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

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ILikeFeet said:
if there's one thing I do miss, is some nicely designed interior spaces. since Xenoblade, as a series, is largely defined by its outdoor spaces, I hope their next game, whatever it is, does the inverse
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X is definitely the worst for having less interior spaces and bad quality ones. All the interior spaces you visit that is connected with the open world are very empty, Ganglion strongholds, the smaller caves, and story setpieces all take hits in being very big and empty, badly designed visually and in map design (the only good one really being the Ma-non ship but even when there are good ones it feels held back, you can only visit the left and right wings of the ship and nowhere else). Otherwise the more elaborate ones have to be loaded in a different map, like the Blade Barracks and the Chapter 12 place, and I wonder how much of the xenoblade series trying to avoid indoor areas is because of the hardware limits and those kinds of spaces clashing with a big open map. Agniritha in Xenoblade 1 is famously the most intensive area to run for Wii and 3DS, needing a hell of a lot of optimization to even run on the 3DS version. And with open worlds, to seemlessly be able to walk into places, have them render in high quality, and still be able to seemlessly leave them whenever and step back into the huge open world, loading and unloading both of them instantly is challenging to do I'd guess. That's why most of the nice ones we see in Xenoblade games are seperated into seperate maps, I was surprised that Keves castle in 3 was part of an outside map, but it's a pretty barren map otherwise so not surprised that they had to trade off the outside map being less detailed to fit Keves castle.
 
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TLZ said:
They can get the slower, smaller, cheaper nvmes as they're still pretty fast imo. They don't have to be PS5 nvme fast.

This is a PCIe gen 4 nvme, 256gb, 3300 MB/s speed, at only au$19.

Size seems good enough for Switch and they should be able to get them cheaper bulk purchased.
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Keep in mind that M.2 2230 SSDs can consume a non-trivial amount of power when active. And that's important if loading/running video games from the expandable external flash storage. One example is the Toshiba BG3 series, which can consume up to 3.3 W when active.
 
I'm gonna call it ... Nintendo will have a propietary flash storage medium for external cards (or a drive) on Switch 2 because there is no real perfect option available right now and Nintendo has no incentive for the SD Card guys to figure their shit out and people aren't going to be happy having to buy entirely new SD Cards anyway (or CFE or whatever) that they don't already own. Maybe they'll retain a micro SD card slot as a secondary option (use but live with awful loading times), but I can see UFS 3.0 flash internal storage + external cards from Nintendo that are in the same speed range (1200MB/sec max?).

And y'know what? Nintendo will make a fortune selling them, 100+ million hardware units and almost everyone buying 1 or 2 Nintendo memory cards is going to yield them hundreds of millions/billions in revenue.

People really won't be able to complain much either since Nintendo can simply say (and rightfully so), SD Cards are too slow as a primary format and other formats are too niche/expensive/or still too slow so Nintendo had to make their own card.
 
TLZ said:
They can get the slower, smaller, cheaper nvmes as they're still pretty fast imo. They don't have to be PS5 nvme fast.

This is a PCIe gen 4 nvme, 256gb, 3300 MB/s speed, at only au$19.

Size seems good enough for Switch and they should be able to get them cheaper bulk purchased.
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I am guessing this might not achieve their goals of power efficiency.

I am honestly just now learning they make them this small lol.

NateDrake said:
The song of my birds shall sing soon.
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oldpuck said:
Skittzo is likely thinking in terms of T239, where we're imagining DLSS running on a RTX card cut down to the bone, and the costs of DLSS are maximized. There has never been an RTX card as small as the leaked GPU in Drake, and there is reason to believe that there will be some edge cases where DLSS is actually more expensive than native rendering.
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Ah, yes, agreed. I've thought about this myself, that in the case of some relatively simple games like SSBU, DLSS taking, say, 5ms to do a 1080p frame in handheld or a 4K frame in docked could actually be longer than it takes the system to simply render natively. Of course...

oldpuck said:
No, but a little yes? Alex's analysis is very good here, but his data is actually surprisingly good, but he's got a missing piece that changes the result pretty dramatically.

Alex estimates Switch 2 performance based on Orin, and estimates DLSS 2 cost based on a 2060, and then tries to extrapolate how long 4k DLSS would take on Switch 2. He lands at about 10ms, which is too slow for 60fps, but pretty good for 30fps.

Since then we've gained more information about both Orin and DLSS 2, and the best estimates we have put DLSS 2 taking anywhere from 2-6ms. Prediction is hard, and Drake sits at a place that is especially fuzzy for this kind of estimation, but the range is still solidly in 60fps territory.

I've been the DLSS pessimist over the course of this thread, but by now I'm 75% convinced that the faster number, the 2ms number, is closest to the correct one.
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... that's if it actually does take this long. I was thinking that if T239 had 50% more SMs than the Orin chip and is made on a vastly better node then that could cut Alex's 10.3ms in half, but your 2ms is better than what I was hoping for. Do you think that if it does a 4K frame in 2-3ms when docked, a 1080p frame in handheld would be even faster? Assuming that the modes are 7 and 15W, and we aren't getting a 25W docked mode.
 
TLZ said:
Why though? Isn't that the whole point of DLSS? Botw was at dynamic 900p30 right? So push that to stable 1080p, then DLSS to 4k so it can get 60fps. Maybe RT was added to it as well.
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I think this supposed demo for a 6 year-old game game using 10 year-old art assets makes the most sense as an apples-to-apples comparison of GPU power. I.e., on Switch this game could hit 900p30 at the best of times; on our new hardware it can hit (let's say) 4K60 with just the effort of switching from NVN to NVN2.

On that specific subject, by the way, since BotW likely used Nintendo's GFX library, they may have had to do virtually no work to switch to NVN2. GFX is an abstraction on top of the low-level graphics API (usually NVN at present), which Nintendo states will be maintained on future hardware, ensuring easy porting even if a different low-level API is slotted in behind the scenes in the future, which NVN2 surely already has been.
 
oldpuck said:
I would love to know that, too. I just don't think the odds are great that TGS will help. If journalists are waiting for more sources to confirm before going public, then you'd need them to have sources at both Gamescom, a Western show and TGS an Eastern one. If journalists don't have that info, then it probably wasn't in the presentation at all.

The value of TGS was always that it provided cover for Gamescom stories to come out without being able to pinpoint where they came from. Since the big secret of Gamescom is out, that value has gone down.
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Of two minds on that. On one hand I definitely see where you're coming from and that does seem logical. On the other, I'd be surprised if Nintendo showed off tech demos to devs and didn't mention specific technical details to them.

I've never been in a behind-closed-doors briefing but I would have imagined there would be Nintendo reps providing context as to what developers are looking at
oldpuck said:
Four avenues. Devs using devkits, a marketing partner leaks, Nintendo lets something slip and it gets datamined, or Nintendo announces it themselves.

At this point, my speculation - informed speculation, but still just speculation - is that H1 2024 really might be on the table. In which case I think all of these are equally likely.
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I like the sound of that. With Eurogamer mentioning Nintendo is keen on releasing sooner than later + your informed speculation that H1 could be possible, truly every pathway for leaks is open for business.

I'd also argue supply chain leaks if H1 does happen. Mass production would need to occur sooner than later (which might prompt Nintendo to beat production leaks to the punch with an official announcement).

Crossing my fingers for some big details to come out over the next 2-3 months
 
Honestly, if the Switch 2 has 512GB of fast UFS storage, I would be ok with the storage expansion just being SD cards. They would be faster than on Switch. They could hold Switch games (even patched ones), some Switch 2 games could stay compatible with them if they were simple visually.

NateDrake said:
The song of my birds shall sing soon.
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Varys vibes.
 
I dont think have been this excited for a new console in like ages.
Switch is already one of my favorite systems ever and this is looking to improve on pretty much everything, while providing BC to the massive Switch library and offering hardware capabilities that will make it my to go system for even more kind of games ?

Looking back its kinda wild how massive Switch turned out despite so many 3rdParty big hitters skipping the system. With Switch 2 though ? Real version of Fifa/Madden are very likely, CoD is a given - with MS likely supporting the system with more than just Diablo 4 and Minecraft, The Witcher 3 was a success on Switch so Cyberpunk 2077 and future games like TW Remake are on the table as well, 7 Remake and more importantly XIV are likely gonna be on Drake as well and i expect mayor mobile Hoyoverse-like games to treat the system like their 2nd home.

Rockstar seems to be on board as well post GTA Trilogy and RDR Remastered - RDR2 has been rumored for ages and is likely gonna be announced for Switch 2/Drake as a showcase title. Not even mentioning Capcom that surely gonna port most of their RE Engine catalog with SF6 and co.

System is gonna have a big impact on the console market thats for sure, with Nintendo strategy really paying off in the longterm while the competition kinda has to resort to multiple devices or cloud services to offer a similar kind of flexibility when it comes to playing games.
 
Ah, time to finally get around to writing up the other thing I wanted to slip in during downtime.

For background/context, there's a bit of a personal subplot, where I'm wrestling with the idea of concepts for cross-gen games. (hah, 'subplot' I say, as if this thread is a long running show, spanning the very lifespan of Famiboards... :whistle:)
The seeds of me burning my daydreaming time on this subject were planted in this post. Follow up mention here. Some more babbling here. So yea, not the first time I spout random crap about game concepts/ideas... in the hardware thread :p

Now returning to the present...

oldpuck said:
The only other use case I've seen for RT cores is 3D audio. RT cores are fast because they're very limited, and you would need to describe your problem in terms of rays bouncing around in order to use RT acceleration.
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Hmm, rays bouncing around...
First thought: Gee, there is Breakout/Alleyway. The ball moves in straight lines; is that ray-like enough to be able to be worked on by the RT cores? Or would we have to re-imagine the ball into like, a laser beam.
(also, the very observant with longer memories will remember this being foreshadowed here...)
Going back to thinking about cross generation game ideas, Alleyway was actually the first thing I thought about. Alright, since I'm careening the hell away from hardware here, I'll continue on in spoiler blocks so it's easier for those uninterested to just skip ahead.

What I wrote back in February? Set that aside for now. Oh, I still think it could be a cool experience, but when I revisted this, I drifted off into another direction...
So, Breakout/Alleyway, but imagine it in 3D/three dimensional space. The playing field is now a cube, or at least a rectangular prism. The paddle now moves along the surfaces of that prism.
Now, allow for multiple paddles/players at once. Yes, as implied, one way to modify difficulty would be to allow a player to operate multiple paddles. Maybe one at a time, using one button to switch around. Or operate them simultaneously.

The extra mode to make it cross-gen? Large scale cooperative multiplayer boss battles. This is a card I end up playing over and over again with these crossgen ideas I kick around in my head; easy fallback for 'how do I lazily crank up the amount of stuff going on?' Yes, even Clu Clu Land, though I won't talk about that one in this post.
Think of double digit number of players bouncing balls/beams around, chipping away at a giant spaceship (may or may not be part of an armada), or humongous Mecha Bowser, or cosmic horror from the depths of space. Think of how much articulation the boss can have from the extra CPU power to throw at simulation. Don't need to reduce all the bricks into sharing one motion vector; they can be divided up into bunches of groups, each moving in their own direction.
The new potential addition: if the balls/beams can be offloaded to RT cores, that should allow for even more stuff. Yessss, potential for grand space battle setpieces.

Wow, yea, this shows that this was my first stab at coming up with a game concept modification for this topic, cause creatively, it's kind of weak sauce :cautious:

Alright, next up, moving away from focusing on cross gen specifically and instead concentrating on 'rays bouncing around'...

What about a form of Billiards? All the balls ought to be moving in straight lines. Now, imagine that in three dimensional space...

So, twist #1 was Billiards/Snooker, but now in 3D space! What's twist #2 then?
Well, your input can be described as two parts, right? Part one is that you select the angle from which you strike the cue ball with. Part two is the amount of force. Let's gamify part one; the selection of the angle to strike from. Maybe the cue stick can be represented by... I dunno, a ship? Or a mecha flying in space? Or... wait...I see something...I see...

Twist #2: Sonic the Hedgehog is now the cue stick. He has a homing attack, after all. We just need to make that move in a straight line here. As far as how much force is used, let's keep that simple and make it a matter of when you press the homing attack button, you freeze in place, and you hold down the button to build up force. Then let go when the force is as high as you'd like. For slight gamification of this aspect, maybe we'll make it such that to increase the maximum amount of force allowed, you need to collect rings. More rings, more max power. But most of the gamification is focused on the part of selecting the angle to strike the cue ball from.
So, you're controlling Sonic now. You're on the surface. The 'cue ball' object and the other balls/objects that need to knocked into the 'pockets' are all over the place, floating in the air. How do you get to the 'cue ball'? You run and jump around the place. Yes, this is now part Platformer.
Obviously, it'd be boring if it's just a flat surface around. So there's terrain. There are buildings. There are platforms. Assorted objects all over the place. They, along with walls, can be used to ricochet the 'balls' off of. Stage motifs can be anything. Generic, or taken from Sonic games, or I dunno, even maybe a discotheque, with a giant disco ball in the center lighting up the place, complete with Sonic in a leisure suit...

Twist #3: Multiple participants active simultaneously.
And yes, the participants (players, bots, or a mix of both) can interfere with each other. I dunno about being able to strike each others' 'cue balls', but definitely yes to being able to kick and punch each other in the face.

Honestly, at this point, if this were cross-gen, the only real difference between generations would be the sheer number of participants active and objects floating about :unsure:

Would a large scale cooperative multiplayer boss battle mode work here? I think so. Sonic(s) (...and maybe & Friends?) on the ground. Giant space ship in the air. This ship, otherwise impervious to most attacks, curiously has certain weaknesses... like, think of a vent you can shove a photon torpedo down, but multiple of these. Use your 'cue balls' to knock 'bombs' into these holes dotted across the ship (yes, these would be the 'pockets') to inflict damage. Then upon victory, celebrate like it's the finale of the ID4 movie.

Incidentally, this idea is the addition to my list of games to will into existence, as I mentioned to @chocolate_supra here. Might need a name though...
Sonic Billiards? Snooker Sonic?... Snoonic? Snonic?

Now here I move completely away from thinking about cross-gen and entirely on the 'rays' thing.
Pinball
"Yea yea, you're always going back to the 'but now, in three dimensional space!' well as the first twist"
Actually, I haven't gotten around to visualizing Pinball in 3D space yet. So...
Twist #1A: Effectively replace the ball with a laser beam.
Not a whole lot on its own; it mainly makes your flippers into mirrors and you mainly control angle of reflection, so...
Twist #1B: There are now objects in the playing field that function as mirrors or prisms. Reflection and refraction. Surely these can be accelerated by RT cores, right!?

Twist #2: You now have an avatar in the playing area which can move about, placing (temporary?) mirrors and prisms.
Next question is, is the playing surface effectively flat/horizontal? And thus your avatar can freely move around? Or is the playing surface vertically oriented, and thus imagine gravity applying to your avatar. And thus, moving your avatar around involves Platformer Elements ™️. And the in between option is the playing surface being at an angle, so add in some frictional force and thus the sum total of forces pulling your avatar 'downward' is weaker. IE, you fall down slower.
Maybe your avatar could be a puffball from the stars, who can inflate himself by sucking in air, and then flap his arms to kind of bob around...
Mmm, let's make that a setting you can choose in options.

Alright, how sly was I in somehow ending up with a RT-oriented alternate take on Kirby's Pinball?

Uhhh, gotta speed up. Alright, the remaining ones should be quick.

How about Air Hockey. Or rather, Laser Hockey?... fine, or Laser Pong.
No, haven't visualized this in 3D yet.
Replace puck with laser beam. Add assorted mirrors and prisms in the playing field. Perhaps allow 3 and 4 player play?

And one last one... which I don't even like the genre(s) of, but nevertheless, it came to my mind somehow.

Laser tag as a first person and/or third person shooter.
Wait, this already is in 3D.
The main gimmick is the addition and usage of mirrors and prisms all over the place. So, less focus on shooting the other bots/players directly, and more on absolutely sick trick shots.

Only one gimmick is boring, so let's at least dress it up. Let's see... oh yea, Mario & Co use guns in the Mario + Rabbids games. There it is, we dress this up as Mario and the gang play laser tag. And from there, the additional fun stuff can be added like you'd expect from other Mario-fied stuff.
I do want to at least emphasize embracing the verticality/Z-axis though. Peach's got her floating ability. Yoshi's got his flutter jump. You can crouch down for a couple of seconds to charge up a super jump.

Really, the reason I bother to write this one down is the chance for this to spread to the wider internet. Because I'd like a mock up of Peach floating by, firing a volley of lasers down (or, again, sick trick shots relying on reflection and refraction), granting her foes the sweet release of death sending her friends off to a very restful nap. Cause ain't she a great princess?
 
LiC said:
I think this supposed demo for a 6 year-old game game using 10 year-old art assets makes the most sense as an apples-to-apples comparison of GPU power. I.e., on Switch this game could hit 900p30 at the best of times; on our new hardware it can hit (let's say) 4K60 with just the effort of switching from NVN to NVN2.

On that specific subject, by the way, since BotW likely used Nintendo's GFX library, they may have had to do virtually no work to switch to NVN2. GFX is an abstraction on top of the low-level graphics API (usually NVN at present), which Nintendo states will be maintained on future hardware, ensuring easy porting even if a different low-level API is slotted in behind the scenes in the future, which NVN2 surely already has been.
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So what you are saying is that it would take very little effort to patch basically every first party game? Since I assume most of them use Nintendo gfx library.
 
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How do you all think Nintendo will handle BC? Not if it exists or not (let’s assume it will) but how it will be implemented.

Will they just add BC at a hardware level and not care about optimising individual games?

Or will their BC be like a drip feed where they release enhancements of Switch 1 games over time? Kind of like how they seem to have put in work on an enhanced version of BoTW.

Or a combination where they will add BC at hardware level but they will also release big improvements for their games over time?
 
Chauzu said:
How do you all think Nintendo will handle BC? Not if it exists or not (let’s assume it will) but how it will be implemented.

Will they just add BC at a hardware level and not care about optimising individual games?

Or will their BC be like a drip feed where they release enhancements of Switch 1 games over time? Kind of like how they seem to have put in work on an enhanced version of BoTW.

Or a combination where they will add BC at hardware level but they will also release big improvements for their games over time?
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BC at a hardware level (or technically a software compatibility layer/ mode), and patches required to run natively.
 
arsen said:
Willing to bet that this will NOT age well.
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I hope so.

I just don't think there will be any new relevant information, in which case it'll be just speculation which we have been doing over here since the articles came out.
And frankly, specially when it comes to hardware, some people here are at least as much creditable IMO.

... unless there is new info ...
 
Mobius said:
You will have that one guy who will expect PS5 Pro performance, and yes that quote will work well on them.
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honestly at first before entering famiboards, i went with the mindset that it'd be comparable to series s but after entering as well as more understanding of what we know/heard so far, i started expecting it to be PS4+ level on handheld & PS4 Pro (+?) level on docked
 
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