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

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TomNookYankees said:
Multiple journalists though have confirmed that Software Dev kits were taken back in mid-late 2022 and it's likely that once nintendo starts making the new dev kits that they would first give them out to first party devs and close AAA third party partners.


That points to digital BC being very likely but doesn't make cartridge BC necessarily likely
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Even if this has to be done game by game instead of at an OS level, this seems solvable with a simple patch unless perfect shader translation is impossible (which would then force ports of every game and no true BC)
 
JoshuaJSlone said:
Even in the extreme case where Switch 2 games are digital only, hard to imagine they'd totally cut out the physical BC right away. Cut it out in later years/models as happened with GCN-on-Wii and GBA-on-DS? OK.
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I was thinking more that if switch 2 carts are too different in shape to switch carts then having cartridge BC would require putting two different cartridge slots into it.

ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
Even if this has to be done game by game instead of at an OS level, this seems solvable with a simple patch unless perfect shader translation is impossible (which would then force ports of every game and no true BC)
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Lack of cartridge compatibility wouldn't be solvable via patches.
 
TomNookYankees said:
Multiple journalists though have confirmed that Software Dev kits were taken back in mid-late 2022 and it's likely that once nintendo starts making the new dev kits that they would first give them out to first party devs and close AAA third party partners.


That points to digital BC being very likely but doesn't make cartridge BC necessarily likely
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"Multiple journalists" did not "confirm". Some speculate.
 
Concernt said:
"Multiple journalists" did not "confirm". Some speculate.
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People from DF outright said that certain devs they were previously hearing from seemed to no longer have switch 2 dev kits, which was then corroborated by Nate confirming he heard something similar in late 2022.

ILikeFeet said:
Why are we thinking Drake cartridges are different? They can improve density and speed at the same physical size
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Because of how prohibitively expensive switch carts with adequate space for AAA third party games have been lately and signs that nintendo seem to be moving away from switch carts.
 
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TomNookYankees said:
People from DF outright said that certain devs they were previously hearing from seemed to no longer have switch 2 dev kits, which was then corroborated by Nate confirming he heard something similar in late 2022.
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"seemed" is speculation. "Confirming he heard something similar" is speculation.

(Plus, I'd consider those two examples more content creators than journalists.)
 
I think BC is a must, given how successful the Switch is. Also worth mentioning that Furukawa want the transition to the new console to be "smooth" by relying on the Nintendo Account system, which strongly hint that people can carry their library to the next console, meaning the console will at least some kind of BC. Looking back at history the time when they drop BC usually is when there is a complete architectural change between their console generation like Wii U to Switch or N64 to GC.
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
Fwd I can’t take this constant tugging and pulling into and out of the hype train 😭
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That's why I'm #TeamAlongForTheRide. It'll come when it comes. That's all I care about at this point. The hype train has broken down at the station one too many times for me to confidently get back on it.
 
If Prime 4 is next year and the next 2D Metroid is the year after, that would mean that we'd be getting yearly Metroid games.
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
The BC shader thing seems like kind of a stupid worry at this point unless it's literally unsolvable.

Nintendo has a massive amount of incentive to get the shaders to compile correctly for the Switch 2 to allow for BC and NVIDIA has the best programmers in gaming.

Unless perfect shader translation is literally impossible, NVIDIA will be able to figure it out in the... four years they've been working on this at least?
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Even if it's impossible, it doesn't matter. Just need to be good enough. People are fine with PS5 not having perfect compatibility and there's are still backward compatibility bugs in supported games.
 
pelusilla6 said:
Nvidia AI boom puts TSCM's best nm chance at risk (4nm?) if it goes to late 2024 imo, has this been discussed already?
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Not really as Apple will move on a big part of their wafer order to TSMC N3 starting this year. So N4 will have more allocation freed.
 
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Zaimokuza said:
What would be the cost? Having a couple of engineers ready the studio tools for it and provide feedback on a prototype (that I assume would cost a couple thousand dollars at max, basically nothing)
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For the studio? You're pulling higher profile engineers - the ones who actually do low level engineering and can provide broad feedback on engine feasibility - making them sign and ton of NDAs and pulling them off their core work for a minimum of 6 weeks to 3 months to do a proof-of-concept port that probably won't see the light of day. So, a dev year? Quarter of a million?

But that, actually, isn't the cost I'm referring to on Mercury Steam's side. It's the opportunity cost. Capcom has engineers who only do engine work, and support a dozen game dev projects simultaneously. Putting some of that team on a new platform doesn't slow down game development. A studio like Mercury Steam, the core engineen devs are also game devs. Pulling them to work on a skonk works project would be removing them from whatever game they are currently developing.

I want to emphasize I'm not talking about devkits, generally. The question was "would Mercury Steam be high on the list for an early devkit." And I wasn't talking about costs to Mercury Steam, I'm talking about costs generally. Early devkits are buggy, they're hand delivered, Nintendo sends an engineer to your studio to set it up because there is no documentation yet, there are only 20 people in the world who know how the whole package works, and they have to support every studio that has one.

Nintendo could make a thousand early devkits, physically, but they don't have the engineering resources to support a thousand studios playing around with them. A Nintendo hardware engineer in Kyoto will be up at midnight talking to a Mercury Steam game developer in Madrid at 6pm and an Nvidia driver engineer in San Fransisco at 8am, and a Tegra engineer in India at 8:30pm to figure out what commands to type into a serial debugger to get a backtrace so that all the data can be send to eSol, company, who makes the Horizon operating system about why the damn thing is crashing...

If Nintendo is hungry to get a launch title out, then Mercury Steam would get an early devkit. But if not, why not let Mercury Steam continue working on their late 2025 game, and get a finalized devkit six-twelve months later. It's just more productive for everyone.
 
TomNookYankees said:
People from DF outright said that certain devs they were previously hearing from seemed to no longer have switch 2 dev kits, which was then corroborated by Nate confirming he heard something similar in late 2022.


Because of how prohibitively expensive switch carts with adequate space for AAA third party games have been lately and signs that nintendo seem to be moving away from switch carts.
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I'm guessing Nintendo will just do digital only releases for >16 GB games in the future.

This seems really unrelated to BC as there's only a couple games on the Switch > 16 GBs right now.
 
pelusilla6 said:
Nvidia AI boom puts TSCM's best nm chance at risk (4nm?) if it goes to late 2024 imo, has this been discussed already?
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Not an issue. TSMC had excess capacity, and Nvidia had already purchased capacity for RTC 40 and Nintendo. The AI boom is making Nvidia buy the excess TSMC capacity at a high price, in order to deliver these AI products in time. Unless Nvidia decides to do something dumb, like burn their relationship with Nintendo by using capacity they've already secured for Nintendo's needs and shuffling it over to AI, then the one shouldn't directly affect the other.

Right now it seems like the AI boom is just countering the bust in the consumer GPU market.
 
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ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
I'm guessing Nintendo will just do digital only releases for >16 GB games in the future.

This seems really unrelated to BC as there's only a couple games on the Switch > 16 GBs right now.
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It's not just 16GB+ games that nintendo is pushing customers to opt for digital though as shown with Metroid Prime Remaster, Pikmin 1+2, and their new voucher system.
 
I feel like the catridge thing could be why Nintendo is holding back on the Redacted. Alienating third parties because of a storage media could be a recipe for disaster of Wii U proportions
 
P4bl0 said:
"I know his source for this tweet, basically the source gave him fake info about devkits just now going out, ("final" hardware devkits have been going out for months, and been able to be built since August/September last year). Hours after this source shared the information with the "leaker" he tweeted that... He isn't validating his sources at all. We only should trust 1 source for all our hard facts, and that of course... is @10k

Right now information is going to be slow, production should be starting very soon if it does come out this year, but it should be this FY (ending exactly a year from now) however, I do think the end of this calendar year makes the most sense."


Y'all read just what y'all want

Please read then relax
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This reminds of what @Z0m3le wrote... interesting 🤔🤔🤔

What does @10k know that we know about the redacted that we don't know. That's the question we should be asking!

In all seriousness, outside of what we know from the illegal Nvidia hacks and Linux kernal. Nintendo, really has no incentive to release the Redacted now nor do they feel the pressure to announce it early. The only real reason why the Switch was announced almost a year in advance was due to the Wii u failure. Nintendo needed to move off the dead platform, regain the investors confidence, and make money. If the switch only managed to sell 75 million units or less I think we would had seen a switch pro a couple years ago or a switch 2 last year.

While the switch hardware is dated, it's still selling well. What is the incentive for Nintnedo to move on from it?
 
Physical media on Nintendo Switch 2 will be just like it is on Xbox Series X|S. Some games will be digital only, even big games, some special editions will only come with a code, and I'd say it's likely there will be a model with no physical media support at all. They're not going to disappear, not when the mix is still closer to 50-50 for first party releases, but they'll definitely take a back seat.
 
Concernt said:
Physical media on Nintendo Switch 2 will be just like it is on Xbox Series X|S. Some games will be digital only, even big games, some special editions will only come with a code, and I'd say it's likely there will be a model with no physical media support at all. They're not going to disappear, not when the mix is still closer to 50-50 for first party releases, but they'll definitely take a back seat.
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Which is basically what we’re seeing with some 3rd party games, like the MGS Collection
 
TomNookYankees said:
People from DF outright said that certain devs they were previously hearing from seemed to no longer have switch 2 dev kits, which was then corroborated by Nate confirming he heard something similar in late 2022.
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John at DF only said that they had heard some developers were in possession of 4K dev kits at some point but didn't seem to have them anymore. He never corroborated the timing of when they were taken back.
 
TomNookYankees said:
If for whatever reason the switch 2 cart slot is unable to take switch 1 carts then nintendo would either have to fit two different cart slots in the switch 2 or opt out of including the switch 1 cart slot.
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I don't think any viable replacement for the carts Nintendo uses has been proposed. UFS 2.1 carts would be incredibly expensive. If Nintendo were to switch carts, it would have to be for something MUCH cheaper and... I don't see where that would be?
 
Quailman said:
While the switch hardware is dated, it's still selling well. What is the incentive for Nintnedo to move on from it?
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It's still selling, but it's at a decline. The sooner they announce a successor, the better they can curb said decline.
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
I don't think any viable replacement for the carts Nintendo uses has been proposed. UFS 2.1 carts would be incredibly expensive. If Nintendo were to switch carts, it would have to be for something MUCH cheaper and... I don't see where that would be?
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eMMC (or very basic UFS) and the current Game Cards would be my expectation. While I definitely think the graphics will impress and the release is sooner than it might seem, I remain of the position that they're pretty much backed into a corner with read speeds and... That's OK.

There isn't a single game in this day and age that can't run off a bottom shelf SSD, I dare even say, a MicroSD card of UHS-1 speed. There are diminishing returns with storage speed, just like GPU speed. Why bother when your expandable storage will almost certainly be locked to SD card speeds and your physical media no faster? Switch games are limited by decompression speed and CPU speed. Things the new console cures in abundance. Beyond that there just isn't much of a concern.
 
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D36 said:
It's kinda moot when they're getting tons of responses.
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If you don't participate, the cycle will tone down. Just reminding folks that they don't have to participate if they don't want to.

No malice! Feel free to discuss whatever on topic thing ya'll like. But some folks seem to be getting worked up about conversations I'm not sure they want to participate in anyway. So just... don't.
 
Quoted by: D36
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The later Redacted releases, and I’m assuming this is all on schedule, the more likely I’m inclined to think it launches with LPDDR5X. Wasn’t LPDDR4 about 3 years old when Switch released? 5X will be 3 when Switch 2 launches in (maybe) 2024. I’m just trying to think rationally how Nintendo will try to widen one of its technological bottlenecks.
 
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oldpuck said:
If you don't participate, the cycle will tone down. Just reminding folks that they don't have to participate if they don't want to.

No malice! Feel free to discuss whatever on topic thing ya'll like. But some folks seem to be getting worked up about conversations I'm not sure they want to participate in anyway. So just... don't.
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Fair enough. I usually read most of the posts going down and I'm sometimes curious about what's being said.
 
ziggyrivers said:
I feel like the catridge thing could be why Nintendo is holding back on the Redacted. Alienating third parties because of a storage media could be a recipe for disaster of Wii U proportions
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I think this is possible, although unlikely.

I fully expect Nintendo to be in super cautious mode though.
 
TomNookYankees said:
Because of how prohibitively expensive switch carts with adequate space for AAA third party games have been lately and signs that nintendo seem to be moving away from switch carts.
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ok, but what does that have to do with switch carts being incompatible? even if third parties are moving to digital, the cart slot isn't cost prohibitive

and there are no signs of Nintendo moving away from carts
 
Would it be possible to keep the current cart, and if the system’s read speeds from the cart are an issue, you can install it to the internal storage/SD card to improve speeds?
 
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