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

How do we know the leak exposed all of Nvidia's pipeline?
Just so no one has to repeat this good work, but also to build off of it:
Kopite7 on June 10th 2021 tweeted that Nintendo will use a custom Tegra called T239 for the next Nintendo hardware.

Nvidia hack reveals NVN2 and NVN2 referencing T239 as it's target hardware on March 1st, 2022.

Public Linux Kernal update on September 5th adds support for T239.

If Nintendo were to have moved to another chip, T239 work would have stopped, Nvidia sells Orin to customers all the way down the stack, from 45 watts to 5 watts, there is no place for the same architecture to exist in the public space, T239 is a custom chip for a private company, and Nvidia is the supplier of Nintendo's next hardware device, we also know from the hack, that there is no other Ampere SoC being made, so unless you think Nvidia is making an even more advance SoC for Nintendo and just making T239 for no one... Then Switch 2 is absolutely using T239, this is deductive reasoning sure, this is occams razor sure, this is the logical conclusion sure... The confirmation that Nintendo is using T239 will never come, even tear downs will almost certainly not clearly identify the chip, what we have is as close to a confirmation as you can get, that indeed Switch 2 will be powered by a 1536 cuda core, 48 tensor core, 12RT core Nvidia Ampere GPU with 8 A78C cores and a 128bit memory bus.
Work for NVN2 (the sequel to NVN, used by Switch and ONLY Switch) that listed T239 as the target chip was happening all the way up to near the end of February of 2022 and this chip was confirmed to at least have underwent sample production prior to full production no later than September of 2022. February 2022 to July 2023 (when news came that dev kits were being distributed and the SoC would consequently become mass-production-ready) means Nintendo would have needed to not move forward with T239 and had a whole new chip taped out and production-ready within the span of 17 months. Between the last NVN2 update and the latest possible timeline for first sample production, that time is a mere 7 months.

Now let's look at Nvidia's Orin chips for a moment. The entire general platform announcement happened at the end of March 2018, while Orin AGX specifically was announced in December 2019. Sample production of the very first Orin AGX chips did not begin until 2021 and, since it required little to no software production ahead of launch, we can reasonably assume full production began before its final release in September of 2022, putting it mass-production-ready at somewhere between March and June of 2022.

Since I do not believe we know the month when sampling began, we have a 12 month margin for error in deducing timeframe. If we gauge it by all that, between announcement and sampling took anywhere from 13-25 months, while sampling to being mass-production ready is anywhere from 15-27 months. So, in total, from announcement (if we assume no design work had yet been completed at that time, which is a dubious assumption) to production-ready is 28-52 months.

So for this to be even remotely possible, Nintendo would have needed to ditch T239 within 30 days of the Nvidia data theft and worked Nvidia like slaves to get a production-ready chip by July of this year, or Nvidia would have needed to needlessly waste man-hours writing NVN2 for a chip that their customer no longer wanted.

At this point, anyone who is seriously suggesting T239 isn't the chip is not even engaged in devil's advocacy, they're doing so simply to be a contrarian. So to put your mind at ease, there is no other chip coming, rest assured.
 
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ToTK DLC?
The hardware part could simply be a Mario Wonder OLED bundle.
Kinda hoping they hold off on the DLC until the Switch 2 where it could serve as a launch feature and do an Animal Crossing on it - coming out with a big expansion about a year after release, hopefully with plenty of extra Zonai devices, a new upper tier of sky islands, a Deeper Depths, along with rebuilt and repopulated ruined villages courtesy of the Hudson Company
 
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This is pretty big, right?
Some first-party games already used FSR 1.0 and from what I saw 2.0 seems to be a substantial upgrade.

Not really? FSR2 was always capable on Switch. It's another TAAU option after all, which has been seen on Switch multiple times already. The thing is, taa is heavy on bandwidth limited devices which is why you don't see it on mobile devices. FSR for mobile is FSR1 for that reason.

You guys seem fairly confident that Drake is going to be on the TSMC N4 node that Nvidia is currently using on Lovelace hardware.

I’m still betting there is a small chance they go with Samsung’s 8nm Node
The problem with 8nm is that it's pushing the known design to its absolute limits, and maybe beyond them. 1536 cores on 8nm would be big and hot.
 
Looking forward to seeing this running on steam deck and the Ally. If they even can
 
FSR 2.0 is huge for Switch, remember Switch is actually capable of mixed precision, and FSR 2 loves fp16 compute, so it wouldn't be too surprising if you could get the Switch to render a game at 540p with 500GFLOPs mixed precision, and use FSR 2 to upscale to 1080p, basically Switch has finally evolved into Switch Pro, that gives it about twice the performance of Switch at launch. We are talking about ~3/4th of an XB1 now. The limitation is still 3.2GB of RAM available for games (I think games have access to 3.2GB RAM, could be wrong there).
I think you are overthinking this a bit, it’s a custom made FSR2.0 which is probably more lightweight on the GPU than normal FSR2.0 thus won’t produce as good IQ.

i could be wrong as this could benefit big third party games to use a light weight FSR2.0. Can the Xbone and PS4 use this or is the uArch more limited?
 
Are people hinting we may get new hardware news in September? Or they just meaning a Direct is close now.
My guess: September direct, clearing up the specific schedule for the announced games (lm2, peach game), showing MP4 as the last switch game, Pokémon trailer with specific date (if we don't already have that)

Could be wrong, but hardware announcement seems of now if it's planed for the holidays 24
 
Imagine moving away from the incredibly strong “Switch” brand to something named after something you have to do while at work like “Focus”
The Nintendo Dandori. Coming 2024.

My guess: September direct, clearing up the specific schedule for the announced games (lm2, peach game), showing MP4 as the last switch game, Pokémon trailer with specific date (if we don't already have that)

Could be wrong, but hardware announcement seems of now if it's planed for the holidays 24
I definitely agree with you about the September Direct and focus on software.

That said, while a lot of the next-gen chatter has been about holiday ‘24… for the last half-decade, I’ve been thinking Nintendo would like to have their next system out earlier in the year (like they did with Switch.) They will have no problem selling the first few million units regardless of when the system launches, so why not take advantage of that fact and release it outside of the holidays to then take advantage of the holiday selling period as a momentum sustainer. In theory, they may also have more software to push by that point if they do big monthly-ish releases like they did in the early days of Switch.

Of course, production timelines and schedules all factor in, so maybe it isn’t feasible to have it out earlier than the holidays, and Nintendo desperately needed to inject some life into their year-end financials when the Switch launched in March of that year. They can also ride the Switch out a little longer, which they didn’t have the benefit of with the Wii U (and the 3DS was pretty long in the tooth by that point.) And on the software side, games can only be ready when they’re ready and some core teams are just or still finishing up work on Switch games, while Wii U had a pretty barren release schedule in its final years.

So who knows, but I too think any news coming in September is software stuff. Maybe a special edition Switch console or controllers.
 
Let the September Direct clear the slate. If the console is launching in Fall '24, then we'll also have a whole direct in January to cover the first half of the year. No need to blow their load on Hardware a whole year before at this point. The Switch has pleanty of gas left in the tank, especially if Nintendo continues to continues to pump out these Gamecube ports/remasters.

Luigi's Mansion 1, F-Zero, Paper Mario TYD, Prime 2/3, and Windwaker/TP..... that's almost half a years worth of games that we assume will release on the OG Switch
 
H2 is not automatically holidays 2024. I can see a lot of good reasons to launch ahead of that especially if the goal is to have ample stock.
 
Let the September Direct clear the slate. If the console is launching in Fall '24, then we'll also have a whole direct in January to cover the first half of the year. No need to blow their load on Hardware a whole year before at this point. The Switch has pleanty of gas left in the tank, especially if Nintendo continues to continues to pump out these Gamecube ports/remasters.

Luigi's Mansion 1, F-Zero, Paper Mario TYD, Prime 2/3, and Windwaker/TP..... that's almost half a years worth of games that we assume will release on the OG Switch
Princess Peach Will Star As the Main Character in a Brand New Game and Prime 4, Fire Emblem Remake
 
The Nintendo Dandori. Coming 2024.


I definitely agree with you about the September Direct and focus on software.

That said, while a lot of the next-gen chatter has been about holiday ‘24… for the last half-decade, I’ve been thinking Nintendo would like to have their next system out earlier in the year (like they did with Switch.) They will have no problem selling the first few million units regardless of when the system launches, so why not take advantage of that fact and release it outside of the holidays to then take advantage of the holiday selling period as a momentum sustainer. In theory, they may also have more software to push by that point if they do big monthly-ish releases like they did in the early days of Switch.

Of course, production timelines and schedules all factor in, so maybe it isn’t feasible to have it out earlier than the holidays, and Nintendo desperately needed to inject some life into their year-end financials when the Switch launched in March of that year. They can also ride the Switch out a little longer, which they didn’t have the benefit of with the Wii U (and the 3DS was pretty long in the tooth by that point.) And on the software side, games can only be ready when they’re ready and some core teams are just or still finishing up work on Switch games, while Wii U had a pretty barren release schedule in its final years.

So who knows, but I too think any news coming in September is software stuff. Maybe a special edition Switch console or controllers.
Sure. My go to assumption was march/spring till now, but the current rumblings seem to point strongly towards holidays, so I'm basing my assumption on that. If it's 1H then I honestly don't know how they would announce that now, next to a direct without directly tanking their holiday sales. But could as well be.
 
I think you are overthinking this a bit, it’s a custom made FSR2.0 which is probably more lightweight on the GPU than normal FSR2.0 thus won’t produce as good IQ.

i could be wrong as this could benefit big third party games to use a light weight FSR2.0. Can the Xbone and PS4 use this or is the uArch more limited?
I'm comparing this to how those consoles use to perform.
 
There's at least a precedent though: we had an FCC filing for an Nvidia-based 3DS devkit, yet the final hardware had a completely different HW partner.

So while we have multiple, extremely solid hints at what the nextgen Switch could end up using, I can totally see why people might prefer keeping a more cautious approach. You never know.
It was a very early prototype/test board, not a devkit. And the FCC filing mentioned by that article was not actually for Nintendo hardware, it was for the DSi's wireless module, DWM-W015, which was evidently reused for that test board (the 3DS ultimately used the newer DWM-W028).

The filing itself was originally testing it for the DSi in 2008, and the test board only showed up because of the module's reuse in 2009, just after the release of the DSi. Normally, an internal test device like that would have never made it to the FCC, so that makes it different from most FCC applications we see for real products with impending releases.

There's some gigaleak info I could dig back through to look for dates, but I think the history of the Tegra in the 3DS was very early and short-lived.
 
feels like the Switch 2 rumours are already reaching fever pitch and we're not even close to the end of 2023.

if it's truly coming holiday 24 it's going to be insane the amount of speculations, mock-ups & leaks that occur before that timeframe.

i would love it to come in March or May like a few people are suggesting. i believe they are already late to the party and a new system should have launched with TOTK. launch with 3D Mario, MP4 (cross-gen) and let Mario Kart be the BIG holiday title next year.

we are reaching a critical period in the next couple of months where if nothing materializes you can pretty much write off this FY. again i believe funcles are the key to all this.
 
To follow up on what I said the other day about looking at Nvidia papers, it looks like the first instance of Nvidia using a deep learning denoiser was in a paper in 2017 (Interactive Reconstruction of Monte Carlo Image Sequences using a Recurrent Denoising Autoencoder), with a commercial integration available that same year in Optix 5.0. This is still very different from dlss 3.5 in that there's no integration with an upscaler, but this shows Nvidia has been toying with ML denoising for a long time.

I have not yet seen anything about mixing the upscaling and denoising together though, but I'll keep searching. Maybe I might even find stuff about potential future features (if I can understand them because this is WAY beyond my knowledge level, a lot of this stuff is just incomprehensible to me).
 
feels like the Switch 2 rumours are already reaching fever pitch and we're not even close to the end of 2023.

if it's truly coming holiday 24 it's going to be insane the amount of speculations, mock-ups & leaks that occur before that timeframe.

i would love it to come in March or May like a few people are suggesting. i believe they are already late to the party and a new system should have launched with TOTK. launch with 3D Mario, MP4 (cross-gen) and let Mario Kart be the BIG holiday title next year.

we are reaching a critical period in the next couple of months where if nothing materializes you can pretty much write off this FY. again i believe funcles are the key to all this.
What rumors. We don't yet have youtubers using sad Mario for an out of context detail leak
 
Yes. I would go to Nintendo's NYC office every August/September to demo their holiday lineup in prior years.


Ascend.
Tears_of_the_Kingdom_Ascend_%281%29.jpg
 
so FSR3 will work on consoles, and even have a driver-level implementation. I'm curious how it scales to something like Steam Deck, Ally, and Series S. it'll still ahve to run on compute, so there might be a performance limit
 
 
Various interesting snippets from the FSR3 blog post.

One important point to note, though — when using frame generation, we recommend always running at a minimum of 60 FPS before frame generation is applied for an optimal and low-latency experience.
A reminder that, until we get to predicting future frames, frame gen is for high frame rates only.

“Native AA” stands for Native Anti-Aliasing and is a new quality mode being introduced in AMD FSR 3. Unlike the other modes, it lets you use AMD FSR 3 without applying any upscaling but still applies the high-quality anti-aliasing and sharpening of FSR for improved image quality over native resolution.
FSR adding a DLAA-like-mode. Partially useful because frame gen requires the same analysis that upscaling does, so DLSS couples them, and so does FSR. This lets folks use frame gen without upscaling.

For all gamers using virtually any hardware, the built-in latency reduction technology in AMD FSR 3 will provide valuable latency reduction when using frame generation, and our in-driver latency reduction solutions are a BONUS for AMD Radeon gamers that stack on top to provide the best experience possible.
Curious how the latency reduction out-of-driver works - possibly the same as in driver, with it effectively being a frame rate cap enforced at the upscaler. Really curious to see someone dive into this.

Supported and Recommended Hardware for using AMD FSR 3 with Upscaling and Frame Generation
AMDNVIDIA
Supported:
AMD Radeon™ RX 5700 and above
Recommended:
AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 Series and above
Supported:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 20 Series and above
Recommended:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 30 Series and above
Emphasis mine - one wonders if this will push Nvidia to open up frame gen to RTX 30 cards, even if the result is not as good. Or will AMD blow performance on these older Nvidia cards to the point that Nvidia can come back and say "see, you need the custom hardware only we provide..." and keep it on RTX 40
 
Various interesting snippets from the FSR3 blog post.


A reminder that, until we get to predicting future frames, frame gen is for high frame rates only.


FSR adding a DLAA-like-mode. Partially useful because frame gen requires the same analysis that upscaling does, so DLSS couples them, and so does FSR. This lets folks use frame gen without upscaling.


Curious how the latency reduction out-of-driver works - possibly the same as in driver, with it effectively being a frame rate cap enforced at the upscaler. Really curious to see someone dive into this.


Emphasis mine - one wonders if this will push Nvidia to open up frame gen to RTX 30 cards, even if the result is not as good. Or will AMD blow performance on these older Nvidia cards to the point that Nvidia can come back and say "see, you need the custom hardware only we provide..." and keep it on RTX 40

So, how does FSR 3 look? At Gamescom, we had a demonstration of both titles running with the new technology active on a Radeon 7900 XTX running at 4K output. Both were running with v-sync on, which AMD recommends for frame-pacing purposes. In the very small Forspoken demo we saw, the game was running locked at 120 frames per second and looked just as a v-synced 120fps should look. The game was running in FSR 2 quality mode providing its own frame-rate boost, with frame-gen then taking you up to the limit. In terms of fluidity and clarity, FSR 3 looked a match for DLSS 3 - a view shared by Alex, Rich and John, who were all present to see the demos in person. A great start for FSR 3.
 
Emphasis mine - one wonders if this will push Nvidia to open up frame gen to RTX 30 cards, even if the result is not as good. Or will AMD blow performance on these older Nvidia cards to the point that Nvidia can come back and say "see, you need the custom hardware only we provide..." and keep it on RTX 40
nah, I don't think Nvidia will do anything. the weird place AMD is in, they support older Nvidia hardware better than Nvidia, but that just means these people don't have a reason to move to AMD. whenever they get a new card, being creatures of habit we are, will most likely move to another Nvidia card. so they'll still everything and the kitchen sink
 
Considering it seemingly is FP16 mostly. May actually work well on Switch 2 with Ampere's inflated Theoretical Peak Mixed Precision value.

At least considering on the slides for Forspoken the cost vs Native 4K without any FSR seems to mostly be from enabling FSR-AA (Native Res TAA via FSR, like DLSS) rather than FSR-FMF
 
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Does anyone here have access to TechInsights’ market analyses? There are reports from China claiming that the latest TechInsights console market analysis “estimates” that the Switch NG will be launched in “March or April next year”. Here is one of the reports. My translation of relevant section (emphases mine):

“In 2022, Nintendo led the console hardware market with a 40% share, albeit down from 45% in 2021. […] Nintendo was able to maintain its lead due to the tremendous success of Switch OLED (launched in October 2021) between Q4 2021 and Q1 2023, with 15 million units shipped worldwide. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s global market share will drop sharply to 28% this year, ceding the number one position to Sony. The trend will reverse in 2024, with the next-generation Switch 2 expected to be launched in March or April next year. TechInsights estimates that the release of the new model will boost Nintendo’s global market share back up to nearly 40 percent. However, that won’t be enough to dethrone Sony from the number one position.”

Note that the “market share” mentioned above refers to the number of units shipped. TechInsights reports usually are fairly reliable, however it isn’t clear from the regurgitated articles from China whether the Switch NG launch window is strictly their estimation or based on any industry information.
 
To follow up on what I said the other day about looking at Nvidia papers, it looks like the first instance of Nvidia using a deep learning denoiser was in a paper in 2017 (Interactive Reconstruction of Monte Carlo Image Sequences using a Recurrent Denoising Autoencoder), with a commercial integration available that same year in Optix 5.0. This is still very different from dlss 3.5 in that there's no integration with an upscaler, but this shows Nvidia has been toying with ML denoising for a long time.

I have not yet seen anything about mixing the upscaling and denoising together though, but I'll keep searching. Maybe I might even find stuff about potential future features (if I can understand them because this is WAY beyond my knowledge level, a lot of this stuff is just incomprehensible to me).
It's Intel, not Nvidia, but look here:
I just found that Intel had published a paper last year that also combined denoising and supersampling into one network. I haven't read it through yet but, as the Facebook paper was for supersampling, this should be useful for figuring out how DLSS ray reconstruction is working behind the scenes.

image.png


And, no surprise, the core feature extraction network is a convolutional autoencoder (specifically, a U-Net, which is a common architecture for image segmentation and the like). Plenty of modifications in the other blocks, though:

image.png
 
nah, I don't think Nvidia will do anything. the weird place AMD is in, they support older Nvidia hardware better than Nvidia, but that just means these people don't have a reason to move to AMD. whenever they get a new card, being creatures of habit we are, will most likely move to another Nvidia card. so they'll still everything and the kitchen sink
Yeah, you're probably right. I would expect the only push would actually come from game devs. "You want me to implement DLSS, let me turn on frame gen for these cards, or I'll just use FSR"
 
I meant 3x the current Switch GPU's docked performance for Switch 2's handheld GPU performance.

3x Switch GPU docked performance in handheld mode would also make Switch 2 a 9x leap in power over Switch in handheld mode considering the Switch handheld mode is 157.3gflops as standard and 193.5gflops (when special permission is asked for from Nintendo but isn't always given which would still be a x7.75 leap).

So saying Switch 2's GPU performance in handheld mode will be 3x Switch's GPU's docked mode is a very big expectation especially considering Nintendo will be battery / size / cooling / price sensitive in terms of Switch 2 as a product and want it to be as sleek / cool / $399 all while having a 3 hour battery life at bare minimum.
The handheld profile are 40-60% docked, so to get to x3 docked would be more like ~6x, give or take. Which, yeah, I don't think should be hard to beat after 7+ years. Sure there are restraints in battery/size/cooling, but no more than original Switch had to deal with so it's an apples-apples comparison.
Seemingly because this is an "AMD sponsored" game.

Modders were able to add DLSS to some games, so if you really want that I believe it will be added unofficially :(
Relevantly, DLSS has been added to Skyrim SE and Fallout 4 (with some glitches).
Yeah, you're probably right. I would expect the only push would actually come from game devs. "You want me to implement DLSS, let me turn on frame gen for these cards, or I'll just use FSR"
Do people think NVIDIA is just lying about their reasons for not allowing it on older cards? This sounds like a developer holding a gun on NVIDIA until they get permission to decrease performance.
 
It's Intel, not Nvidia, but look here:
Nice find ! I missed it the first time you posted.

According to the paper, this is the first time denoising and upscaling are treated as a joint problem. So it looks like Intel came up with that before Nvidia.
Interestingly, this was published in July 2022. Either Nvidia is really fast, or they were working independantly on the same idea at the same time.
Either way, this should mean we can expect xess to have such a feature in the future.
 
If you Google search “euphoriæ”, there is a good bit of related social media pages that reference the LinkedIn page that’s existed for months
 
Yeah, you're probably right. I would expect the only push would actually come from game devs. "You want me to implement DLSS, let me turn on frame gen for these cards, or I'll just use FSR"
well, the problem is, why would they care? especially when Nvidia commands the marketshare as they do



Either Zippo is getting extra elaborate with their fake rumors or there might be some new Nintendo/Epic partnership after all.

I think I found two people in question. it's a weird thing to put in your profile. especially if you're meant to be discrete
 
A guy with an Associate's degree is heading up a major joint venture between Nintendo and Epic? And they are sitting in North Kingstown, RI? At a company with no public address? With no prior credits to their name.

He lists himself as 'Founder' of Epic Games, ffs.
 
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