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

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Don't forget the all but confirmed, willed into existence by me, Scrollwheel Shoulderbuttons.

Those alone should make difference enough that even the average consumers notice the difference!

;D
 
NineTailSage said:
I agree with this completely, there's so many details we aren't currently aware with Drake. I do believe that memory latency issues are a concern in the industry, If they weren't we wouldn't have companies using expensive solutions like large on die caches. Us trying to get a rough idea of how Drake will perform by comparing to desktop RTX is flawed as well because this will be the very first Ampere based SoC dedicated to gaming.
Click to expand...
Exactly.
And we can sort of see what the consequence for latency is CPU-wise on Series S|X with their split-memory situation.

Series X has 16GB sure, but only 10 is the full 560GB/s and the other 6 is slashed down to 336GB/s...

With the Series X specifically, beyond a bit of the 6 being eaten up by the OS, it is designed to be used by the CPU.

Problem there is, you incur a massive penalty to the CPU if you use that slower pool for it as the CPU can't make up the massive latency hit with raw bandwidth like the PS5.

And well if you only use the 10GB pool for both, you're leaving RAM on the table.

Series S doesn't nessecarily suffer from this...but it suffers from having way too little memory for both with the 8GB of even slower 224GB/s memory.

While the GPU may be able to be worked around to accommodate via optimizing draw-calls, asset reduction.etc. The CPU can't. The CPU will always have inherit Latency to it without bandwidth to shove into it to compensate like Insomniac did on PS5.

So, Switch 2 with LPDDR not only would be able to have a far more stable CPU-side experinece without the CPU becoming a bottleneck as easily due to latency stalling. But the GPU also would inherit benefits even if you assume that having lower-latency to the GPU in 2023/2024 wouldn't help solve GPU-IP Bottlenecks a bit even though the solution to said bottlenecks was "Shove low-latency memory into it and make the shaders busier so they stall less" (Lovelace),

Ray Tracing is a latency-sensitive Task. It's part of why Steam Deck can surprisingly keep up with Series S when both have access to Ray Tracing. The main cut being the raw GPU horsepower. (Metro Exodus Enhanced on Steam Deck running Windows, which already incurs more overhead than a console, running eerily around where you'd hit following the reduction in TFLOPs between the Series S and Steam Deck)
 
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I think the Switch 2 being compatible with Switch 1 Joycons would benefit Nintendo s lot. If Switch NG launches with Mario Kart 9/10, and an already existing Switch OG owner buys a Drake Switch, the they’d have four Joycons and can immediately engage in multiplayer

And yes, I believe Switch Next will have exclusive Joycons 2.0
 
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Bonejack said:
Don't forget the all but confirmed, willed into existence by me, Scrollwheel Shoulderbuttons.

Those alone should make difference enough that even the average consumers notice the difference!

;D
Click to expand...
You mean scrolling capacitive shoulder buttons- 👁️👄👁️
 
I could see Nintendo following the Xbox series strategy when coming to compatibility. Basically everything is compatible.
 
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I don't know if this is the place to talk about it but I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all those game early leaks.
Even if it's not threating their business (yet?), It is probably becoming a huge deal for Nintendo. Zelda and now Mario leaking 1 week in advance, playable in a somehow 'better version'... it is terrible. I hate it, I can't even imagine Nintendo's state of mind.

So I wonder how those leaks could negatively impact Switch NG (and how it could explain some of the last unwelcome and sometime absurd rumors).

  • Since the leaks come from game cartridges, there is obviously an easy fix for that. They have now a new incentive to speed up the transition toward full-digital ( => 2 different SKUs at launch?).
  • Since the OG hardware is compromised, to start afresh on a healthy footing, we could have a more abrupt transition toward NG. More exclusives, no transition stage.
  • And that leads to a more hypothetical 'threat' but what about BC? If they somehow burn the technical bridge between the 2 hardware, would it make emulation more difficult?

Sorry to sound like a nintendoomer, I just trying to explore some of the worst scenario to see if it has some weight to it. My brain does that, please send help. 🙃
 
syrozz said:
I don't know if this is the place to talk about it but I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all those game early leaks.
Even if it's not threating their business (yet?), It is probably becoming a huge deal for Nintendo. Zelda and now Mario leaking 1 week in advance, playable in a somehow 'better version'... it is terrible. I hate it, I can't even imagine Nintendo's state of mind.

So I wonder how those leaks could negatively impact Switch NG (and how it could explain some of the last unwelcome and sometime absurd rumors).

  • Since the leaks come from game cartridges, there is obviously an easy fix for that. They have now a new incentive to speed up the transition toward full-digital ( => 2 different SKUs at launch?).
  • Since the OG hardware is compromised, to start afresh on a healthy footing, we could have a more abrupt transition toward NG. More exclusives, no transition stage.
  • And that leads to a more hypothetical 'threat' but what about BC? If they somehow burn the technical bridge between the 2 hardware, would it make emulation more difficult?

Sorry to sound like a nintendoomer, I just trying to explore some of the worst scenario to see if it has some weight to it. My brain does that, please send help. 🙃
Click to expand...
Only your second hypothetical is somewhat plausible otherwise I doubt Nintendo sees early leaks as anything other than a nuisance rather than a big problem impacting their business.

One thing I'd say is that the NG Switch will probably be a much tougher nut to crack at least for the common user if the oled version is anything to go by. The latter require doing soldering work to be hacked properly (unless it has gotten easier since then).

The hardware being much more powerful than the current Switch will also significantly reduce the amount of people able to properly emulate it.

So ultimately by virtue of Nintendo improving the security hardware wise (as the software solutions are already pretty good as far as I'm aware) they won't need to take drastic measures to prevent homebrewing if it's really a big issue for them.
 
syrozz said:
I don't know if this is the place to talk about it but I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all those game early leaks.
Even if it's not threating their business (yet?), It is probably becoming a huge deal for Nintendo. Zelda and now Mario leaking 1 week in advance, playable in a somehow 'better version'... it is terrible. I hate it, I can't even imagine Nintendo's state of mind.

So I wonder how those leaks could negatively impact Switch NG (and how it could explain some of the last unwelcome and sometime absurd rumors).

  • Since the leaks come from game cartridges, there is obviously an easy fix for that. They have now a new incentive to speed up the transition toward full-digital ( => 2 different SKUs at launch?).
  • Since the OG hardware is compromised, to start afresh on a healthy footing, we could have a more abrupt transition toward NG. More exclusives, no transition stage.
  • And that leads to a more hypothetical 'threat' but what about BC? If they somehow burn the technical bridge between the 2 hardware, would it make emulation more difficult?

Sorry to sound like a nintendoomer, I just trying to explore some of the worst scenario to see if it has some weight to it. My brain does that, please send help. 🙃
Click to expand...
I don't think the possibility of a game leaking early will change any of their plans, it will sell millions regardless.
I know it's bad for the devs for worked on the title but all they can do is hope for better security on NG.

Gameplay leaks are still going to happen if gamecards are still a thing, remember the SMO ones when the huge exploit was not released?
 
Mobius said:
I don't think the possibility of a game leaking early will change any of their plans, it will sell millions regardless.
I know it's bad for the devs for worked on the title but all they can do is hope for better security on NG.

Gameplay leaks are still going to happen if gamecards are still a thing, remember the SMO ones when the huge exploit was not released?
Click to expand...
Devs are getting payed the exact same regardless, I doubt they're loosing sleep over it.
 
syrozz said:
Since the OG hardware is compromised, to start afresh on a healthy footing, we could have a more abrupt transition toward NG. More exclusives, no transition stage.
Click to expand...
This is what will happen. Nintendo will fix everything that went wrong with Switch and Tegra security and will make things super tight so that the system isn't easily hacked. A secure system will mean that once the transition is finished, emulators, piracy, etc will be a non-issue for Nintendo and their partners.

As for the game cards/broken street date leaks, Nintendo will enforce tight policies for stores and blacklist those who break it. They won't speed a digital transition because of it.
 
syrozz said:
I don't know if this is the place to talk about it but I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all those game early leaks.
Even if it's not threating their business (yet?), It is probably becoming a huge deal for Nintendo. Zelda and now Mario leaking 1 week in advance, playable in a somehow 'better version'... it is terrible. I hate it, I can't even imagine Nintendo's state of mind.

So I wonder how those leaks could negatively impact Switch NG (and how it could explain some of the last unwelcome and sometime absurd rumors).

  • Since the leaks come from game cartridges, there is obviously an easy fix for that. They have now a new incentive to speed up the transition toward full-digital ( => 2 different SKUs at launch?).
  • Since the OG hardware is compromised, to start afresh on a healthy footing, we could have a more abrupt transition toward NG. More exclusives, no transition stage.
  • And that leads to a more hypothetical 'threat' but what about BC? If they somehow burn the technical bridge between the 2 hardware, would it make emulation more difficult?

Sorry to sound like a nintendoomer, I just trying to explore some of the worst scenario to see if it has some weight to it. My brain does that, please send help. 🙃
Click to expand...

Next switch will be hard to hack unless a big flaw is found and i doubt it since they had one in the Switch.

Also, most of the people playing it early have already preordered the game!
 
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syrozz said:
I don't know if this is the place to talk about it but I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all those game early leaks.
Even if it's not threating their business (yet?), It is probably becoming a huge deal for Nintendo. Zelda and now Mario leaking 1 week in advance, playable in a somehow 'better version'... it is terrible. I hate it, I can't even imagine Nintendo's state of mind.

So I wonder how those leaks could negatively impact Switch NG (and how it could explain some of the last unwelcome and sometime absurd rumors).

  • Since the leaks come from game cartridges, there is obviously an easy fix for that. They have now a new incentive to speed up the transition toward full-digital ( => 2 different SKUs at launch?).
  • Since the OG hardware is compromised, to start afresh on a healthy footing, we could have a more abrupt transition toward NG. More exclusives, no transition stage.
  • And that leads to a more hypothetical 'threat' but what about BC? If they somehow burn the technical bridge between the 2 hardware, would it make emulation more difficult?

Sorry to sound like a nintendoomer, I just trying to explore some of the worst scenario to see if it has some weight to it. My brain does that, please send help. 🙃
Click to expand...
early game leaks online have been around since the game boy advance days and Nintendo has been fine
 
lemonfresh said:
early game leaks online have been around since the game boy advance days and Nintendo has been fine
Click to expand...

I'm more worried about DRM ruining my future carts.

It's already hit or miss with final code shipping on physical media. If online DRM checks exist, there's no reason to buy a cartridge anymore.

I like the portability of Switch, but physical media is the main selling point for me.
 
Hermii said:
Sakurai is a rare breed. To the average programmer/ designer etc its a day job.
Click to expand...
This comes off as tad dismissive towards the creators in this field. Game development doesn't pay that well and there are plenty of passionate artists within the industry. If you have the development skills to work on a game, you'll earn more and have healthier work life balance doing "traditional" development work.

There's no way a leaked game doesn't leave multiple people on the dev team disappointed.
 
I, for one, welcome our DRM overlords!
I'm sick and tired of my experience being ruined by morally challenged halfwits who have a chip on their shoulder because Nintendo ran over their dog allegedly.
 
ertaboy356b said:
The leaks of today have significantly more impact than the leaks from the old days.
Click to expand...
Early copies of games are only able to reach pirate sites so efficiently due to hacked Switches being relatively common. Without an easy entry point, it should be significantly slowed.
 
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Puikko said:
This comes off as tad dismissive towards the creators in this field. Game development doesn't pay that well and there are plenty of passionate artists within the industry. If you have the development skills to work on a game, you'll earn more and have healthier work life balance doing "traditional" development work.

There's no way a leaked game doesn't leave multiple people on the dev team disappointed.
Click to expand...
Those who pirate the game now, would likely have pirated the game regardless. And many of them would not have played the game at all for full price.

In a Mario game there are no big spoilers to speak of. The gameplay is the star.

The game will sell tens of millions. Losing maybe a few thousand sales to piracy (generously) is not something the average Nintendo employee loses sleep over.
 
ertaboy356b said:
The leaks of today have significantly more impact than the leaks from the old days.
Click to expand...
and why exactly is that people could still emulate stuff early even back in the day i would even say back then it was worse cause stuff like GameCube sold not so great compared to switch so it would get less sales with switch the games will sell well regardless cause its so popular
 
Puikko said:
This comes off as tad dismissive towards the creators in this field. Game development doesn't pay that well and there are plenty of passionate artists within the industry. If you have the development skills to work on a game, you'll earn more and have healthier work life balance doing "traditional" development work.

There's no way a leaked game doesn't leave multiple people on the dev team disappointed.
Click to expand...

As an artist, I don't imagine a small fraction of the audience for your game playing it early registers as something that would bother most people much. I imagine game designers would be more concerned with something like a wide swath of the audience playing the game in a way you didn't intend (which happens all the time, by the nature of how video games work), if you're the kind of person to get hung up on how people experience the art you created.
 
CalmMind said:
I, for one, welcome our DRM overlords!
I'm sick and tired of my experience being ruined by morally challenged halfwits who have a chip on their shoulder because Nintendo ran over their dog allegedly.
Click to expand...
Where does this narrative come from that people who want to play leaked games hate Nintendo? They could just want to play the game early cause they cant wait for it. Like if they are willing to go for a leak I would think they are big fans of the games for the most part
 
Bonejack said:
Enough talk about game leaks.

How about ReDraketed leaks?
Click to expand...
Yes! Where's the RTX 2050 Testing Digital Foundry. I need it🥺
GamerJM said:
I imagine game designers would be more concerned with something like a wide swath of the audience playing the game in a way you didn't intend (which happens all the time, by the nature of how video games work), if you're the kind of person to get hung up on how people experience the art you created.
Click to expand...
I think that's a big crux of the issue. I remember tons of Switch games where people played on emulators and accused the game of being faulty, whether the performance or graphical bugs.

I vividly remember the SMT community thinking SMT V was in a broken state because the game was stuttering and had graphics bugs on emulator. Some even went to say to people to avoid the game at launch because of it. It needed people with real Switch and the physical game to prove that it was the emulator fault and the game was fine on hardware.
 
I don’t think there’s even been a significant piracy event after the PSP and Square Enix games, seeing as how those were the most pirated IPs

That said, I don’t get the seemingly disproportionate worry of piracy and emulation for Switch and its successir
 
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Nintendo doesn't have to wait a new generation to do digital early access or introduce online DRM or something else.

Given how much they care about it, they very likely have projections saying any harsh measure would hurt sales more than piracy is doing right now.

And considering the Switch generation is their most profitable generation ever and so many software records broken, piracy is very likely not hurting that much, unlike what flash carts did to the DS.
 
RennanNT said:
Nintendo doesn't have to wait a new generation to do digital early access or introduce online DRM or something else.

Given how much they care about it, they very likely have projections saying any harsh measure would hurt sales more than piracy is doing right now.

And considering the Switch generation is their most profitable generation ever, piracy is very likely not hurting that much, unlike what flash carts did to the DS.
Click to expand...
It requires someone to go through the effort of doing one of these 2 things.

1. Download an emulator and have a beefy enough PC.

2. Hack their Switch.

Not saying it's a super high barrier of entry, but it's not something everyone would do.
 
I don’t know why I have an obsession with RAM but I do. 😭 I’m really hoping we get 5X instead of just 5. Whenever NG was planned, and it seems they always planned for a 2024 release, surely Nintendo knew there would be a RAM revision by that time. LPDDR5 came out (all the way back) in 2020, and it seems tape out was in 2022, even after 5X was announced. During planning, couldn’t Samsung have dropped the hint that 5X would be widespread by 2024? It just seems that, barring a high price, 5X should be the obvious choice for a H2 2024 device.
 
Cuzizkool said:
I don’t know why I have an obsession with RAM but I do. 😭 I’m really hoping we get 5X instead of just 5. Whenever NG was planned, and it seems they always planned for a 2024 release, surely Nintendo knew there would be a RAM revision by that time. LPDDR5 came out (all the way back) in 2020, and it seems tape out was in 2022, even after 5X was announced. During planning, couldn’t Samsung have dropped the hint that 5X would be widespread by 2024? It just seems that, barring a high price, 5X should be the obvious choice for a H2 2024 device.
Click to expand...
5X is not an efficiency win though. It's able to be clocked higher, but at the cost of power consumption (unlike 4X which is more power efficient than 4).

So it may not be that attractive to Nintendo for that reason.
 
Ghostsonplanets said:
I mean, by 2030/2031/2032, we'll be looking at LPDDR7 already.
Click to expand...
It's gonna be close.. we'll see. Hopefully 408 GB/s will be enough, unless they got with 256 but and we get 816..

Cuzizkool said:
I don’t know why I have an obsession with RAM but I do. 😭 I’m really hoping we get 5X instead of just 5. Whenever NG was planned, and it seems they always planned for a 2024 release, surely Nintendo knew there would be a RAM revision by that time. LPDDR5 came out (all the way back) in 2020, and it seems tape out was in 2022, even after 5X was announced. During planning, couldn’t Samsung have dropped the hint that 5X would be widespread by 2024? It just seems that, barring a high price, 5X should be the obvious choice for a H2 2024 device.
Click to expand...
Same 😭
 
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www.qualcomm.com

Qualcomm to Bring RISC-V Based Wearable Platform to Wear OS by Google | Qualcomm

www.qualcomm.com www.qualcomm.com
I don't expect Nvidia to adopt RISC-V outside of microcontrollers (p. 3) for a very long time due to Nvidia's 20 year Arm licence.
As far as Nintendo, depends on if Nintendo decides to continue partnering with Nvidia for 20 years.
chipsandcheese.com

Arm Announces Total Design: Taking Neoverse CSS Forward

We recently covered the announcement of Arm’s Neoverse CSS Genesis N2 platform, a near off-the-shelf compute subsystem design created to accelerate the time to market for custom accelerators …
chipsandcheese.com chipsandcheese.com
 
This article I googled (reputable? I dunno) said that Samsung did claim a power efficiency boost as well as performance. This was back in 2021, and claimed 5X was on 14nm EUV node. Greek to me, but said 20% less power. 🤷‍♂️

www.techspot.com

Samsung starts mass manufacturing LPDDR5X memory, paving the way for mobile devices with up to 64 GB of RAM

Back in August 2020, Samsung started mass producing 16 Gb LPDDR5 DRAM at the world's largest semiconductor line, opening the possibility of cramming up to 16 gigabytes...
www.techspot.com www.techspot.com
 
Cuzizkool said:
This article I googled (reputable? I dunno) said that Samsung did claim a power efficiency boost as well as performance. This was back in 2021, and claimed 5X was on 14nm EUV node. Greek to me, but said 20% less power. 🤷‍♂️

www.techspot.com

Samsung starts mass manufacturing LPDDR5X memory, paving the way for mobile devices with up to 64 GB of RAM

Back in August 2020, Samsung started mass producing 16 Gb LPDDR5 DRAM at the world's largest semiconductor line, opening the possibility of cramming up to 16 gigabytes...
www.techspot.com www.techspot.com
Click to expand...
Cuzizkool said:
Double post, but from Samsung itself:

semiconductor.samsung.com

Samsung Develops Industry’s First LPDDR5X DRAM | Samsung Semiconductor Global

Samsung's LPDDR5X DRAM is designed to drive further growth throughout the high-speed data service applications including 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.
semiconductor.samsung.com semiconductor.samsung.com
Click to expand...
The power efficiency is due to being fabbed on a newer node compared to LPDDR5. Samsung and others will probably move LPDDR5 to the same node as 5X later.
 
I've been playing Skyward Sword HD recently and I was reminded that it was apparently emulating the GPU while the CPU was native, and was not the same implementation as Super Mario Galaxy in 3D All-Stars. Combined with recent comments from Miyamoto about backwards compatibility being easier than ever, this is probably their ideal in keeping backwards compatibility, moving forward. Just make a translation layer if the Switch 1 GPU isn't forward compatible with Switch 2, if I understand it correctly.
Shoulder said:
Yes, Switch cartridges do exist, but I believe I’m correct in saying that every single Switch title has a digital version on the eShop. You don’t need cartridge slots to maintain BC. It just makes it frustrating for collectors, and fans of physical media is all.
Click to expand...
Ring Fit Adventure and Labo have no digital versions. Nintendo Switch Sports has a digital version, on the other hand.
 
Hermii said:
I don't know. I seen it repeated in this thread that it's not an efficiency win, so I assumed it was true.
Click to expand...
Same, but after some digging I found those articles. I’m going to be cautiously optimistic and hope for 5X again… until someone with more info will dash my hopes. 🥺
 
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