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

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oldpuck said:
The DLA is a separate bank of tensor cores, which run at the same clock as the rest of the GPU. There are still tensor cores in the GPU as well. So yes, when core counts come down, so do the TOPS, when the clock goes down, so do the TOPS.

Instead of trying to reverse engineer from Orin's numbers, just use desktop Ampere, since we know they are identical.

256 ops/clock, 4 tensor cores per SM, doubled for sparsity
512 sparse ops * 1GHz clock speed * 48 tensor cores = 24.576 sparse INT8 TOPS
Click to expand...
But the DLA isn't a bank of Tensor Cores? It's an actual dedicated hardware part/single core.

Not sure where this "It's a bank of Tensor cores" comes from, NV's Orin documentation clearly diagram the DLA as an isolated component that is similar yet with unique capabilities to the Tensor Cores, thus is singular
 
Giancarlo said:
was Switch sucessor really show at Gamescom 2023? a Digital Foundry analysis


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This was from their podcast from 5 days ago, which they didn't delve too much on, because they wanted to verify from sources first. Days before they published the article about Switch 2 demos being seen by devs.
 
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Danny said:
Could be that their massive war chest built over the last few years plus their new movie/theme park business makes them more willing to take chances and become more like Microsoft/Sony in being willing to lose money on console sales if it leads to a massive user base and expansion of software and subscription sales.
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I think they’re simply aware of how much the bar has been raised to compete in gaming. Overclocking your previous generation hardware (Wii) or sourcing a cheap chip from a relatively unknown supplier (3DS) and banking the system’s appeal on a novelty isn’t gonna cut it anymore.
 
John Omaha said:
I think they’re simply aware of how much the bar has been raised to compete in gaming. Overclocking your previous generation hardware (Wii) or sourcing a cheap chip from a relatively unknown supplier (3DS) and banking the system’s appeal on a novelty isn’t gonna cut it anymore.
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Yeah, primarily because devs don't have the time/resources to make versions of games for archaic/extremely underpowered hardware.

So getting a system closer to the par, especially when coming in "late" would give you the best odds for longevity.
 
Thraktor said:
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.
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But what if Drake has 5X support 🤔🤔🤔

Which is a small chance
 
oldpuck said:
The DLA is a separate bank of tensor cores, which run at the same clock as the rest of the GPU. There are still tensor cores in the GPU as well. So yes, when core counts come down, so do the TOPS, when the clock goes down, so do the TOPS.

Instead of trying to reverse engineer from Orin's numbers, just use desktop Ampere, since we know they are identical.

256 ops/clock, 4 tensor cores per SM, doubled for sparsity
512 sparse ops * 1GHz clock speed * 48 tensor cores = 24.576 sparse INT8 TOPS
Click to expand...
(I believe for INT4 and sparse INT8, Drake does 4096 ops per SM per clock, so it would be double that number at 49 TOPS. But otherwise yes, this is the way.)

@Alovon11 : I’m assuming you’re taking the 200 TOPS number from the top of Table 1 of the Orin white paper. Look at the equivalent number for the AGX 64 GB (275 TOPS). If you look on the next page, in the section titled “GPU,” you’ll see that only 170 TOPS of sparse INT8 for that model are attributed to the tensor cores.

Just to show why Oldpuck’s accounting is correct: Orin’s tensor cores have the double rate tensor operations that Drake will not (8192 ops per SM per clock of sparse INT8), and the 64 GB version of Orin has 16 SMs. So taking the 1.3 GHz GPU clocks from Table 1, we have 8.192 * 1.3 * 16 = 170 TOPS.
 
MadMarvainy said:
So the Switch storage a made by Toshiba and is an eMMC 5.1 module which peaks at 300 MB/s (HS400 interface)...

Can we expect something maybe 5-6x as fast in Switch 2?
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that's pretty much UFS

Sequential read (MB/s)Sequential write (MB/s)Random read (IO/s)Random write (IO/s)
eMMC 5.125012511,00013,000
UFS 3.121001200100,00070,000
UFS 4.042002800N/AN/A

ReddDreadtheLead said:
But what if Drake has 5X support 🤔🤔🤔

Which is a small chance
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if they aim for 102 GB/s docked, then there won't be much difference
 
MadMarvainy said:
So the Switch storage a made by Toshiba and is an eMMC 5.1 module which peaks at 300 MB/s (HS400 interface)...

Can we expect something maybe 5-6x as fast in Switch 2?
Click to expand...
Switch is far below that in reality, because real world speeds are bottlenecked by the cpu. Drake has dedicated file decompression hardware and a much more powerful cpu, so even if it's still emmc 5,1 it wont be bottlenecked.

But most likely it's some form of UFS.
 
I'm trying to think how on earth they're going to manage expandable memory with this thing. It's a non-negotiable in this day and age, but what even is there?

And before someone says UFS card-

It's dead, que sera sera.

My first thought is still SDexpress, but there isn't much else in terms of options.

Edit: having quickly looked through (read: skimmed) the SD organisation's paper on SDe, single lane only pulls a max of 1.8W, which is less than double the theoretical maximum of standard SD if I'm not mistaken, so it could be a genuine option, and SDe (single lane) is also... coincidentally... 1+GB/s

And the technology has been available at least since 2020... so it IS a genuine option.

Aaaand Nintendo is a member of the SD association.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
that's pretty much UFS

Sequential read (MB/s)Sequential write (MB/s)Random read (IO/s)Random write (IO/s)
eMMC 5.125012511,00013,000
UFS 3.121001200100,00070,000
UFS 4.042002800N/AN/A


if they aim for 102 GB/s docked, then there won't be much difference
Click to expand...

Hermii said:
Switch is far below that in reality, because real world speeds are bottlenecked by the cpu. Drake has dedicated file decompression hardware and a much more powerful cpu, so even if it's still emmc 5,1 it wont be bottlenecked.

But most likely it's some form of UFS.
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Thanks for the info, I've seen UFS brought up here before.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
that's pretty much UFS

Sequential read (MB/s)Sequential write (MB/s)Random read (IO/s)Random write (IO/s)
eMMC 5.125012511,00013,000
UFS 3.121001200100,00070,000
UFS 4.042002800N/AN/A


if they aim for 102 GB/s docked, then there won't be much difference
Click to expand...
how this will translate in-game? will Switch sucessor games load faster then Switch games, can we expect similar loading to current gen or i dreaming too much
 
Giancarlo said:
how this will translate in-game? will Switch sucessor games load faster then Switch games, can we expect similar loading to current gen or i dreaming too much
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Like I said yes. Switch 1 storage is heavily bottlenecked so even in the worst case scenario (no storage speed upgrade), there would be a significant boost in loading times.

UFS 2,1 is around 850MB/S, so if we get that it's not as fast as current gen, but still fast enough for good load times and to run Nanite pretty well. But then there's the problem with expandable storage.
 
Hermii said:
Like I said yes. Switch 1 storage is heavily bottlenecked so even in the worst case scenario (no storage speed upgrade), there would be a significant boost in loading times.

UFS 2,1 is around 850MB/S, so if we get that it's not as fast as current gen, but still fast enough for good load times and to run Nanite pretty well. But then there's the problem with expandable storage.
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Cough SD Express
 
Thraktor said:
A theory I have is that BOTW was used as an internal testbed for new technologies and techniques on the new hardware, and they're showing developers the results of that. Let's say you're Nintendo in 2020 or 2021 or whenever, and this new hardware you were planning has got to the point where you can actually start doing some early software tests. You've got a small team of graphics engineers, and you want to get up and running quickly and really put the system through its paces; ray tracing, DLSS, asset streaming, etc. You probably don't want to waste time building something from scratch, so you need to choose an existing game to build upon. Firstly, you want something built with an engine the team is already familiar with, which means an EPD game. Secondly, you want a game that's finished, not something in development where code is constantly changing. Finally, it should be something that is graphically ambitious and gives you room to really push the hardware.
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THANK YOU. I don't know why everyone is jumping down my throat for saying this! It just doesn't feel right for Nintendo to show up with a gen old Zelda game unless they have it really showcasing new features. "That's what the Matrix Demo was for!" So? Whynotboth.gif.
Serif said:
This tracks. At GDC '17 Nintendo shared how they used previous Zelda game assets to test their HD engine for BotW. Their experiments with Wind Waker ended up becoming WWHD, here's TP and SS as well.

7i9tdVi.jpg

hfGYBv1.jpg
Click to expand...

And ya Zelda has been Nintendo's test bed for new systems for awhile! They also released the WW game with updated lighting after playing with that for the Wii U.

OniLgnd said:
You are [wrong]
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Okay, but I thought this was a speculation thread?
 
rinku said:
I mean those aren't even widely available yet, and it seems no company is really actively working on it.
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Lexar is!

Let's be real, any storage solution for this thing that can actually play next gen games off it will have to be pushed by Nintendo themselves. UFS Card could have been a possibility once upon a time, but it's LONG dead. Micro SDe at the very least is in active development and Nintendo would benefit from pushing it to market, even if they only have one partner at launch (like the Xbox Storage Expansion Card- which is basically souped up... or maybe souped-down, but definitely souped CFexpress.)
 
Concernt said:
Lexar is!

Let's be real, any storage solution for this thing that can actually play next gen games off it will have to be pushed by Nintendo themselves. UFS Card could have been a possibility once upon a time, but it's LONG dead. Micro SDe at the very least is in active development and Nintendo would benefit from pushing it to market, even if they only have one partner at launch (like the Xbox Storage Expansion Card- which is basically souped up... or maybe souped-down, but definitely souped CFex
Click to expand...

I think the issue there is you’ll have the same issue Microsoft is currently having where their storage solution is much more expensive than their competitor's due to its proprietary nature. While SD express is a standard, Nintendo will theoretically be the only one to adopt it as far as we can tell, so it might as well be a proprietary technology they're pushing until other manufacturers decide to produce them. But that would require widespread adoption of SD express.

I do wonder about the feasibility of allowing for an additional, non-soldered gen 4 NVME SSD being usable, specifically the shorter form M.2 cards usually used in laptops. That would sidestep the widespread adoption issue entirely.

This is the kind of SSD I'm talking about specifically. Much closer in size to your standard SD card.
 
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rinku said:
I think the issue there is you’ll have the same issue Microsoft is currently having where their storage solution is much more expensive than their competitor's due to its proprietary nature. While SD express is a standard, Nintendo will theoretically be the only one to adopt it as far as we can tell, so it might as well be a proprietary technology they're pushing until other manufacturers decide to produce them. But that would require widespread adoption of SD express.

I do wonder about the feasibility of allowing for an additional, non-soldered gen 4 NVME SSD being usable, specifically the shorter form M.2 cards usually used in laptops. That would sidestep the widespread adoption issue entirely.

This is the kind of SSD I'm talking about specifically. Much closer in size to your standard SD card.
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I wish those were viable, but their power consumption is something like half of the entire Switch power budget and they might look small, but they're at least an order of magnitude larger than a MicroSD card.
 
Concernt said:
I wish those were viable, but their power consumption is something like half of the entire Switch power budget and they might look small, but they're at least an order of magnitude larger than a MicroSD card.
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I still wonder if you can reduce the power of these drives for slower speeds
 
rinku said:
I do wonder about the feasibility of allowing for an additional, non-soldered gen 4 NVME SSD being usable, specifically the shorter form M.2 cards usually used in laptops. That would sidestep the widespread adoption issue entirely.
Click to expand...
The 2230 form? I was thinking about that mainly because there aren't really any other highly-available solutions to this problem. Besides power consumption and whatnot, I'd say there is another problem, and that's installation. Looking over various handheld PCs teardowns, it seems to be a common problem how the slot for NVMe is tucked away under various components, likely so the heat it produces can be caught by the cooling system. While adding/swapping out an SSD is easy enough for you and me, we're talking about a mass-produced product for all ages. PS5 does have a similar situation, but that's more of casings than components. Besides, one might not be comfortable with that, but they at least can use very large external HDDs to hold PS5 games on, and copy them to internal storage when they're ready to play them. For Switch 2, they'd have microSD, which is much more limited in overall storage space.
 
Still have several pages to go…

Hermii said:
3000
Click to expand...

No no…OVER 9000!

Terrell said:
I'd also like to point out that, based on the games confirmed to use DLSS, we can determine which 3rd-party engines likely already have the tools necessary to take advantage of the new hardware's best feature:

Baldur's Gate 3 - Divinity Engine (Larian Studios)
Battlefield 2042 - Frostbite Engine (EA)
CoD MW2 - IW Engine (Activision Blizzard)
Cyberpunk 2077 - REDengine 4 (CD Projekt Red)
Judgment - Dragon Engine (Sega/RGG Studio)
MH Rise - RE Engine (Capcom)
RDR2 - RAGE (Rockstar)
Rainbow Six Extraction - AnvilNext (Ubisoft)

No small number, to be sure, and pretty sure I didn't name every engine on Nvidia's list. And then there's Unreal Engine 5, which pulls a lot of other publishers into the frame.
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Ideally, I’d like to see a Switch 2 reveal that like what Switch 1 did by showing Skyrim as the first game, Nintendo could do the same with Cyberpunk. Would be a double whammy of having Cyberpunk on more platforms, and also say, “Yes…it can run Cyberpunk.”

Even better is CP2077 is a technical showcase for DLSS, and Ray Tracing. It would be THE game to showcase the power of Drake.
 
Concernt said:
I'm trying to think how on earth they're going to manage expandable memory with this thing. It's a non-negotiable in this day and age, but what even is there?

And before someone says UFS card-

It's dead, que sera sera.

My first thought is still SDexpress, but there isn't much else in terms of options.

Edit: having quickly looked through (read: skimmed) the SD organisation's paper on SDe, single lane only pulls a max of 1.8W, which is less than double the theoretical maximum of standard SD if I'm not mistaken, so it could be a genuine option, and SDe (single lane) is also... coincidentally... 1+GB/s

And the technology has been available at least since 2020... so it IS a genuine option.

Aaaand Nintendo is a member of the SD association.
Click to expand...

Well you know Nintendo just love using old and dead technology 😜
 
Concernt said:
Sure, but then you're right back to "Nintendo has to push a new format."
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if it's just an m.2/cf express/sd express but running at a lower power state, I don't see how that would force a new format. even Xbox's memory cards aren't actually new formats

Gerald said:
Btw guys how big memory Switch 2 will have in your opinion? Beacuse we only know "up to 512"
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at least 256GB. maybe a 512GB option in the future
 
TechnicalTip6578 said:
what backs this up is that Matrix was running on a Hardware that's running on Switch 2 specs, so it's hard imo at least to not take the matrix demo seriously
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As an aside, I'm very curious as to what hardware that Matrix demo was actually running on.

I'm always a bit sceptical when it comes to early "target spec" demos. How many times have we been burnt on those in the past? MGS4's first trailer immediately comes to mind.

Typically these target spec systems are PC based, which always ends up being an imperfect analogue. PC's have fast dedicated VRAM and traditionally much beefier CPUs. No amount of downclocking can replicate the same bottlenecks we'll see on final hardware. If that's the case with this system then I'm definitely taking these reports with a grain of salt.

However, if this demo was running off a modified Tegra Orin dev board then that's going to be a much closer stand-in for the final hardware and colour me intrigued.
 
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Giancarlo said:
can we really expect all this techinal/graphical power the Eurogamer/VGC new report is claiming for Switch sucessor, i have doubts, i recall when Nintendo revealed Wii U at E32012, they showed this tech demo far superior what Wii U can acomplish in it games, could this history been repeating itself, a reputable site/source claim a Nintendo console is gonna be powerful, said console is launched and is not powerful as this sites/souces has claimed, i too burned in believing such report, i was fooled ounce and will not be fooled again

Click to expand...


tenor.gif


I would encourage Nintendo…to Nintendont do that.

tenor.gif
 
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ILikeFeet said:
if it's just an m.2/cf express/sd express but running at a lower power state, I don't see how that would force a new format. even Xbox's memory cards aren't actually new formats
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You're correct, but that wasn't the point being made 😅
 
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Giancarlo said:
can we really expect all this techinal/graphical power the Eurogamer/VGC new report is claiming for Switch sucessor, i have doubts, i recall when Nintendo revealed Wii U at E32012, they showed this tech demo far superior what Wii U can acomplish in it games, could this history been repeating itself, a reputable site/source claim a Nintendo console is gonna be powerful, said console is launched and is not powerful as this sites/souces has claimed, i too burned in believing such report, i was fooled ounce and will not be fooled again

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That demo was pretty accurate, though? I mean it's not like Breath of the Wild or Bayonetta 2 look WORSE than that.
 
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I'm genuinely hoping for 512GB internal storage. Truly and wholly.

I just... really can't expect it, and in my mind my expectations remain 128GB of eMMC-grade storage. Anything more than that, and I'll be happy. Well. Not completely happy. I'm not completely happy unless it's 512GB of UFS.
 
Shoulder said:
Still have several pages to go…



No no…OVER 9000!



Ideally, I’d like to see a Switch 2 reveal that like what Switch 1 did by showing Skyrim as the first game, Nintendo could do the same with Cyberpunk. Would be a double whammy of having Cyberpunk on more platforms, and also say, “Yes…it can run Cyberpunk.”

Even better is CP2077 is a technical showcase for DLSS, and Ray Tracing. It would be THE game to showcase the power of Drake.
Click to expand...

Cyberpunk doesn't carry the same weight and it's not a "desirable" game either (I'm not saying the game is bad).

If they want to wow people they need Elden Ring, 4k Witcher 3, or Baldur's Gate 3 on that reveal trailer.
 
Discostew said:
The 2230 form? I was thinking about that mainly because there aren't really any other highly-available solutions to this problem. Besides power consumption and whatnot, I'd say there is another problem, and that's installation. Looking over various handheld PCs teardowns, it seems to be a common problem how the slot for NVMe is tucked away under various components, likely so the heat it produces can be caught by the cooling system. While adding/swapping out an SSD is easy enough for you and me, we're talking about a mass-produced product for all ages. PS5 does have a similar situation, but that's more of casings than components. Besides, one might not be comfortable with that, but they at least can use very large external HDDs to hold PS5 games on, and copy them to internal storage when they're ready to play them. For Switch 2, they'd have microSD, which is much more limited in overall storage space.
Click to expand...
Concernt said:
I wish those were viable, but their power consumption is something like half of the entire Switch power budget and they might look small, but they're at least an order of magnitude larger than a MicroSD card.
Click to expand...

Power consumption isn't something I had seriously considered, thank you for pointing that out!

I do wonder if Nintendo could come up with some sort of workaround for the heat as well but I think this will definitely be a defining issue for the system if it comes with very little storage and the additional storage isn't inexpensive.
 
TechnicalTip6578 said:
to possibly get more new reports or even detailed ones based on what we know so far, do we wait for TGS?
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I doubt it actually. I suspect that TGS presentations will be the same content, and that the Matrix leak is as good as it gets leak-wise.

The fact that Eurogamer didn’t report on the Matrix means that either they didn’t hear about it, or didn’t have as many sources for it - meaning that not every dev saw it - or they were asked for additional discretion that VGC ignored.

That makes me think that we got the juicy bit already, and the Nintendo will be in full lockdown at TGS
 
Just FYI: Nintendo will be present in Business Area at Tokyo Game Show too
Maybe we're not too far from another wave of "closed doors talks"
 
LiC said:
If BotW was running at 4K res and 60 fps, that's 5.76 times more pixels than the original (dynamic) 900p while doubling the framerate, so more than 11 times as much GPU work done per second, all for the low cost of switching NVN to NVN2.
Click to expand...
Hold on. That simply could've just been 1080p native DLSS'd to 4k.
 
Quoted by: LiC
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