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

[Deleted member 887]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, because I'm not a tech person, but what would an external-storage-as-cold-storage solution mean for game cards? Would it imply forced installs, or are game cards faster than the feasible external storage options?

It’s not dumb. Lemme give you the lay of the land.

Storage has gotten really really fast, and modern games are taking advantage of that.

The relatively slow internal storage of the Switch, eMMC, is dying rapidly. Nintendo has multiple high performance solutions.

Nintendo GameCards are built on a proprietary tech that currently is well behind the curve. But here, too, Nintendo has options to solve that problem on their own.

The problem comes to expandable storage. There are multiple standards for products that would extend this super speed to expandable storage - SD Express and CF Express for example.

But overall the consumer electronics market has abandoned expandable storage, and in the few places it still exists, they’re not pursuing high performance. Cheap SD cards are enough.

(Also, I just googled SD express out of interest to see what sort of prices we're talking about in AUD, and I'm not seeing any for sale. Is there some brand name that I should be looking for, or are they just that non-mainstream?)

Which brings us here. No one makes these damn cards.

Nintendo just about has to make internal storage fast on their next console. Slower tech will die out before the generation does, Nintendo would be paying a premium cost for a worse solution.

Nintendo can probably make their GameCards keep up. But when it comes to expansion Nintendo’s options are

• Keep using MicroSD, possibly breaking games that need the speed
• Eliminate expansion storage entirely, and bring back multiple SKUs with different amounts
• Invent an expensive proprietary format, and piss off customers
• Single handedly decide to revive a dead standard like SD Express, and hope that third party manufacturers step up and drive the price down.

None of these are great options. We’ve talked about “the best/most likely of the worst” for a while, but I stumbled upon something we’d discussed before that, I think, I misread and indicates Nintendo at least experimented with the SD Express solution

Edited to add: sorry, I didn’t answer your original question!

The idea of “cold storage” is that you would continue to use boring, slow MicroSD but games actually wouldn’t run from there. If you wanted to play a game on the MicroSD card it would need to be copied back to internal “hot” storage which is fast, and you’d archive games you weren’t actively playing to “cold” storage. Possibly with this whole process automated behind your back.

I don’t think it is technologically viable to make it transparent to the user, and a bad experience. I think Nintendo would prefer to just have a bunch of different SKUs and sell you a “premium” option

 

[Mr Swine]

I really don’t want to use SD cards as a cold storage and move data to the internal storage whenever I want to play a game. It will wear the NAND cycles down if data gets written a lot every day.

Have SD cards as a temporary cold storage until you buy a new card. But it’s optimal to play from the external storage with a certain type of storage that meets the requirements.

I still think that the switch 2 should do a little treat at startup to see if the external storage meets the requirement to play directly from the external:

Written and read test, does the external storage meet the requirements?

1. If yes then boot up Switch 2 games from the external storage to play
2. If no then move game from external storage to internal storage to play

I think that would solve some problems without giving users that much headache.

 

[pelusilla6]

What the fuck? I'd sorta convinced myself that they were going purely in an Elite direction, but this would be a proper PS5 Pro.

30 WGP is insane. The PS5 is 16 WGP, by comparison. They've gotta be pushing clocks, at least a little bit, too, I would assume, because they have to be building on a 4nm. That's a 19 TFLOP machine, at minimum

And now they are forcing Microsoft to do the same thing. What a postcovid generation, we are just starting to see next-gen games after 3 years meanwhile we are about to get next-next gen consoles haha

 

[theguy]

a ps5 pro? such nonsense

 

[themagpieswarble]

a ps5 pro? such nonsense

I just want a switch that's running at least PS4 level... Is that too much to ask for? These people getting ps5 pros already.. sheesh

 

[ShaunSwitch]

This might be contraversial but I don't see Nintendo stifling their platform strategy by allowing sd card use just to avoid backlash. Not sure Nintendo cares about a minority complaining they can't use the sd cards they already own.

IMO they will go SD Express if it gives them parity with their other storage options, and if they have no solution for the SD Card compatability that is simple and doesn't disrupt their vision for the platform they will not provide sd card support.

Using SD cards for fridge storage just won't happen, if they go with fast storage everywhere else why hobble the system because a few people will be salty.

I think they could even go full size SD Express Card if its cheaper than Micro for the very reason it renders old microsd cards useless.

 

[theguy]

I just want a switch that's running at least PS4 level... Is that too much to ask for? These people getting ps5 pros already.. sheesh

it genuinely makes no sense. the ps4 pro made sense i suppose, 4k tvs really started to take off and so to capture that market they released a “4k” capable console. it wasn’t really native 4k at all times either. and the framerate was choppy as hell.

you don’t really hear about 8k tvs afaik. i could be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be a huge market for it. (i have a 4k OLED tv and pretty much everything looks insanely good on it, to the untrained eye 8k is lost on most people). 4k/60fps performance i understand sure, but this gen hasn’t even kicked off properly and they’re ready to throw out a more powerful mid-gen refresh?

what about the cost of this thing? like i mentioned in a previous post, to get that resolution and framerate you’re looking at a £1200 graphics card. unless they plan on selling at a HUGE loss, i see this being another stupid decision by sony, much like psvr2 and this project wii-u they’re putting out.

 

[Concernt]

If I can't press buttons on the opposite side of each other, they can keep it, IMO.

Ah, sorry, by no pivot I meant having the buttons not be physically connected or be one piece of plastic like PS buttons are.

 

[ILikeFeet]

This might be contraversial but I don't see Nintendo stifling their platform strategy by allowing sd card use just to avoid backlash. Not sure Nintendo cares about a minority complaining they can't use the sd cards they already own.

IMO they will go SD Express if it gives them parity with their other storage options, and if they have no solution for the SD Card compatability that is simple and doesn't disrupt their vision for the platform they will not provide sd card support.

Using SD cards for fridge storage just won't happen, if they go with fast storage everywhere else why hobble the system because a few people will be salty.

I think they could even go full size SD Express Card if its cheaper than Micro for the very reason it renders old microsd cards useless.

if they use SD Express, then people's micro SD cards will work thanks to how it hands backwards compatability

 

[Hermii]

it genuinely makes no sense. the ps4 pro made sense i suppose, 4k tvs really started to take off and so to capture that market they released a “4k” capable console. it wasn’t really native 4k at all times either. and the framerate was choppy as hell.

you don’t really hear about 8k tvs afaik. i could be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be a huge market for it. (i have a 4k OLED tv and pretty much everything looks insanely good on it, to the untrained eye 8k is lost on most people). 4k/60fps performance i understand sure, but this gen hasn’t even kicked off properly and they’re ready to throw out a more powerful mid-gen refresh?

what about the cost of this thing? like i mentioned in a previous post, to get that resolution and framerate you’re looking at a £1200 graphics card. unless they plan on selling at a HUGE loss, i see this being another stupid decision by sony, much like psvr2 and this project wii-u they’re putting out.

I doubt 8K is anything but a marketing tagline.

 

[chocolate_supra]

That's a 19 TFLOP machine, at minimum

Switch 3 when?

 

[Pokemaniac]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, because I'm not a tech person, but what would an external-storage-as-cold-storage solution mean for game cards? Would it imply forced installs, or are game cards faster than the feasible external storage options?

(Also, I just googled SD express out of interest to see what sort of prices we're talking about in AUD, and I'm not seeing any for sale. Is there some brand name that I should be looking for, or are they just that non-mainstream?)

Forced installs is a separate issue. The simple answer is that we don't know what the capabilities of Nintendo's next gen game cards will be.

SD Express has yet to really get off the ground, and there are some serious questions if it ever will. Nintendo throwing their weight behind it would probably help, though.

This might be contraversial but I don't see Nintendo stifling their platform strategy by allowing sd card use just to avoid backlash. Not sure Nintendo cares about a minority complaining they can't use the sd cards they already own.

IMO they will go SD Express if it gives them parity with their other storage options, and if they have no solution for the SD Card compatability that is simple and doesn't disrupt their vision for the platform they will not provide sd card support.

Using SD cards for fridge storage just won't happen, if they go with fast storage everywhere else why hobble the system because a few people will be salty.

I think they could even go full size SD Express Card if its cheaper than Micro for the very reason it renders old microsd cards useless.

SD Express is inherently backwards compatible with the current SD cards the Switch can leverage, and one of the other options, UFS cards, are designed so that you can make a slot that accepts both them and microSD.

They could of course, choose to reject any card that will not meet the minimum requirements, but there is some potential value in allowing the older formats to work in a more limited capacity. If Nintendo is going the route of trying to kickstart a new/failed format, allowing people to use cheaper cards for their collection of Switch 1 games while leaning on internal storage for native games could help to ease the transition for users.

Also all 3 sizes of SD card are electrically compatible. The smaller ones can be used in readers designed for the larger ones with simple adapter shells, which (at least for UHS-I level cards) are cheap and abundant. I did this myself with my 3DS. I needed to upgrade to a bigger SD card shortly before the New 3DS launch, so I chose to get a microSD card instead, so I could just move it over once the new system came in.

 

[LiC]

Has this person admitted to faking these? I'll be honest....it's one thing to have the artistic ability to create some pretty good looking fakes, but to think long and hard about some novel controller concepts and to then go all out in making fakes based on those concepts is on another level.

I really like this animation below....it's very smooth and very well designed. Very much feels like something Nintendo (or even Apple) would do:




They also say that no one figured out how the Joy-Con design works. He seems to be implying that different Joy-Con positions function as an input themselves, or that different positions lead to different kinds of inputs on the controller.

I can appreciate the amount of work that went into them, although I don't actually like anything that's been shown, personally. It ranges from meh (the animation looks nice but it takes forever, and the Switch's simple/instant transitions are much better) to very bad (whatever is going on with the Joycons). But they should have just presented them as mockups and then people would probably be giving them a lot of praise for their effort and ideas instead of arguing about whether they're real (lol) and/or justifiably mocking them for attempting a fake like this.

 

[Adulfzen]

if it really needs to be pointed out but Nintendo would have requested asap the pictures to be nuked if it had any chance to be real. also that concept looks ugly af I dare say even compared to the OG Switch so I'm glad it's fake.

The UI looks decent but it's just fancy little animations that I have seen a thousand times by motion artists where there is more care about it looking good rather than being functional.

 

[RedSpring]

My favorite topic returns. Expansion storage format. As for as I understand it, the options are:

SD card. Either as cold storage or games will have to be designed around this limitation.

SD Express has the big name recognition but as far as I can tell, barely available and nonexistent for the microSD version. Has poor energy consumption though we don’t know how it efficient it is when underclocked. At least you can reuse your microSD card but UFS readers exist that can do the same thing. Really hope Nintendo isn’t putting their weight behind this.

CF express is the relatively most popular format. Mainly used in cameras I believed. Pretty good availability. Rather pricy though for the regular format and the smaller form factor is even costlier. Make the Xbox Series expansion storage looks cheap. Also high energy consumption.

UFS, commonly exist as embedded storage format in many smartphone but also as a nonexistent expansion card format. The perfect fit for the Switch technology wise. Low cost due to mass production and designed to be power efficient. Also similar form factor as the microSD and as mentioned, has readers that can handle both. Samsung tried to make this a thing but failed. Now this format is dead. Thankfully, a company that can make embedded storage version is 90% ready to make the expansion card version and there are a lot of them. My ideal format for both the Switch and other devices. Would love to one day put a UFS card in my Steam Deck 2.

 

[Quailman]

What the fuck? I'd sorta convinced myself that they were going purely in an Elite direction, but this would be a proper PS5 Pro.

30 WGP is insane. The PS5 is 16 WGP, by comparison. They've gotta be pushing clocks, at least a little bit, too, I would assume, because they have to be building on a 4nm. That's a 19 TFLOP machine, at minimum

I feel that the Series X gpu has been heavily under utilize, I know a lot of people think the consoles are the same outside of the core specs but when you take a deeper lookin into the gpu you can see there's a clear power difference.

Series X uses 26 wgp clocked at 1.825 ghz (it's actually a 30 wgp with 4 wgp disabled) vs ps5 at 16 wgp clocked at a variable frequency up to 2.23 ghz

I don't expect sony to keep the gpu clocked at 2.23 ghz for the ps5 pro because how are they going to dispel the heat? I would expect sony to probably clock the gpu at 1.825 ghz or at least around there in order to keep the heat in check for the ps5 pro.

 

[Νεφέλωμα]

I feel that the Series X gpu has been heavily under utilize, I know a lot of people think the consoles are the same outside of the core specs but when you take a deeper lookin into the gpu you can see there's a clear power difference.

Series X uses 26 wgp clocked at 1.825 ghz (it's actually a 30 wgp with 4 wgp disabled) vs ps5 at 16 wgp clocked at a variable frequency up to 2.23 ghz

I don't expect sony to keep the gpu clocked at 2.23 ghz for the ps5 pro because how are they going to dispel the heat? I would expect sony to probably clock the gpu at 1.825 ghz or at least around there in order to keep the heat in check for the ps5 pro.

Series X is underutilised cause the de facto next gen console of Microsoft is the Series S, and the X is just a pro version.

 

[ReddDreadtheLead]

What the fuck? I'd sorta convinced myself that they were going purely in an Elite direction, but this would be a proper PS5 Pro.

30 WGP is insane. The PS5 is 16 WGP, by comparison. They've gotta be pushing clocks, at least a little bit, too, I would assume, because they have to be building on a 4nm. That's a 19 TFLOP machine, at minimum

PS5 has 20 WGPs.

 

[Giancarlo]

fall/holiday 2024: possible launch of Nintendo Switch sucessor
2026/2027: launch of Nintendo Switch sucessor Lite or OLED model, the launch model of Switch sucessor will be a LCD display console,

 

[NineTailSage]

Technically RDNA3 doubled it's FP32 cores over RDNA2, so the performance theoretically should be close to 3-4x PS5 in theory...
I know RDNA3 had a pretty rough launch with drivers and all so I'm not sure if these cards ever measured upto the protected performance gains all the insiders were leaking.

​

 

[eye0h]

What’s weird is the people that make it seem like we are crazy for wanting a new console.

people who bought a switch somewhat recently have the headcanon that the system came out in 2020 and don't want nintendo to make anything else its main priority

 

[ILikeFeet]

Strix Halo is probably a preview of what PS5 Pro will be: Zen 4(C) and RDNA3.5

wonder if RDNA3.5 adds BVH traversal to the RT cores

 

[Dakhil]

Here is an article about SD express. Sounds like a pretty massive leap.

The New SD Express Card Explained: Everything You Need to Know

Learn about the new SD Express card from our comprehensive article. We have covered its architecture, PCIe and NVMe technology, transfer speed and more.

beebom.com

"Up to 3,939 MB/s" is for SD Express 8.0 only, which no company has made currently.

---

Report by Tom Henderson:

PlayStation 5 Pro ‘Project Trinity’ Details And Release Date

Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:Like Loading...

keytogaming.com

Although the Pro's specs were difficult to pin down, admittingly due to my lack of technological prowess, sources have stated that Trinity with have 30 WGP and 18000mts memory.

As for the consoles performance targets and as to be expected, the PlayStation 5 Pro will be targeting improved and consistent FPS at 4K resolution, a new 'performance mode' for 8K resolution, and accelerated ray tracing.

Whether or not a PlayStation 5 Pro console is desired enough in the current market remains to be seen, but as of writing, the PlayStation 5 Pro is in development and is targeting a November 2024 release date.

Trinity appears to be PlayStation’s last bits of major hardware for this generation and after reporting on almost everything from the DualSense Edge Controller (via Try Hard Guides), to Project Q and PlayStation’s new wireless earbuds (via Insider Gaming), the next time you hear on a PlayStation hardware report from me will likely be on the PlayStation 6 – Which is currently targeting a 2028 release date.

They've got a great track record concerning Sony's hardware.


We're officially in the timeline where the release date for the PlayStation 5 Pro is more concrete than Nintendo's next-gen console

---

Technically RDNA3 doubled it's FP32 cores over RDNA2, so the performance theoretically should be close to 3-4x PS5 in theory...
I know RDNA3 had a pretty rough launch with drivers and all so I'm not sure if these cards ever measured upto the protected performance gains all the insiders were leaking.

New CU architecture, 2× as many shaders​

The compute units (CUs) of the RDNA 3 architecture are significantly redesigned. Since the first GCN architecture GPUs nearly 11 years ago, AMD’s GPU base block has always had 64 shaders (“ALUs”), although the implementation has varied over time – four 16-wide SIMDs for GCN, two 32-wide SIMDs for RDNA and RDNA 2.

RDNA 3 fo the first time gives the SIMD units (which provide those “shaders”, stream processors or also “shader ALUs” or “FP32 units” that are usually mentioned) the ability to process two instructions per cycle. So two 32-wide SIMD units should still be used, but with the “dual issue” capability they have a theoretical compute capacity of 128 shaders instead of the current 64. These two concurrently processed instructions can be of different types – integer and FP32, so it should be a flexible solution. However, this doubling of “ALUs” or shaders is done within the framework of a single CU structure derived from the previous generations, so 64 of these dual-issue shaders aren’t same as 128 shaders, since they share some control and compute resources that has only been serving only 64 shaders in RDNA 2 compute unit.

And the RDNA 3 ISA reference guide on p. 68 mentions that dual issue only works for wave32, not for wave64.

The VOPD instruction encoding allows a single shader instruction to encode two separate VALU operations that are executed in parallel. The two operations must be independent of each other. This instruction has certain restrictions that must be met - hardware does not function correctly if they are not. This instruction format is legal only for wave32. It must not be used by wave64's. It is skipped for wave64.

And wave64 is used extensively in the GCN architecture since AMD didn't introduce wave32 until AMD introduced the RDNA architecture.

 

[NineTailSage]

"Up to 3.939 GB/s" is for SD Express 8.0 only, which no company has made currently.

---

---

And the RDNA 3 ISA reference guide on p. 68 mentions that dual issue only works for wave32, not for wave64.

And wave64 is used extensively in the GCN architecture since AMD didn't introduce wave32 until AMD introduce the RDNA architecture.

Was just reading through that article I had originally included and they misunderstood doubled shaders vs doubled fp32 instructions per CU.

 

[Deleted member 887]

PS5 has 20 WGPs.

I thought four of them were disabled. I stand corrected!

 

[ILikeFeet]

I thought four of them were disabled. I stand corrected!

4 CUs are disabled

 

[Quailman]

I thought four of them were disabled. I stand corrected!

You were right with your initial thought they use a 20 WGP with 4 of them disabled.

 

[Concernt]

Switch 3 when?

Oh boy, here I go, upsetting the tech heads again.

Drake is a handheld PS5. Not a handheld PS4. More precisely, it's a handheld that can in theory produce comparable performance to PS5 in TV Mode, because wow, do the teraflops not do it justice.

I'm not one bit worried about a PS5 Pro; who even has an 8K display? 4K NOW is only reaching adoption 1080p had in 2013, at this rate widespread 8K adoption is a 2033 thing!

 

[Giancarlo]

Oh boy, here I go, upsetting the tech heads again.

Drake is a handheld PS5. Not a handheld PS4. More precisely, it's a handheld that can in theory produce comparable performance to PS5 in TV Mode, because wow, do the teraflops not do it justice.

I'm not one but worried about a PS5 Pro; who even has an 8K display? 4K NOW is only reaching adoption 1080p had in 2013, at this rate widespread 8K adoption is a 2033 thing!

excuse me? how can a console that is rumored to have 2 teraflops of power been more powerful then a console that have 10 teraflops of power?(PS5), this simply dont add up.

 

[chocolate_supra]

Oh boy, here I go, upsetting the tech heads again.

Drake is a handheld PS5. Not a handheld PS4. More precisely, it's a handheld that can in theory produce comparable performance to PS5 in TV Mode, because wow, do the teraflops not do it justice.

I'm not one but worried about a PS5 Pro; who even has an 8K display? 4K NOW is only reaching adoption 1080p had in 2013, at this rate widespread 8K adoption is a 2033 thing!

I was just joking

 

[Cybergatuno]

it genuinely makes no sense. the ps4 pro made sense i suppose, 4k tvs really started to take off and so to capture that market they released a “4k” capable console. it wasn’t really native 4k at all times either. and the framerate was choppy as hell.

you don’t really hear about 8k tvs afaik. i could be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be a huge market for it. (i have a 4k OLED tv and pretty much everything looks insanely good on it, to the untrained eye 8k is lost on most people). 4k/60fps performance i understand sure, but this gen hasn’t even kicked off properly and they’re ready to throw out a more powerful mid-gen refresh?

what about the cost of this thing? like i mentioned in a previous post, to get that resolution and framerate you’re looking at a £1200 graphics card. unless they plan on selling at a HUGE loss, i see this being another stupid decision by sony, much like psvr2 and this project wii-u they’re putting out.

Sony will still sell the PS5 Slim probably at $450 or so for the mass market.

Beyond that, they seem to target the luxury market segment as well, people with disposable income that spend a lot more on gaming than the average consumer, people that impulse buy an 8K TV.
They don't need to sell at a loss, there's the Slim for that, so I don't think they'll sell the PS5 Pro for less than $600, I'm actually expecting more.
It would be in line with Project Q or PSVR2. Premium products with very high margins that are not intended to sell very well, but to generate a lot of profit from a limited audience.

The other console manufacturers each have a very unique proposition in the market that Sony can't really compete with.
Differentiating themselves into some kind of "Elite Gaming" to capture the high-end console market seems like a good move.

 

[eye0h]

Switch 4 when?

 

[chocolate_supra]

Switch 4 when?

 

[TomNookYankees]

Drake is a handheld PS5. Not a handheld PS4. More precisely, it's a handheld that can in theory produce comparable performance to PS5 in TV Mode, because wow, do the teraflops not do it justice.

Only way NG ends up being closer to a "handheld PS5" than a "handheld PS4" is if nintendo decided to go with 16 GB of 5x RAM and opted to aim for significantly higher wattage than the switch in both handheld and docked modes, which is extremely unlikely.

 

[lexony]

Switch 4 when?

Soon

 

[Quailman]

Sony will still sell the PS5 Slim probably at $450 or so for the mass market.

Beyond that, they seem to target the luxury market segment as well, people with disposable income that spend a lot more on gaming than the average consumer, people that impulse buy an 8K TV.
They don't need to sell at a loss, there's the Slim for that, so I don't think they'll sell the PS5 Pro for less than $600, I'm actually expecting more.
It would be in line with Project Q or PSVR2. Premium products with very high margins that are not intended to sell very well, but to generate a lot of profit from a limited audience.

The other console manufacturers each have a very unique proposition in the market that Sony can't really compete with.
Differentiating themselves into some kind of "Elite Gaming" to capture the high-end console market seems like a good move.

I saw this on twitter while looking through information on the ps5 pro...even if it was true this seems like a whole new console generation. Also to make the console sell like hotcakes like the ps2 it will also be marketed as a space heater for those cold winter days and can be used to turn any room during the summer a sauna.

The ps5 pro isn't going to change the landscape for the NG switch, Nintendo will probably receive more 3rd party support this console gen then before. This "extra power" on the ps5 pro will be wasted as most games will have to run on the base ps5 and series S so we won't see games that will even fully utilize the potentially modest upgrade of the ps5 pro. I always felt that Sony is the king of Marketing so this talk of 8k gaming is essentially 2 console generations early when this current generation barley plays 4k games in 4k...yet alone plays any games with RT enabled in 4k.

 

[GrandDemand]

So the question has been how would Nintendo make storage faster, in the age of NVMe, and how would Nintendo make expansion storage able to keep up. One solution would be to go with SD Express, which would leave you with a slot that is backwards compatible with the MicroSD cards people already have, and then partner with another company to make MicroSD Express cards, probably Nintendo branded, and say "hey, if you want fast storage, you gotta buy these".
[...]
The cost would be that the necessary controllers in the hardware itself are nasty, and the cards themselves more expensive to make than CF Express. I don't know about the power consumption differences, but I would bet that SD Express is also less power efficient than CF Express, but only when running at those higher speeds

Hypothetically speaking, could the FDE in T239 be used to offset some of the speed/power related issues of SD Express? Wondering if there was any prior speculation on what the File Decompression Engine would be used for

 

[ffr48]

Looks like Sony just put least effort in their new handheld. It‘s runing on Android from the leaked photos.
edit: Maybe it's a factory specific OS for QA.

Spoiler: leaked photos

 

[Shoulder]

I saw this on twitter while looking through information on the ps5 pro...even if it was true this seems like a whole new console generation. Also to make the console sell like hotcakes like the ps2 it will also be marketed as a space heater for those cold winter days and can be used to turn any room during the summer a sauna.

The ps5 pro isn't going to change the landscape for the NG switch, Nintendo will probably receive more 3rd party support this console gen then before. This "extra power" on the ps5 pro will be wasted as most games will have to run on the base ps5 and series S so we won't see games that will even fully utilize the potentially modest upgrade of the ps5 pro. I always felt that Sony is the king of Marketing so this talk of 8k gaming is essentially 2 console generations early when this current generation barley plays 4k games in 4k...yet alone plays any games with RT enabled in 4k.

What I find interesting is 8K is 4x the resolution of 4K, which is 4x the resolution of 1080p. We'd be repeating the same damn cycle all over again, and the actual differences between games on the platforms wouldn’t even be monumental like they used to be.

It was difficult enough during the PS3 era touting 1080p when most games didn’t even reach that. Follow that up with the PS4 Pro touting 4K, and most games also never reached that. And now with the PS5 Pro, we’re just expecting we can get 8K?

If you ask me, we should be focusing more with higher frame rates than outright resolution, but that’s my preference. But I also say this as someone who has never owned a high refresh rate monitor/TV also. Still rocking 1080p60 with my gaming rig.

Like you said, marketing does wonders for Sony in this case.

 

[TomNookYankees]

What I find interesting is 8K is 4x the resolution of 4K, which is 4x the resolution of 1080p. We'd be repeating the same damn cycle all over again, and the actual differences between games on the platforms wouldn’t even be monumental like they used to be.

It was difficult enough during the PS3 era touting 1080p when most games didn’t even reach that. Follow that up with the PS4 Pro touting 4K, and most games also never reached that. And now with the PS5 Pro, we’re just expecting we can get 8K?

If you ask me, we should be focusing more with higher frame rates than outright resolution, but that’s my preference. But I also say this as someone who has never owned a high refresh rate monitor/TV also. Still rocking 1080p60 with my gaming rig.

Like you said, marketing does wonders for Sony in this case.

You're too focused on the 8k part when that's not the biggest reason for a PS5 Pro. The main reason is Ray Tracing at 4k 60+FPS.

 

[ILikeFeet]

Hypothetically speaking, could the FDE in T239 be used to offset some of the speed/power related issues of SD Express? Wondering if there was any prior speculation on what the File Decompression Engine would be used for

nah. the decompression engine works after the data is off the storage, so it plays no part in how fast or slow your storage is

Looks like Sony just put least effort in their new handheld. It‘s runing on Android from the leaked photos.
edit: Maybe it's a factory specific OS for QA.

Spoiler: leaked photos

such an ugly device. also, Android, as I expected

 

[Dakhil]

Looks like Sony just put least effort in their new handheld. It‘s runing on Android from the leaked photos.
edit: Maybe it's a factory specific OS for QA.

Spoiler: leaked photos

I wonder what Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC Sony's using for the PlayStation Q if what Qualcomm said is any indication.

 

[ReddDreadtheLead]

You were right with your initial thought they use a 20 WGP with 4 of them disabled.

Not 4 disabled WPGs, 4 disabled CUs

PS5 has 36CUs/18WGPs active.

This PS5 pro will have about 56CUs/28WGPs in the final product active, with 4 CUs/2WGPs disabled for yield.

At least that’s my assumption because from what Tom reported, this is the hardware side not the software side, and software only sees the enabled parts. Hardware side would know all the juicy bits.

Also, it seems like this is aiming to have about 576GB/s of memory bandwidth, unless I did the math wrong.

 

[Deleted member 2]

Looks like Sony just put least effort in their new handheld. It‘s runing on Android from the leaked photos.
edit: Maybe it's a factory specific OS for QA.

Spoiler: leaked photos

How is running Android "low effort"? Who designates that?

 

[ILikeFeet]

given the Playstation Q is a streaming device first, making a custom OS is a waste of time

 

[epicmartin7]

a ps5 pro? such nonsense

Don't you mean the PIS5 Pro?

Spoiler

sorry i had too

 

[ffr48]

How is running Android "low effort"? Who designates that?

That's my personal opnion for the product, though.

 

[epicmartin7]

That's my personal opnion, though.

oof, i wonder what you think of this device then.

Spoiler

 

[Cybergatuno]

Hypothetically speaking, could the FDE in T239 be used to offset some of the speed/power related issues of SD Express? Wondering if there was any prior speculation on what the File Decompression Engine would be used for

nah. the decompression engine works after the data is off the storage, so it plays no part in how fast or slow your storage is
...

The Switch's storage is bottlenecked by CPU decompression. It's far from reaching the full speed of SD cards.
NX with FDE/GPU decompression would be quite the jump even with standard SD cards.

I think the real question would be how fast NX can decompress assets.
Storage any faster than that would be a waste.
They'll probably use something faster then throttle it down to save power but just high enough to keep FDE busy.

 

[TLZ]

This doesn't seem even slightly viable.

"However, the big issue with SD cards, in general, is that they consume too much power in comparison to UFS or eMMC. Traditionally, SD cards need 3.3V to initialize the card and 1.8V to perform operations. In contrast, UFS needs 0.2V to 0.4V to initialize and perform operations."

Why would Nintendo ever use this compared to UFS 4.0

Maybe for the next NVIDIA shield.