business people.
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And this absolutely blows the Quest Pro out of the water. The seamless integration with other Apple devices alone is a coup.

Concernt said:
Alright, that might be a matter of taste. I prefer the battery to live on the back to balance out the weight of the HMD.
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Given the chipset power on tap here I'm guessing it's a pretty large/heavy battery to be mounted in the headset.
 
Concernt said:
In the US, maybe. I don't even KNOW anyone with an iPhone.
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Oh yeah, here in the US it's wayyyyyyy different. iPhones everywhere. They've managed to position themselves almost as a luxury brand over here. People have bought into it and so they get an iPhone.

...Although I'm not immune to that. The 12 Mini was the best (and only) option for a small phone when I was upgrading...
 
lattjeful said:
Oh yeah, here in the US it's wayyyyyyy different. iPhones everywhere. They've managed to position themselves almost as a luxury brand over here. People have bought into it and so they get an iPhone.

...Although I'm not immune to that. The 12 Mini was the best (and only) option for a small phone when I was upgrading...
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I have a 13 mini! It's great.
 
kvetcha said:
I have a 13 mini! It's great.
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Small phone superiority wooooooo. Super bummed the Mini line is done.

Getting back on topic, 1080p screen guys, do you think bandwidth will be an issue with being able to consistently hit that target in handheld when having last gen ports look similar to the PS4 versions? I think [REDACTED] is gonna be a great system and it's far more advanced than the PS4, but it's still a mobile SoC. I'm sure things like the better CPU and more RAM can helped alleviate some of the concerns, if devs choose to shuffle things around like that, but idk I feel like we'd be too bandwidth limited for 1080p handheld, at least not without severe compromises in either battery life or image quality.

I'm also, like, super OCD about upscaling and stuff like that, and I don't want unpatched Switch games looking worse on the successor lol
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
What does that have to do with this? AR/VR is a different segment altogether
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Not according to the EU, who are the ones who made the decision. And they're right. They're different interfaces, but they're rechargable consumer electronics. Why WOULDN'T they be covered when every other piece of consumer electronics is?
 
Concernt said:
Not according to the EU, who are the ones who made the decision. And they're right. They're different interfaces, but they're rechargable consumer electronics. Why WOULDN'T they be covered when every other piece of consumer electronics is?
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Also, uh, where are you getting that it won’t have USB-C? Apple has implemented that standard across their entire hardware lineup aside from the iPhone, which has a huge bought-in accessories market they had to consider alienating.
 
oldpuck said:
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?"
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If we assume 4k is the target with DLSS then both 1080p (x2) and 720p (x3) scale well (2160p).
 
kvetcha said:
Also, uh, where are you getting that it won’t have USB-C? Apple has implemented that standard across their entire hardware lineup aside from the iPhone, which has a huge bought-in accessories market they had to consider alienating.
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I was following a live tweet thread that said "Proprietary cable". I'd love for them (and me) to be proven wrong on this! See the directive isn't stupid, it KNOWS manufacturers could make a USB C port that requires a cable from that manufacturer and call it a day, but it specifically disallows this. Maybe they're getting around it by having the headset well, not charge at all, have the puck to headset be proprietary, then have the puck charge by USB-C, but that just sounds... Bad. That sort of "you can only buy your replacement cables from Apple" stuff is exactly what it was meant to prevent. I guess we'll see.
 
Concernt said:
Not according to the EU, who are the ones who made the decision. And they're right. They're different interfaces, but they're rechargable consumer electronics. Why WOULDN'T they be covered when every other piece of consumer electronics is?
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This product was already deep in development by the time that passed. They’ll be fine. This is some weird dooming over this when they’ll just be required to change it for the follow up device.
 
lattjeful said:
but idk I feel like we'd be too bandwidth limited for 1080p handheld, at least not without severe compromises in either battery life or image quality.
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@Look over there is the braingenius when it comes to the bandwidth situation, but it's a little iffy on the battery life side. I suspect Nintendo will want to bump down the memory clock in handheld mode, in which case 1080p might be a bit of a stretch, but if they can eke out decent battery life without doing that, obviously there wouldn't be a bandwidth problem in handheld mode that doesn't exist in desktop mode.

Drake's expected bandwidth is quite a bit below the PS4's, but that's not as much of an issue as it seems. Modern GPU architectures are vastly more memory efficient. I'm a weeeee bit concerned about the cache situation on Drake, but overall, I think docked mode is in solid shape on the memory architecture. It just remains to be seen exactly how handheld shakes out.
 
Look over there said:
Ooh, yea, it didn't occur to me that the set top box could evolve to go back downward in power draw. I would like that to come back as an option on the market. For that matter, I didn't think of the utilization of a set top box as a mass market plug n play server.
Not much else to add, but I dig the food for thought.
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Resurrecting this thread from last year - but @Look over there and I had a conversation about what consoles could offer as gen-on-gen leaps slow, and what settop boxes could offer over hybrids, and one of our thoughts was that a theoretical playstation 6 could become, well, a Wii U with a dedicated handheld even just to stream your Playstation games.

I guess we're gonna see how that works out.
 
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Concernt said:
I was following a live tweet thread that said "Proprietary cable". I'd love for them (and me) to be proven wrong on this! See the directive isn't stupid, it KNOWS manufacturers could make a USB C port that requires a cable from that manufacturer and call it a day, but it specifically disallows this. Maybe they're getting around it by having the headset well, not charge at all, have the puck to headset be proprietary, then have the puck charge by USB-C, but that just sounds... Bad. That sort of "you can only buy your replacement cables from Apple" stuff is exactly what it was meant to prevent. I guess we'll see.
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The battery connects to the headset via a Magsafe charger. I’d bet dollars to pesos the battery itself charges via USB-C, and it’s already confirmed you can run the headset with the battery plugged into a wall outlet.
 
oldpuck said:
@Look over there is the braingenius when it comes to the bandwidth situation, but it's a little iffy on the battery life side. I suspect Nintendo will want to bump down the memory clock in handheld mode, in which case 1080p might be a bit of a stretch, but if they can eke out decent battery life without doing that, obviously there wouldn't be a bandwidth problem in handheld mode that doesn't exist in desktop mode.

Drake's expected bandwidth is quite a bit below the PS4's, but that's not as much of an issue as it seems. Modern GPU architectures are vastly more memory efficient. I'm a weeeee bit concerned about the cache situation on Drake, but overall, I think docked mode is in solid shape on the memory architecture. It just remains to be seen exactly how handheld shakes out.
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Keep in mind that, as @Thraktor mentioned before, when it comes to gaming the clock speed we see online isn’t exactly representative and games actually can have the GPUs clock higher so the relative Memory Bandwidth to the GPU is not the same as we had known based on the numbers we can get online.
 
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BDGAME said:
A very theoretical question: What settings would Drake have to to match or even surpass the XBOX series S in Docked mode? Would something like this already be possible?
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maybe be 540p or lower. half frame rate for more assurance. texture quality will have to be cut too. Drake might have the quantity but there's still a bandwidth limitation
 
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BDGAME said:
A very theoretical question: What settings would Drake have to to match or even surpass the XBOX series S in Docked mode? Would something like this already be possible?
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Well, for one it would need to not be a portable device and 2, would need to have sufficient cooling. 3, let’s assume the chip is equipped for a set top box and has a 256-bit interface.

4, let’s also assume that it is on 4N.


Since battery life isn’t a thing it has to worry about, the system can clock rather high.

Series S is rated for 100W TDP if I’m not mistaken?

So, the 8 A78 CPU cores, ok so the CPU can clock up to 3.3GHz and probably consume about 12-15W I believe? For the sake of conversation let’s say it’s only 3GHz, Per core, and have it consume no more than 10W for just the CPU. I think, based on what ARM claims at 5nm and at 3GHz being 1W.

The GPU on the other hand can probably clock all the way to 2GHz and consume 20-30W. Ampere can already clock higher than this, but this is supposed to be on a much more efficient process than ampere.



The memory I described above would consume about 3-3.8W I think and offer 204GB/s(?). I’m basing it off an Orin sheet where 2 ram modules operating at full consume I think it was 1.5-1.9W.


This is still lower bandwidth than the Series S faster RAM at 224GB/s but ampere can be more efficient than the IC-less RDNA 2 of the series S. But it depends.


For storage, since power is less of an issue here, lest throw in an NVMe storage but of the smaller kind because we want to fit it into something no bigger than the GameCube for aesthetic reasons.

Some NVMe drives can consume 4-6W and offer slower speeds but at that point I don’t think you need really really fast PS5 like speeds. So a 1.8GB/s capable drive? Should be ok. I think.




A CPU that can get within spitting distance of the series S, in theory.

A GPU that on paper has higher theoretical performance and can utilize DLSS in scenarios needed.

Memory bandwidth that isn’t the same, lower, but with what would be supposedly a similar in theory due to other aspects that can make it more efficient with it.

Enough theoretical performance that can work for RT loads better than the Series S.

And all for about half of the TDP of the Series S, but costing probably the same as the Series D (USD).

A fan that uses say, 5W. And let’s give 5W for everything else in the system (this may be overdoing it anyway).

47-54W for the total device.

Would be about 6.14TFLOPs fwiw.


Drake, the chip, is very capable in theory. It will not operate at that though for obvious reasons.

You can probably shave some of this in terms of consumption, to be closer to say… the Wii U in TDP. I’m probably overestimating some of this in consumption.

And the only change I made to the silicon is a 256-bit bus vs the 128-bit.

Oh, yeah, so in this case it has 16GB of RAM.
 
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mjayer said:
I feel it in my bones. Soon.
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a76.png
 
mjayer said:
I feel it in my bones. Soon.
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monkey's paw curls Jason Schreier writes an entire report on the weird rumors surrounding the "Switch Pro", being capped off with the bombshell (for us, anyway) that T239 was scrapped and that Nintendo has plans to ride the wave of the Switch for the next 5 years, at least.
 
Concernt said:
I think this is missing the forest for the trees. The HEADLINING games, Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears, all hit 720p in handheld mode.
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Odyssey is very much 720p with an asterisk. That interlacing of 2 640x720 frames is smart but not fantastic in motion.
 
BDGAME said:
A very theoretical question: What settings would Drake have to to match or even surpass the XBOX series S in Docked mode? Would something like this already be possible?
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Do you mean that hardware? Or the software?

When it comes to the hardware, there are places where if Nintendo pushed it, they could get close-ish (GPU raster perf), and places where they could not (bandwidth), and a few places where they probably will (memory).

If you mean what software, depends on the game. If there were a game with a solid last gen version, so you know it doesn’t depend on the strongest parts of the Series S, that would be a good start. But also something with a solid PC pedigree, so it’s well optimized for Nvidia, with DLSS support already. Ideally something with a Series S version that doesn’t have ray tracing, but does on PC

Basically, Control.

There already exist side by side comparisons of DLSS Control to TAA and matched settings for the various consoles. So I can be pretty confident that you could take Series S’s settings, and replace the TAA with DLSS 2x upscaling and get something that looks as good or better.

I’ll spare you the details but I already did an RT analysis of the game and I’m pretty confident that NVidia’s RT is about 2.5x as AMDs in that game. And that DLSS even from 540p and 4x scaling looks better than the native TAA. So it seems pretty likely with those DLSS settings you’d have room for at least some RT effects in the game which Series S doesn’t have.

That’s about as ideal a case for a Series S/Drake head to head as you could imagine.
 
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TLZ said:
I just watched the video. I liked what I saw. If I had throwaway money I'd definitely get one if it really does everything I saw. Soon TVs will go extinct if these things become super accessible.
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As long as consoles remain, this will never happen.
 
Quoted by: TLZ
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