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Rumour Eurogamer: "Nintendo demoed Switch 2 to developers at Gamescom ahead of widely-expected launch next year."

Reader mode
9-Volt said:
If that's considered shitty, I don't know what Bomb Rush Cyberfunk icon is:

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oh my god is that derachi
 
Machrider said:
To be honest, Nintendo isn't even really making the chips anymore.

Nvidia is. These are basically now Nvidia platforms from a tech perspective.

The Tegra X1 has nothing from Nintendo in it basically, it's all Nvidia.

I think the days of Nintendo creating bespoke chip designs and lording over every aspect of a chip and having weird design fetishes prioritized are basically over. Nvidia doesn't work that way, they make a base chip design (Orin) and sure they will give Nintendo some options, but I don't think those options are as robust as people think.

Because Nintendo getting very detailed and specific would likely drive the cost of the chip up (Nvidia R&D is probably not cheap), I think more or less their instruction to Nvidia was to give them something that is a full generation beyond the Tegra X1 + backwards compatible + fits into XYZ power/cost profile, Nvidia takes that and basically creates from their Orin self driving chip line a chip that falls in line with all that.

Nintendo is just by luck or happenstance I think tied to the best graphics card maker and AI tech leader in the world, they can't leave Nvidia because of backwards compatibility issues and really there's not much incentive to want to do so anyway so long as Nvidia is willing to give them a decent price.

The Wii U, being a clunky, expensive mess of a hardware platform I think effectively neutered Nintendo's hardware R&D division and probably Nvidia's engineers are simply on a different level from Nintendo. They don't need notes from Nintendo, all the top video games in the world run on Nvidia GPUs anyway (aside from the odd Sony Playstation exclusive), random engineer from Nintendo is not really going to be lecturing Nvidia's design staff on what they need for gaming. The reality is if Nvidia architecture/tech/philosophy can run the most demanding, high end games at the best performance in the world, then they can run your little Mario game just fine there Mr. Nintendo R&D employee, lol.
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I don't think Nintendo ever made chips in house tbh...Wii U was a powerpc chip
 
ILikeFeet said:
any other wacky, made up stuff you got to share to the class?
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Does Nvidia make highly bespoke Tegra chips for any vendor period? Like it seems like you get some variance on a few things, but if you look at all the consumer products that use the Tegra X1 or Parker X2 ... there's not much variance. It is basically entirely an Nvidia design.

And frankly ... y'know that's not a bad thing. It's probably a good thing. Nintendo has made bizarre hardware choices in the past culminating with the train wreck Wii U hardware that was embarrassingly underpowered yet still very expensive to mass produce.

It's not the 90s anymore, GPU design, especially on Nvidia's end is not cheap. AMD probably allows for more variance and more control/input from Sony/MS because they have no choice. They can't afford to lose those contracts because they're so far behind Nvidia in GPU marketshare.
 
Machrider said:
To be honest, Nintendo isn't even really making the chips anymore.

Nvidia is. These are basically now Nvidia platforms from a tech perspective.

The Tegra X1 has nothing from Nintendo in it basically, it's all Nvidia.

I think the days of Nintendo creating bespoke chip designs and lording over every aspect of a chip and having weird design fetishes prioritized are basically over. Nvidia doesn't work that way, they make a base chip design (Orin) and sure they will give Nintendo some options, but I don't think those options are as robust as people think.

Because Nintendo getting very detailed and specific would likely drive the cost of the chip up (Nvidia R&D is probably not cheap), I think more or less their instruction to Nvidia was to give them something that is a full generation beyond the Tegra X1 + backwards compatible + fits into XYZ power/cost profile, Nvidia takes that and basically creates from their Orin self driving chip line a chip that falls in line with all that.

Nintendo is just by luck or happenstance I think tied to the best graphics card maker and AI tech leader in the world, they can't leave Nvidia because of backwards compatibility issues and really there's not much incentive to want to do so anyway so long as Nvidia is willing to give them a decent price.

The Wii U, being a clunky, expensive mess of a hardware platform I think effectively neutered Nintendo's hardware R&D division and probably Nvidia's engineers are simply on a different level from Nintendo. They don't need notes from Nintendo, all the top video games in the world run on Nvidia GPUs anyway (aside from the odd Sony Playstation exclusive), random engineer from Nintendo is not really going to be lecturing Nvidia's design staff on what they need for gaming. The reality is if Nvidia architecture/tech/philosophy can run the most demanding, high end games at the best performance in the world, then they can run your little Mario game just fine there Mr. Nintendo R&D employee, lol.
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Nintendo never designed CPUs, GPUs, or SoCs before the Switch either. They always got with a chipmaker (AMD, IBM, Sharp), gave them requirements and targets, and had it made to meet those -- exactly the way any client of those chipmakers would.

The only difference in the Switch is that TX1 was a general-purpose instead of custom-built SoC. That was something Nintendo had been researching for some time, even prototyping the 3DS with an early Tegra chip in it. But beyond that, the actual hardware R&D process didn't change for them. The TX1 SoC is only one part of the Odin motherboard that actually powers the Switch, and Nintendo was 100% involved with the design and development of Odin.

Also, before they had even released the TX1 Switch, they had Nvidia working on TX1+, designed specifically for them. And now they've been working with Nvidia on T239, designed specifically for them, featuring hardware blocks that the parent T234/Orin line doesn't even have, like the FDE -- file decompression engine -- made for Nintendo's use case.
 
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Machrider said:
To be honest, Nintendo isn't even really making the chips anymore.

Nvidia is. These are basically now Nvidia platforms from a tech perspective.

The Tegra X1 has nothing from Nintendo in it basically, it's all Nvidia.

I think the days of Nintendo creating bespoke chip designs and lording over every aspect of a chip and having weird design fetishes prioritized are basically over. Nvidia doesn't work that way, they make a base chip design (Orin) and sure they will give Nintendo some options, but I don't think those options are as robust as people think.

Because Nintendo getting very detailed and specific would likely drive the cost of the chip up (Nvidia R&D is probably not cheap), I think more or less their instruction to Nvidia was to give them something that is a full generation beyond the Tegra X1 + backwards compatible + fits into XYZ power/cost profile, Nvidia takes that and basically creates from their Orin self driving chip line a chip that falls in line with all that.

Nintendo is just by luck or happenstance I think tied to the best graphics card maker and AI tech leader in the world, they can't leave Nvidia because of backwards compatibility issues and really there's not much incentive to want to do so anyway so long as Nvidia is willing to give them a decent price.

The Wii U, being a clunky, expensive mess of a hardware platform I think effectively neutered Nintendo's hardware R&D division and probably Nvidia's engineers are simply on a different level from Nintendo. They don't need notes from Nintendo, all the top video games in the world run on Nvidia GPUs anyway (aside from the odd Sony Playstation exclusive), random engineer from Nintendo is not really going to be lecturing Nvidia's design staff on what they need for gaming. The reality is if Nvidia architecture/tech/philosophy can run the most demanding, high end games at the best performance in the world, then they can run your little Mario game just fine there Mr. Nintendo R&D employee, lol.
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You know that all Nintendo consoles since like the start they don't really design CPUs and GPUs, right?
N64 dev kits used to be just SGI workstations imitating an N64, the GameCube CPU is designed by IBM, its GPU designed by ex-SGI staff at ATi (then bought by AMD) and continued with these partnerships until Nvidia came along.
You could even talk about the 3DS just reusing the PICA300 GPU because it was a good fit for a handheld, even.
When consoles were simpler, I could see Nintendo having more of a hand, but they always relied on a partner who could design and manufacture the chips.
 
LiC said:
Nintendo never designed CPUs, GPUs, or SoCs before the Switch either. They always got with a chipmaker (AMD, IBM, Sharp), gave them requirements and targets, and had it made to meet those -- exactly the way any client of those chipmakers would.

The only difference in the Switch is that TX1 was a general-purpose instead of custom-built SoC. That was something Nintendo had been researching for some time, even prototyping the 3DS with early an Tegra chip in it. But beyond that, the actual hardware R&D process didn't change for them. The TX1 SoC is only one part of the Odin motherboard that actually powers the Switch, and Nintendo was 100% involved with the design and development of Odin.

Also, before they had even released the TX1 Switch, they had Nvidia working on TX1+, designed specifically for them. And now they've been working with Nvidia on T239, designed specifically for them, featuring hardware blocks that the parent T234/Orin line doesn't even have, like the FDE -- file decompression engine -- made for Nintendo's use case.
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But the R&D was still deeply involved in all design aspects especially post NES.

I remember for example one of the lead SGI engineers who worked with Nintendo on the N64 said the Nintendo guys from Japan were up his ass over every single transistor on the chip, they would make him count every single one and forced the transistor count down to a minimum and that was also a big part of the reason why the N64 had that terrible 4kb texture cache limit.

I think those days are over. Nvidia makes the chip and sure they'll take out the self-driving car bits, but no one at Nintendo is going to order them around and make some wonky very customized design that is very far removed from other industry standards because some designer at Nintendo Kyoto has a weird design fetish.

Frankly y'all should be happy if that's the case. Nintendo getting in there would only muck things up, they're not a billion dollar graphics design company for a reason. Let the big boys at Nvidia handle that stuff, Nintendo has generally gotten themselves into nothing but trouble when they've made too many "Nintendo-Only" style hardware decisions. Do what you do best, which is make the games, let Nvidia more or less worry about the hardware. They're doing stuff with DLSS and AI that frankly is probably way over Nintendo's head.
 
Machrider said:
Does Nvidia make highly bespoke Tegra chips for any vendor period? Like it seems like you get some variance on a few things, but if you look at all the consumer products that use the Tegra X1 or Parker X2 ... there's not much variance. It is basically entirely an Nvidia design.

And frankly ... y'know that's not a bad thing. It's probably a good thing. Nintendo has made bizarre hardware choices in the past culminating with the train wreck Wii U hardware that was embarrassingly underpowered yet still very expensive to mass produce.

It's not the 90s anymore, GPU design, especially on Nvidia's end is not cheap. AMD probably allows for more variance and more control/input from Sony/MS because they have no choice. They can't afford to lose those contracts because they're so far behind Nvidia in GPU marketshare.
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Nintendo never had as custom of a chip as you claimed, ever.
 
ITSMILNER said:
I really hope this doesn’t end up being difficult to get hold of, I need it day one!
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Better camp Amazon/BB/local equivalent then because this thing will very likely super hard to get in the beginning, even without another pandemic.
 
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Machrider said:
But the R&D was still deeply involved in all design aspects especially post NES.

I remember for example the SGI engineer who worked with Nintendo on the N64 said the Nintendo guys from Japan were up his ass over every single transistor on the chip, they would make him count every single one and forced the transistor count down to a minimum and that was also a big part of the reason why the N64 had that terrible 4kb texture cache limit.

I think those days are over. Nvidia makes the chip and sure they'll take out the self-driving car bits, but no one at Nintendo is going to order them around and make some wonky very customized design that is very far removed from other industry standards because some designer at Nintendo Kyoto has a weird design fetish.
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That's just Nintendo begging for the chip to be as cheap as possible. Technically custom, but how to do it is essentially down to SGI.
 
I just hope they don’t have the full reveal at 5 a.m German time again. I stayed up the whole night and then some to wait for preorders to open.
 
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BlackthornOrion said:
$400 feels like the sweet spot to me. More expensive than Series S, same price as the cheapest Steam Deck and the digital PS5, but still cheaper than Series X or disk drive PS5.

I could see them going a little higher though, if only to avoid the "corrective price adjustments" that both Sony and Microsoft have done post-launch.
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What the other consoles are selling at doesn’t really matter. This new switch model could release at the exact same price as the ps5 and Series X and be fine.

The original switch sold like gangbusters and launched at the same price as the ps4.

Heck, you could argue the Switch launched at $50 more than the ps4 because the ps4 was having consistent $249 bundles throughout 2017.


kvetcha said:
so far, yes. But the cross-gen era won't always be with us. At some point devs are going to be using 8c/16t as a CPU baseline.
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Which the 8 core A78c cpu will certainly be capabale enough to tackle. When this “some point” happens lol.

I imagine most big 3rd party support will still try and develop and release for the 140 million current models for years anyways.
 
I'm gonna go with $349.99.

We'll also see a price drop at some point bringing the OLED down to $299.99, and the Nintendo Switch down to $179.99.
 
No matter how much we say it. I’m expecting people to expect this to deliver ps5 graphics and be disappointed when it doesn’t. Hopefully some legit specs and more detail come soon so people can have realistic over assumed expectations.
 
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Dark Cloud said:
From Necro on Twitter
Per my sources now: The version of DLSS shown behind closed doors by the “Nintendo Switch 2” tech demo was 3.1 and not 3.5 as reported or pointed out by Eurogamer

Ray-Tracing is indeed possible and the RAM I was told was 12 GB for consumer
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4ulbrt.jpg


Double digits is a massive relief, I was too stressed thinking it might have been kneecapped at 8GB

Atheerios said:
So what are y’all guys thinking? $349? $399? $449?
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$449USD, meaning $619CAD, meaning $699.97 Canadian dollary-doos after taxes for a new console 🥲

This is why I want the console announced sooner rather than later with a long build-up; I need to know how much to save up for this monstrosity of a pricetag!

SpaceGodzilla said:
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That's a pretty beefy console sandwich
 
Price of a console is a topic that I have always considered irrelevant. In the end, 100 dollars more or less, spread over the 6-7 years of life of the console, means 15 dollars a year... Less than a pizza and beer.
 
My Tulpa said:
Which the 8 core A78c cpu will certainly be capabale enough to tackle. When this “some point” happens lol.

I imagine most big 3rd party support will still try and develop and release for the 140 million current models for years anyways.
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I mean, games like Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 are already CPU-bound on the current gen consoles, so it's not some theoretical future scenario that the Switch CPU might be a bottleneck at half the threads and half the frequency. Steam Deck and the ROG Ally are already gagging.
 
bellydrum said:
I'm gonna go with $349.99.

We'll also see a price drop at some point bringing the OLED down to $299.99, and the Nintendo Switch down to $179.99.
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I think with inflation, currency and everything it‘s almost impossible to get it below $399.99. Maybe they will try to sell it at a better price for the US because of it being their biggest market but if they want to make again a profit of the hardware it will be hard for them to find the right price.
 
Machrider said:
But the R&D was still deeply involved in all design aspects especially post NES.

I remember for example one of the lead SGI engineers who worked with Nintendo on the N64 said the Nintendo guys from Japan were up his ass over every single transistor on the chip, they would make him count every single one and forced the transistor count down to a minimum and that was also a big part of the reason why the N64 had that terrible 4kb texture cache limit.

I think those days are over. Nvidia makes the chip and sure they'll take out the self-driving car bits, but no one at Nintendo is going to order them around and make some wonky very customized design that is very far removed from other industry standards because some designer at Nintendo Kyoto has a weird design fetish.

Frankly y'all should be happy if that's the case. Nintendo getting in there would only muck things up, they're not a billion dollar graphics design company for a reason. Let the big boys at Nvidia handle that stuff, Nintendo has generally gotten themselves into nothing but trouble when they've made too many "Nintendo-Only" style hardware decisions. Do what you do best, which is make the games, let Nvidia more or less worry about the hardware. They're doing stuff with DLSS and AI that frankly is probably way over Nintendo's head.
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"Nintendo asked their vendor to make it cheaper or more power efficient" is not being "deeply involved in the design." And I guarantee you they've had the same discussion with Nvidia about the one, soon to be two, custom chips Nvidia has delivered them.

This is all just a narrative with no basis in reality. Nvidia smart, Nintendo dumb, if that's what you have in your head then I can't convince you otherwise, but I can just point out there's no evidence that anything is different today than it ever was. Nvidia is a vendor and Nintendo is an engaged client that knows what they want, and even when they got a 100% off-the-shelf chip in the Tegra X1, their hardware R&D team still worked hand-in-hand with putting it on the board that would actually run their console.
 
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LuigiBlood said:
That's just Nintendo begging for the chip to be as cheap as possible. Technically custom, but how to do it is essentially down to SGI.
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I don't think that's how it works with Nvidia today though. You can't say "change the number of Tensor cores, or give us a special number of CUDA cores here there, change this CPU core, we love our embedded RAM, so you have to put embedded RAM on this thing, it's a Nintendo design philosophy staple!" etc. etc.

I don't think today they have that level of control. Sure they can request it, but it will come at a cost and likely impact a lot of things like the fabrication side of things, so I think Nintendo just doesn't bother anymore with that. Why make weird custom requests and then end up paying a ton of extra money.

The chip inside the Switch 2 I would bet is going to be like 95% an Nvidia design with maybe some input from Nintendo, but probably not nearly as much as people think.

Nvidia knows what they're doing, just get the heck outta their way and let them work.
 
Eclissi said:
Price of a console is a topic that I have always considered irrelevant. In the end, 100 dollars more or less, spread over the 6-7 years of life of the console, means 15 dollars a year... Less than a pizza and beer.
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If I could pay for a console for $100 a year over seven years, sure, but that upfront cost is relevant enough having to plan to save around bills, vacations, investments, and unexpected emergencies.

ILikeFeet said:
I question if the Matrix demo can even run on such a system
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Didn't there used to be a YouTube channel (or subsidiary of DF) that would try to run PC games on the bare minimum required hardware? I'm surprised no one would have tried to with the UE5 demo just to see what it could look like at lowest graphical settings and still be functional at 30 or 60fps.
 
I don't think the price matters much in the first year, if the public likes it, it'll fly off the shelves, look at what people were paying for Wiis and PS5s were scarce.
 
Machrider said:
I don't think that's how it works with Nvidia today though. You can't say "change the number of Tensor cores, or give us a special number of CUDA cores here there, change this CPU core, we love our embedded RAM, so you have to put embedded RAM on this thing," etc. etc.

I don't think today they have that level of control. Sure they can request it, but it will come at a cost and likely impact a lot of things like the fabrication side of things, so I think Nintendo just doesn't bother anymore with that. Why make weird custom requests and then end up paying a ton of extra money.

The chip inside the Switch 2 I would bet is going to be like 95% an Nvidia design with maybe some input from Nintendo, but probably not nearly as much as people think.

Nvidia knows what they're doing, just get the heck outta their way and let them work.
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Of course Nintendo can make requests. T239 is using a CPU core layout not seen in any other Tegra product. Are they doing the chip layout? No. Are they defining the hardware target requirements and power envelope? Absolutely.
 
kvetcha said:
Of course Nintendo can make requests. T239 is using a CPU core layout not seen in any other Tegra product. Are they doing the chip layout? No. Are they defining the hardware target requirements and power envelope? Absolutely.
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I doubt T239 is exclusive to Nintendo. Will likely be used in other products, just like Tegra X1 is.

And you know what? That's fine. Likely that yields Nintendo a cheaper price at lower R&D cost and that's just smart.

Frankly the only hardware consumer level vendor that I think Nvidia could probably learn a thing or two from is Apple and their M1/M2 line of chips and likely there mostly just for the power consumption side.

Ultimately it's like a person who's a big time basketball enthusiast and even coaches here and there trying to tell an NBA pro how to shoot a jump shot. Like odds are, they don't need to hear it from you, lol.
 
Machrider said:
I doubt T239 is exclusive to Nintendo. Will likely be used in other products, just like Tegra X1 is.

Frankly the only hardware consumer level vendor that I think Nvidia could probably learn a thing or two from is Apple and their M1/M2 line of chips and likely there mostly just for the power consumption side.
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At best I'd expected binned T239s to be used for a Shield-class product, but it's pretty clear from the leaks that unlike the TX1, this SOC was designed for Nintendo.
 
bellydrum said:
I'm gonna go with $349.99.

We'll also see a price drop at some point bringing the OLED down to $299.99, and the Nintendo Switch down to $179.99.
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Man, this new super powerful ps5 in your pocket Switch console launching at the exact same price as the 10 year old tech OLED Switch that someone just bought for that price yesterday is wild lol.

Doubt that will happen.

Ps5 launched $200 more than what the ps4 slim was selling for in 2020
 
kvetcha said:
At best I'd expected binned T239s to be used for a Shield-class product, but it's pretty clear from the leaks that unlike the TX1, this SOC was designed for Nintendo.
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This seems reasonable, I would also posit that binned t239s could be used in a future Drake Lite.
 
My Tulpa said:
Man, this new super powerful ps5 in your pocket Switch console launching at the exact same price as the 10 year old tech OLED Switch that someone just bought for that price yesterday is wild lol.

Doubt that will happen.

Ps5 launched $200 more than what the ps4 slim was selling for in 2020
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I'm not saying I'm an authority. Chill lol
 
Eclissi said:
Price of a console is a topic that I have always considered irrelevant. In the end, 100 dollars more or less, spread over the 6-7 years of life of the console, means 15 dollars a year... Less than a pizza and beer.
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if you price a console at a prohibited price no one will buy your console, like Sony priced PS3 at $600 and they suffered because of that
 
My Tulpa said:
Man, this new super powerful ps5 in your pocket Switch console launching at the exact same price as the 10 year old tech OLED Switch that someone just bought for that price yesterday is wild lol.

Doubt that will happen.

Ps5 launched $200 more than what the ps4 slim was selling for in 2020
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PS4 had a price drop, though. Switch still hasn't. $399 is $100 more than the Switch launched at. PS5 launched at $100 more than the PS4.
 
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Machrider said:
I don't think that's how it works with Nvidia today though. You can't say "change the number of Tensor cores, or give us a special number of CUDA cores here there, change this CPU core, we love our embedded RAM, so you have to put embedded RAM on this thing, it's a Nintendo design philosophy staple!" etc. etc.

I don't think today they have that level of control. Sure they can request it, but it will come at a cost and likely impact a lot of things like the fabrication side of things, so I think Nintendo just doesn't bother anymore with that. Why make weird custom requests and then end up paying a ton of extra money.

The chip inside the Switch 2 I would bet is going to be like 95% an Nvidia design with maybe some input from Nintendo, but probably not nearly as much as people think.

Nvidia knows what they're doing, just get the heck outta their way and let them work.
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the "I [don't] think" is doing a shit load of heavy lifting in all you're posts. unless you have evidence to back it up, making baseless conjectures isn't gonna get you anywhere but destinations that exist in your head
 
kvetcha said:
At best I'd expected binned T239s to be used for a Shield-class product, but it's pretty clear from the leaks that unlike the TX1, this SOC was designed for Nintendo.
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T239 is basically just a variant of a car AI chip Nvidia already had made just with (well) the car stuff cut out, and Nintendo likely paid quite a bit of R&D just to get that.

The broader point is this ... when people say "Nintendo would never do this!" and "Nintendo would never do that!" ... who says Nintendo is even in the passenger seat for these decisions? I think people think Nintendo is driving the car when really it's more like they are in the back seat making suggestions here and there. These are Nvidia's designs and their hardware philosophy.

And frankly that's great. Nvidia is basically second to none in the graphics industry for a good reason. Let them handle the design decisions, it'll run that little Mario game just fine if it's pumping out the freaking Matrix Awakens demo, no worries Nintendo.
 
Machrider said:
T239 is basically just a variant of a car AI chip Nvidia already had made just with (well) the car stuff cut out, and Nintendo likely paid quite a bit of R&D just to get that.

The broader point is this ... when people say "Nintendo would never do this!" and "Nintendo would never do that!" ... who says Nintendo is even in the passenger seat for these decisions? These are Nvidia's designs and hardware philosophy.

And frankly that's great. Nvidia is basically second to none in the graphics industry for a good reason. Let them handle the design decisions, it'll run that little Mario game just fine, no worries Nintendo.
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It's also, as previously discussed, got a different CPU core and cluster layout. It's also got a dedicated hardware file decompression system. It's also likely on a totally different production node. That's a lot of work for 'a variant of a car AI chip,' and points to NVidia making significant customizations to the SOC based on Nintendo's requirements.
 
kvetcha said:
I mean, games like Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 are already CPU-bound on the current gen consoles, so it's not some theoretical future scenario that the Switch CPU might be a bottleneck at half the threads and half the frequency. Steam Deck and the ROG Ally are already gagging.
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You are talking about games that struggle to hit all platforms at launch already. Even after years and years of development. Both those games are going to spend years trying to post launch optimize and support them for the platforms they did release on.

So you are talking about the type of games that publishers will ignore for a Nintendo port for quite awhile. More likely than not, just skip the Nintendo platform altogether.

It won’t be the A78c cpu in the Switch that will hold back ports. Well, any more than the Tx1 held back major ports from the ps4/XboxOne (it didn’t)
 
My Tulpa said:
You are talking about games that struggle to hit all platforms at launch already. Even after years and years of development. Both those games are going to spend years trying to post launch optimize and support them for the platforms they did release on.

So you are talking about the type of games that publishers will ignore for a Nintendo port for quite awhile. More likely than not, just skip the Nintendo platform altogether.

It won’t be the A78c cpu in the Switch that will hold back ports. Well, any more than the Tx1 held back major ports from the ps4/XboxOne (it didn’t)
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Ah, I see. The goalposts are moving. These games don't count because, uh, they contradict your point.

These games were designed around next-generation console specs without taking XB1 and PS4 into account at all, and are exactly the sort of thing we can expect to see more of.
 
Brofield said:
If I could pay for a console for $100 a year over seven years, sure, but that upfront cost is relevant enough having to plan to save around bills, vacations, investments, and unexpected emergencies.
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You can give up 6 pizzas the first year, and from the second year go back to eating pizza, achieving the same result.
 
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Machrider said:
T239 is basically just a variant of a car AI chip Nvidia already had made just with (well) the car stuff cut out, and Nintendo likely paid quite a bit of R&D just to get that.

The broader point is this ... when people say "Nintendo would never do this!" and "Nintendo would never do that!" ... who says Nintendo is even in the passenger seat for these decisions? I think people think Nintendo is driving the car when really it's more like they are in the back seat making suggestions here and there. These are Nvidia's designs and their hardware philosophy.

And frankly that's great. Nvidia is basically second to none in the graphics industry for a good reason. Let them handle the design decisions, it'll run that little Mario game just fine if it's pumping out the freaking Matrix Awakens demo, no worries Nintendo.
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it is not. the only thing that's similar is the architectures used. and even those aren't the same because there are differences. you can't keep making these claims if you don't understand the differences
 
$499.99 USD.

followed by a price drop to $399.99 six months later and an ambassador program 2.0 rollout.
 
Giancarlo said:
if you price a console at a prohibited price no one will buy your console, like Sony priced PS3 at $600 and they suffered because of that
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This would be a relevant topic: what is the price threshold that would make the console less desirable. But it is different from the discussion "for me it will cost 349" "for me 399" "for me 349"...
 
kvetcha said:
Ah, I see. The goalposts are moving. These games don't count because, uh, they contradict your point.
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No goalpost moving here. I’m saying there are a bunch of multiplats that publishers didn’t feel would have enough demand on the Switch to bother with porting resources…and there will be a bunch of multiplats that will treat this new model the same way. All these multiplats are within the same goalposts lol
 
kvetcha said:
It's also, as previously discussed, got a different CPU core and cluster layout. It's also got a dedicated hardware file decompression system. It's also likely on a totally different production node. That's a lot of work for 'a variant of a car AI chip,' and points to NVidia making significant customizations to the SOC based on Nintendo's requirements.
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And I'm sure even to get just that, Nvidia got paid a fortune (probably a die shrink down the line is baked into the pricing, but that's about it).

If you want to go really exotic, crazy hardware with a bespoke design these days it is way beyond the price tag a company like Nintendo would be comfortable with.

Apple transitioned to making their own silicon where they call the shots on everything and everything is made to their design philosophy and needs, but they are a monster company that could buy a Nintendo (or Sony or Disney) in their sleep if they really wanted to. Not many companies, even huge ones can afford to do something like that or even close.

The days of console manufacturers I think having heavy, heavy sway over their chip designs are largely over because it's not economically feasible to do wacky shit like "hey lets let Ken Kutaragi make some random CELL processor for our next Playstation!" or "lets make a Gamecube where Nintendo basically litigates to Art-X every problem they had with the N64 and attempt to fix it with a totally custom design that encapsulates Nintendo's entire design philosophy!".

Those days are long, long gone and I think the influence of console makers is only getting less. AMD only allows Sony/MS the leeway they do because they can't afford to lose that business. Nvidia's stock price would be through the roof with or without Nintendo.

When people say "Nintendo wouldn't do this" or "Nintendo doesn't design hardware like that" ... they're saying that as if it's still like 2005, when it's not 2005 at all. This is Nvidia's show, as long as it fits into the power requirements and cost, but even there, Nvidia knows how to take their tech there, it's not Nintendo lecturing them on how to do it.
 
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