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

The thing that bugs me about that statement was that sure, the Matrix demo was there to show UE5 support, features, etc. and not necessarily specs but they also had BoTW running at a higher framerate and resolution than it ran on Switch purposefully to show developers "hey, this is how much more powerful this thing is". Now of course its unlikely that this is a retail-ready highly optimized build, and there could be enough room for improvement that they COULD get whatever resolution/frame-rate they were showing on a slightly less capable final hardware, but regardless, while they weren't showing the demo literally running on the final system, they still were telling the devs "this, at minimum, is the jump you can expect" and it would be very weird to lie to developers like that.
 
Switch 2 should get the latest version of DLSS as Nvidia continues to tinker and make it better excluding Frame generation for all Nvidia GPU’s
Tbh I think it should get it’s own custom version of DLSS as it’s going to be designed for a variety of factors it has to account for on Switch 2 that it typically doesn’t have to
 
The thing that bugs me about that statement was that sure, the Matrix demo was there to show UE5 support, features, etc. and not necessarily specs but they also had BoTW running at a higher framerate and resolution than it ran on Switch purposefully to show developers "hey, this is how much more powerful this thing is". Now of course its unlikely that this is a retail-ready highly optimized build, and there could be enough room for improvement that they COULD get whatever resolution/frame-rate they were showing on a slightly less capable final hardware, but regardless, while they weren't showing the demo literally running on the final system, they still were telling the devs "this, at minimum, is the jump you can expect" and it would be very weird to lie to developers like that.
This is running on a 4090, but Drake will be comparable, we promise!
 
Imran posted this on the VGC/Eurogamer thread on Era:



I’m wondering, if the above is true, what’s the point of the tech demo shown to the developers?

I'd wager the "target specs" mentioned in the VGC article just means non-final clock speeds, which would be pretty standard at this stage. The T239 chip taped out a year or more ago, so Nintendo will have had access to the actual hardware for quite a while now, and dev kits (surely with T239 hardware) have been reportedly going out to developers in increasing volume in the past couple of months. We're well past the point of Nintendo using proxy hardware like Orin or PCs.

Clock speeds typically aren't finalised until very close to launch. You need to get full-scale manufacturing of the SoC going so that you can determine parametric yields (ie how many of the chips can hit X GHz at Y voltage), then you need to put it in final hardware and do extensive thermal, acoustic and battery life testing. Until then you use "target clocks".

It's a valid point that specs (ie clock speeds) can and probably will change before launch, but I wouldn't expect much difference, particularly as our only info is vague claims of running one particular demo in a way that's "comparable" to other consoles. A +/-10% change to clock speeds wouldn't change that. Secondly, I'd expect Nintendo to be a bit more conservative with target clocks than Sony or MS, as they're not using them as publicity material. The PS5, XBSS and XBSX all have clocks chosen to hit nice round TFLOPS figures, which in Sony's case most likely cost them in terms of yields and contributed to the prolonged shortages, but Nintendo will be much more concerned with keeping battery life in check than hitting an arbitrary round number for marketing purposes.
 
This is running on a 4090, but Drake will be comparable, we promise!
"We promise that like the hardware this demo is running on, the Switch 2 will in fact be a computer of some kind, and at some point in time we will give you some form of that hardware so you can port some kind of games to it".
 
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In all fairness, tempering expectations is a healthy thing to do even at the best of times. In this case however, I sincerely doubt that the demo isn't taken from at least a prototype of the system. Hell, it's probably taken from a finalised model of the Sw2.

Granted, this is something we don't really know until we see the device proper (either through a big stealth-drop trailer or Nintendo Switch Presentation 2024), but... c'mon there's so little chance that the real system wouldn't be able to run the Matrix demo if Nintendo wasn't confident in their hardware.
The "key partners" have dev kits at this point. The gamescom presentation is obviously for "other" devs. It’s more like you said to avoid leaks. That statement makes it seem like the hardware is still very early and not ready to be shown, which I don’t think is the case. "Things could change for the worse”. "This isn’t final hardware; don’t get too excited".

Obv things could change, but they’ve sent dev kits to multiple devs. At this point, they‘re in the final stretch of this console before public unveiling. They didn’t just start working on it.
 
The "key partners" have dev kits at this point. The gamescom presentation is obviously for "other" devs. It’s more like you said to avoid leaks. That statement makes it seem like the hardware is still very early and not ready to be shown, which I don’t think is the case. "Things could change for the worse”. "This isn’t final hardware; don’t get too excited".

Obv things could change, but they’ve sent dev kits to multiple devs. At this point, they‘re in the final stretch of this console before public unveiling. They didn’t just start working on it.
I'd wager the "target specs" mentioned in the VGC article just means non-final clock speeds, which would be pretty standard at this stage. The T239 chip taped out a year or more ago, so Nintendo will have had access to the actual hardware for quite a while now, and dev kits (surely with T239 hardware) have been reportedly going out to developers in increasing volume in the past couple of months. We're well past the point of Nintendo using proxy hardware like Orin or PCs.

Clock speeds typically aren't finalised until very close to launch. You need to get full-scale manufacturing of the SoC going so that you can determine parametric yields (ie how many of the chips can hit X GHz at Y voltage), then you need to put it in final hardware and do extensive thermal, acoustic and battery life testing. Until then you use "target clocks".

It's a valid point that specs (ie clock speeds) can and probably will change before launch, but I wouldn't expect much difference, particularly as our only info is vague claims of running one particular demo in a way that's "comparable" to other consoles. A +/-10% change to clock speeds wouldn't change that. Secondly, I'd expect Nintendo to be a bit more conservative with target clocks than Sony or MS, as they're not using them as publicity material. The PS5, XBSS and XBSX all have clocks chosen to hit nice round TFLOPS figures, which in Sony's case most likely cost them in terms of yields and contributed to the prolonged shortages, but Nintendo will be much more concerned with keeping battery life in check than hitting an arbitrary round number for marketing purposes.
so if there's gonna be a change in the hardware retail/dev kit version, it wouldn't be a massive change?

also quick side note: i do admit that the matrix demo may have raised my hopes a little bit too high regarding what the console is capable of, at least both specs wise & DLSS usage but judging from what we've heard & hearing so far as well as setting a good set of expectations: is it safe to say that in handheld mode the console is comparable to ps4(+) while in docked mode it's comparable to ps4 pro(+)?
 
Is it possible that the whole "running on target specs" thing is just Nintendo speak for "running on a devkit, not a retail unit" and doesn't really mean much? That sounds like exactly the type of over-correcting thing they'd say because they have some bureaucratic and/or legal obligation to. Unless Nate has heard for sure that it wasn't running on actual Switch 2 hardware.
 
The "key partners" have dev kits at this point. The gamescom presentation is obviously for "other" devs. It’s more like you said to avoid leaks. That statement makes it seem like the hardware is still very early and not ready to be shown, which I don’t think is the case. "Things could change for the worse”. "This isn’t final hardware; don’t get too excited".

Obv things could change, but they’ve sent dev kits to multiple devs. At this point, they‘re in the final stretch of this console before public unveiling. They didn’t just start working on it.
I have my doubts that Nintendo would be showing off their hardware if it wasn't finalised or at least very close to completion. Considering the other bits and pieces we've heard, Nintendo is likely ready to start the mass productions but are waiting for both it's initial announcement and the launch year of games.. probably, i'm not too sure on that.

I stand on the hill that the reveal can come as early as October, but that doesn't really matter. Nintendo is almost there when it comes to producing the console. We're ready... almost.
 
Is it possible that the whole "running on target specs" thing is just Nintendo speak for "running on a devkit, not a retail unit" and doesn't really mean much? That sounds like exactly the type of over-correcting bureaucratic thing they'd say because they have some obligation to. Unless Nate has heard for sure that it wasn't running on actual Switch 2 hardware.
i asked nate about his opinion on whether or not matrix was used to show the console is capable, & he said that it is but rather running on a hardware that's targeting the console's specs
 
As long as they hit stable performance, it can be as heavy as they want
I’m more referring to the fact that it’s going to take quite some effort to actually get the matrix demo to run on that device. There’s been some downplaying of “oh it’s because they made a specific port” yadda yards but the engine is still going to be rather heavy. Even if it’s 30FPS and it is supposedly giving visuals that has all the features of the PS5 and Series X version, the engine isn’t going to be magically light. It should still be impressive that it is running the demo and achieving that. Lumen and Nanite and all.

Which is a good thing for the system I reckon. Matrix Demo was a pretty high bar as is.
 
I have my doubts that Nintendo would be showing off their hardware if it wasn't finalised or at least very close to completion. Considering the other bits and pieces we've heard, Nintendo is likely ready to start the mass productions but are waiting for both it's initial announcement and the launch year of games.. probably, i'm not too sure on that.

I stand on the hill that the reveal can come as early as October, but that doesn't really matter. Nintendo is almost there when it comes to producing the console. We're ready... almost.
Didn´t some rumours say that Nintendo was aiming to go into unit mass production this winter or something? And the article also said that Nintendo wanted to release it as early as possible. If both those things are true then yes the hardware must be totally finished in every parameter by now. Nintendo should now be in the final stage preparation for the units actually starting to be produced as of now.
 
Yeah, I said that Game Cards would be supplied with a neural network update that is performed passively (meaning not a hard firmware update, just updating the library when the Game Card is inserted if the library contained an older version). That's not "just randomly inserting shit into the neural network willy-nilly".
Isn't that just each game coming with its own copy, the way it already works on PC?
As it only spits out a better result when that better result is ready and only then is distributed to hardware through updates, a new version of that neural network that generates worse results than the previous iteration is so unlikely as to be not worth much consideration.

As I said, this is how DLSS Super Resolution already functions as of v2, so if you find the method lacking in consistency or reliability, you are arguing against its use in totality.
Each PC game comes with usually the latest version (or the latest version they ended up using during development) as a DLL. Since it's possible for end users to swap these they often do, and people find different "sweet spots" where they find if they move up to a certain version suddenly ghosting has increased again or whatever.
 
so if there's gonna be a change in the hardware retail/dev kit version, it wouldn't be a massive change?

also quick side note: i do admit that the matrix demo may have raised my hopes a little bit too high regarding what the console is capable of, at least both specs wise & DLSS usage but judging from what we've heard & hearing so far as well as setting a good set of expectations: is it safe to say that in handheld mode the console is comparable to ps4(+) while in docked mode it's comparable to ps4 pro(+)?
It more depends on if you found the matrix demo impressive or not, I guess. Epic touts the demo as being more than a pretty scene but completely game ready, just add in your gameplay loop.

As we're seeing from other UE5 games, people, in general, should lower their expectations for games that use the whole suite. Unless they want more Fortnite
 
Didn´t some rumours say that Nintendo was aiming to go into unit mass production this winter or something? And the article also said that Nintendo wanted to release it as early as possible. If both those things are true then yes the hardware must be totally finished in every parameter by now. Nintendo should now be in the final stage preparation for the units actually starting to be produced as of now.
I read somewhere that it takes around 5 months of production before the release. If they want to reveal the system before the end of this year, we can assume the release is... like... May at the latest. Of course assuming that H1 2024 is real.
 
tha weird why Nintendo would need to specify this Direct is focused on Switch, Nintendo is no longer suporting two consoles
Here's something kinda interesting. The previous two directs are starting to specify that they are for "Nintendo Switch". While ones before that never had a moniker designating the system it's for. Very inch resting...

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I fail to see the point of a tech demo if the hardware isn't already tuned to run at the same level. You might expect a few changes here or there, but nothing that differs in a significant way from the target spec. If the system is meant to launch in a year or less, they'd have these things dialed down by now.

But hey, maybe Nintendo is Team 2026 after all?
 
In all fairness, tempering expectations is a healthy thing to do even at the best of times. In this case however, I sincerely doubt that the demo isn't taken from at least a prototype of the system. Hell, it's probably taken from a finalised model of the Sw2.

Granted, this is something we don't really know until we see the device proper (either through a big stealth-drop trailer or Nintendo Switch Presentation 2024), but... c'mon there's so little chance that the real system wouldn't be able to run the Matrix demo if Nintendo wasn't confident in their hardware
has anyone learned companies always lie to get the best performance on games, cof cof cof PS3 reveal, Watch Dog reveal
 
Nintendo has had T239 for who knows how long and the approximate performance for even longer. "Target performance", methinks, is probably, this is running on a T239 at ABOUT the clocks we're hoping for.

I know others have said this, I'm just adding to the noise. No way they're showing off "simulacrum" type devices at this point, unless they're using a fully kitted out PC running a VM/Emulator of the T239.
 
has anyone learned companies always lie to get the best performance on games, cof cof cof PS3 reveal, Watch Dog reveal
Don't cite the deep gaming lore to me, witch. I was there when it was being written.

It's not something that Nintendo would get away with as easily in the Current Year, especially thanks to Sony's actions back then. Lying doesn't get you anywhere, what do you know.
 
"PIN number" ;)


Makes me think of how when messing with Toyotas and rotary Mazdas back in the day I used to catch hell from muscle car guys saying "okay yeah maybe it makes 400hp on paper but it pulls that off with RPM, not with displacement like a 'real' engine"

I am bracing for "okay yeah it outputs 4K but it pulls that off with upscaling, not natively like a 'real' console" :p

As an owner of a 2005 Mini Cooper S, I can literally drive circles around those displacement fellas. They may have me on the straights, but I’ll have them in the bends. And it’s supercharged from the factory, so it’s got the sound to match. :sneaky:


Absolute perfection.

So who has started to save up for this thing, got a few months but yeah hope its around 300 dollars that will be the sweet spot price

Not I. One of my cars I need to trade in due to can’t put money into it anyone (it’s a Jeep thing...), so new car (to me) it is with a car loan with these kinds of interest rates now. Not ideal, but I’ll manage.

That said, I do have plenty of time to secure say 10-20 dollars/week to put towards it, so not out of the realm Of possibility at launch, though that'll depend if H1, or H2 2024.
 
So, I take that many of the people here are not PC gamers so they are not aware of differences within DLSS and FSR, so let me explain it. To keep it simple, there's no competition:

When done right, DLSS is free extra performance + High Quality AA in one. There's no reason to not activate it on any game that support it (with bad implementations as outliers). Even if your GPU is overkill and you are frame-capped at max resolution, is still one of the best AA solutions there is, so you activate it.

One other hand, the only reason you would activate FSR is if you are struggling to get your performance target and the IQ hit of lowering settings is worse than the inherent IQ loss of FSR. FSR is tolerable at high resolution, but it gets worse the lower resolution you go. It's bad at 1080p and plain horrible at ~720-800p. It's better if you sit far away from your TV, but for a PC monitor at 1440p, I took the performance hit over the soft IQ I was getting during my playthrough of REVIII. There's a reason why the lack of DLSS was such a big deal with Starlink.
 
A few things

The Unreal Demo wasn't for marketing. It was part of a developer communication to invited parties that very much was not supposed to become public. Nintendo is likely trying to genuinely show what the hardware can do.

Yes, it seems like it was running on non-NIntendo hardware "specced" to the performance target. But you can go buy a 3050 right now and get an Ampere GPU very close to Drake's design. You can get Orin with an Ampere GPU and and ARM CPU. It seems likely that you could get such a machine really close to final performance.

As Thraktor and others point out, yes, there will be tuning up till late in the production process as battery life and thermal properties get dialed in. But unless there is a serious fuck up, that's unlikely to be a gigantic change from the target.

This is almost definitely not stock Unreal on an underclocked PC, with someone tweaking settings. It's a beta of Unreal running on Nintendo's software stack, NVN2. This isn't just Nintendo demoing hardware, it's them demoing the most popular gaming engine in the world, ported to their stack.

"We have full Unreal 5 running. Ray tracing is running using our RT pipeline. Nanite is here, using mesh shaders and asset streaming from disk. Mass AI is running for the NPCs, so no worries about these mobile CPUs. Full fat DLSS is integrated for resolution scaling. And rather than just tell you we have these things, let me show you, so you can see that when I say 'acceptable framerate' you can see I really mean it."

Such a demo is designed to answer all the detailed questions faster than a specc list. If you've been in this thread for a while, you know "but can DLSS 2 really do that" or "you think they're going to add real RT in 10W of power?" come up a lot. It's not arguing about the spec, it's asking how far can the spec deliver, and what is it going to look like when dialed down that far.
 
this thing should be roughly competitive with other handhelds of its class for like a year or two, right? like, it probably won't be demolished by something until the steam deck 2?
the-return-of-the-king-lord-of-the-rings.gif


Answering your question though, yeah probably. And after that, it'll probably still have the edge in terms of things like battery life and support.
 
Nintendo doesn't do that. With them it's always what you see is what you get.
BOTW (or Zelda Wii U as it was known then) would beg to differ.

Nintendo has definitely used bullshots here and there but it's mostly been for Zelda media, and it's never been all that egregious. They don't really do vertical slices like a lot of companies do.
 
But the gap isn’t the same. How do I say this? In terms of cutting-edgeness, it is similar, but ARM has progressed and has caught up to x86 processors, giving Nintendo a huge advantage. The gap between the X1 and a traditional home console in 2017 was much bigger, despite Nintendo opting for the "latest" mobile technology. The same latest mobile tech NOW has a much smaller gap. Also, this time it seems to me the chip is much more customized and specifically made for Nintendo more so than the X1.

I genuinely believe heavily downgraded ports won’t exist anymore on the new Switch because of the technology available. Those days should be gone. Most games should look very good. And if it looks bad, it is definitively more of a developmental problem than anything to do with hardware (i.e., Gamefreak's recent Pokémon games). And it's probably going to look bad across different platforms anyway.

For sure, the gap for GPU, amount of memory, and storage are much closer. That said, the gap for CPU, storage speed, and maybe memory bandwidth are wider than before. Still overall improvement over the Switch.

Not so optimistic about the ports. Should be easier to make it looks good but as long as the dev focused solely on the other console and have an external team comes in at the end to port it like the Switch then ports will continue to looks horrible. Even then, not like people can tell if a bad ports is due to developmental problem than hardware. Plenty of people blame the Switch for Pokemon and when the first port of Ark comes out, people totally accepted it as just what the Switch is capable of.
 
Frankly the most terrifying part of this statement is that console wars between all three are probably going to ramp up due to idiotic "console warriors". Damn...

Still, I'm all for this. A Nintendo system that's up to par with current gen expectations is an amazing thought to have. I genuinely can't wait.
Console warriors are inevitable.

We are destined to fight until Ragnarok.
 
So, I take that many of the people here are not PC gamers so they are not aware of differences within DLSS and FSR, so let me explain it. To keep it simple, there's no competition:

When done right, DLSS is free extra performance + High Quality AA in one. There's no reason to not activate it on any game that support it (with bad implementations as outliers). Even if your GPU is overkill and you are frame-capped at max resolution, is still one of the best AA solutions there is, so you activate it.

One other hand, the only reason you would activate FSR is if you are struggling to get your performance target and the IQ hit of lowering settings is worse than the inherent IQ loss of FSR. FSR is tolerable at high resolution, but it gets worse the lower resolution you go. It's bad at 1080p and plain horrible at ~720-800p. It's better if you sit far away from your TV, but for a PC monitor at 1440p, I took the performance hit over the soft IQ I was getting during my playthrough of REVIII. There's a reason why the lack of DLSS was such a big deal with Starlink.
I feel like that's oversimplifying it a lot.

DLSS has a cost, it's not free. It's very small and it's mostly in terms of a handful of miliseconds but it's there. And there's also the power cost for powering the tensor cores.

However FSR having no dedicated hardware puts a lot more of the cost on the GPU cores themselves, which makes it cost a lot more than DLSS.
 
I feel like that's oversimplifying it a lot.

DLSS has a cost, it's not free. It's very small and it's mostly in terms of a handful of miliseconds but it's there. And there's also the power cost for powering the tensor cores.

However FSR having no dedicated hardware puts a lot more of the cost on the GPU cores themselves, which makes it cost a lot more than DLSS.

It essentially is free extra performance as long as you're comparing it to natively rendering the targeted output resolution. If you start at the native input resolution and add DLSS on top, then your performance will drop a bit in exchange for a big IQ boost. It's great tech either way, but you can look at it from different angles.
 
has anyone learned companies always lie to get the best performance on games, cof cof cof PS3 reveal, Watch Dog reveal

You can't do that with a showing for the dev since they will be the one having to make the graphics. Otherwise, it will be like when my college professor handed the class a problem saying "you should be able to do this" and I'm sitting there lost as hell
 
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Switch 2 should get the latest version of DLSS as Nvidia continues to tinker and make it better excluding Frame generation for all Nvidia GPU’s
Nvidia seems to have shown even the oldest Turing RTX 20 series GPUs will be forward compatible with new versions of DLSS sans frame generation.
 
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BOTW (or Zelda Wii U as it was known then) would beg to differ.

Nintendo has definitely used bullshots here and there but it's mostly been for Zelda media, and it's never been all that egregious. They don't really do vertical slices like a lot of companies do.

I was talking more about specs, they don't like to exaggerate their numbers. Which is one of the reasons why to this day there are still people that think the PS2 is more powerful than the GC.

In the case of Zelda U, I mean yes and no? That game reveal was running on an actual Wii U and BotW does look like that internally. The problem is that to maintain a decent framerate, they ended up adding some kind of LoD reducer that makes things look less detailed if they are not directly near Link. You can sometimes literally see the divider line where things turn into low quality assets. I remember the GC Wind Waker also having that LoD line divider.
 
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this thing should be roughly competitive with other handhelds of its class for like a year or two, right? like, it probably won't be demolished by something until the steam deck 2?

I don't see anything significantly outperforming it until AMD APUs start supporting LPDDR6. The ROG Ally is already pretty heavily bandwidth constrained on LPDDR5, hence why it's only capable of relatively modest gains over the Steam Deck despite its big TFLOPS claims. LPDDR5X will give a bit of a boost, but nothing that would "demolish" current hardware.
 
Bro both BOTW and TOTK look better.
Well... it's pretty much the BotW engine with settings cranked up, zoomed out, and running a beta overworld with increased density and level of detail. From what I remember the reveal was actually in-engine, but probably running on a development PC.

You can see how close it gets by just rendering the game in 4K. But I doubt the demo was just just an upres. They probably boosted render distance, LoD, shadow and texture resolution, and so on. The end result would look closer to that reveal, if not better.

cemu2017-07-0208-18-0husek.png


zelda1dnp0q.png
 
Well... it's pretty much the BotW engine with settings cranked up, zoomed out, and running a beta overworld with increased density and level of detail. From what I remember the reveal was actually in-engine, but probably running on a development PC.

You can see how close it gets by just rendering the game in 4K. But I doubt the demo was just just an upres. They probably boosted render distance, LoD, shadow and texture resolution, and so on. The end result would look closer to that reveal, if not better.

cemu2017-07-0208-18-0husek.png


zelda1dnp0q.png

The Wii U was already 2 years out on the market, why would they use a development PC?

That demo reveal is using the same engine and graphics, it's just that the final game has some sort of blur filter on the top 70% of the screen that makes everything look like Wii graphics.
 
The Wii U was already 2 years out on the market, why would they use a development PC?

That demo reveal is using the same engine and graphics, it's just that the final game has some sort of blur filter on the top 70% of the screen that makes everything look like Wii graphics.
so they can actually record the footage of a scenario that won't be in the game. this isn't as erroneous as in the past. even Nintendo's tools run natively on the PC
 
Please read this staff post before posting.

Furthermore, according to this follow-up post, all off-topic chat will be moderated.
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