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

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oldpuck said:
Hit enter too early. Post continued

TV Play matters. I just want to add that I'm a handheld play guy, but the SD has really poor support for the TV. I think inherent to the hybrid concept is the idea that handheld will always be "better" technologically. You can't scale down things like cache or CPU in the same way as the GPU, so those things tend to favor handheld, where you've got the same amount of hardware, but a smaller perf target. With all these little details needing to get right on the form factor and performance balance on handheld, I was reminded that TV isn't just a matter of scaling it "up." Making sure that both experiences are good, both visually and ergonomically are really going to be key here.

I kinda want a gimmick. I love playing with the trackpads? But I rarely use them. Still, it makes me sort hunger for the weird gameplay experiences that only Nintendo can offer me. I don't need them to build the console around it, but I'll spend a hundred bucks over a consoles life-cycle for a few moments of childlike delight that no other sleekly designed piece of corporate product can offer me.
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TV play continues to be dismissed or omitted in many Deck vs Nintendo discussions.

I get that Switch on TV is lacking, but it’s such a fundamental part of the offering. I used it perhaps 30-50% of my total Switch playtime (*skewed heavily toward early generation, as I started to find TV play pretty ugly as the generation went on)

Deck has an optional dock, but nobody I know, among 5 (?) owners, has or uses one. That to me at least is a glaring disparity between the two devices. Switch 2 presents an opportunity to step up with a very competent TV offering.
 
Codename_Steam said:
Welcome back! Speaking of gimmicks. Didn’t that hurt Nintendo with the Wii U GamePad?
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I think it would be hard to break down everything that hurt the Wii U. I think the price for what you got was a big one. That they kept the GPU from the GC/Wii and just made it bigger hurt them in portability. The poor experience with the OS hurt them a bunch. The way that the GamePad hurt them was in the expense of it and that it was an underutilized concept.

You can see the way they backlashed in the OS design of the Switch. It's simple and boots fast. The OS on the Wii U was slow and quite clunky. It loaded a bunch of stuff that was superfluous to playing games.

That they didn't move to modern GPU model hurt them in portability. Like a lot. It hurt them in the original Wii, but that didn't matter so much because they sold the Wii Remote concept so well. They just didn't realize it at the time. A modern GPU in the Wii and/or Wii U would have made them a capable port machine like the Switch is. The biggest missed opportunity was a Wii HD in late 2009 with a CPU similar to what's was in the 360, a modern (and modest) GPU, and more RAM that the PS3 or 360. Could have been the bridge to more successful years on the Wii concept, a successful 3rd party port machine, and a bridge into the Switch.

The gamepad was a gamble that didn't pay off and it hurt them in every unit sold by sheer cost. If it were well used in every game, that would be one thing, but as it was, it wasn't.
 
TechnicalTip6578 said:
i came across the new rumor on how switch 2 is gonna have 8gb ram & 64gb memory size, is it dead on arrival?
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99.9% chance it's BS. First of all, it just doesn't make sense if you look at the rest of the speculation. The rest of the specs just don't work well together. Nate here also believes the system has more than 8gigs of ram, and he's got a bullet proof record. Also the source of the speculation has a terrible track record, getting most of their predictions wrong. Finally, it isn't even a rumor like I said in the previous sentence, it's just speculation from an economics journal.
 
Please refrain from xenophobic generalizations. - meatbag, Volcanic Dynamo, xghost777, Party Sklar
Hermii said:
I don't expect 16, simply because Nintendo knows they can get away with less.
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I expect an even more baffling logic for 12GB: "Well, dev kits traditionally have more RAM than the system..."

This a traditionally Japanese company run by old conservative men after all. The same mind set as Kutaragi's "we don't want developers to max the system too early....".
 
Codename_Steam said:
Welcome back! Speaking of gimmicks. Didn’t that hurt Nintendo with the Wii U GamePad?
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That’s part of the reason for why it was unattractive but overall the device itself was poison from concept. A more ancillary “gimmick” probably works out better since the hybrid is the main “gimmick” for the Switch & its successors.
 
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MilkyChance said:
Knowing Nintendo, if 8 GB is true, I suspect it's 8 GB of available Memory total with 4 GB reserved for other usage such as the OS, it wouldn't make sense IMO. 64 GB is still too low especially games today, unless Nintendo is teaching developers how to compress games.
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Of course it doesn't make sense all that means is that the Switch 2 will get 512 MB more than the Switch 1.
 
karmitt said:
TV play continues to be dismissed or omitted in many Deck vs Nintendo discussions.

I get that Switch on TV is lacking, but it’s such a fundamental part of the offering. I used it perhaps 30-50% of my total Switch playtime (*skewed heavily toward early generation, as I started to find TV play pretty ugly as the generation went on)

Deck has an optional dock, but nobody I know, among 5 (?) owners, has or uses one. That to me at least is a glaring disparity between the two devices. Switch 2 presents an opportunity to step up with a very competent TV offering.
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I have one but I honestly almost never use it except for desktop mode. It's just way too inconvenient. A friend of mine has one and he uses it almost exclusively docked, because changing between modes is inconvenient
 
PedroNavajas said:
I expect an even more baffling logic for 12GB: "Well, dev kits traditionally have more RAM than the system..."

This a traditionally Japanese company run by old conservative men after all. The same mind set as Kutaragi's "we don't want developers to max the system too early....".
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90% sure that quote can't be taken at face value. He was just trying to save face.

To elaborate why I think 12gb, it's because it's more than the Series S. It won't lose them any ports that only could have been done with 16gb. Yes they will be a bit more compromised, but it won't stop them from being ported at all. Nintendo themselves can do miracles with 12gb. It will still be an amazing handheld.

So that's why I think Nintendo will ultimately not prioritize 16.
 
PedroNavajas said:
I expect an even more baffling logic for 12GB: "Well, dev kits traditionally have more RAM than the system..."

This a traditionally Japanese company run by old conservative men after all. The same mind set as Kutaragi's "we don't want developers to max the system too early....".
Click to expand...
These guys are Nintendo’s modern guard
And they aren’t old men lol
 
oldpuck said:
Gimme 16 GB of RAM plz. I've been on the "12GB is fine" train for sometime, but the SD convinced me that 16GB would be a real win. Being able to push texture setting to max every where is such a relief, and we're starting to see RT heavy titles really need lots of system RAM as well as GPU RAM.
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Well, I was going to post a joke. But I think It won't land.
 
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lattjeful said:
Honestly I agree with all of this, especially the ergonomics and the RAM amount. Honestly I can deal with visual cutbacks, but soupy textures and character models are a non-starter for me. Being able to keep texture quality high, along with Nvidia's more performant RT hardware allowing for RT to scale down better (I think? Not an area of expertise, but I'd imagine the tensor cores will allow for RT to still be achievable in "miracle ports" despite the massive power delta)
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It's the RT cores, not the tensor cores (though Nvidia marketing makes the confusion understandable). But yes, Nvidia is way ahead. Basically, if two cards perform the same with RT off, the Nvidia card will be 30-50% better with RT on.

Codename_Steam said:
Welcome back! Speaking of gimmicks. Didn’t that hurt Nintendo with the Wii U GamePad?
Click to expand...
I think what hurt the Wii U wasn't a gimmick, but the gimmick.

Wii had a gimmicky controller, but you saw it, and you got it. It launched with Zelda and Wii Sports, two games with radically different audiences, but with the same pitch - what you do with your hand is reflected on screen.

Wii U didn't make sense immediately in the same way. And the games it launched with reflected that - NSMBU and Nintendo Land don't share a vision of the hardware. The crowd that came to gaming through the Wii didn't know what to make of the Wii U and the crowd that Nintendo lost with the Wii were put off by it.


karmitt said:
TV play continues to be dismissed or omitted in many Deck vs Nintendo discussions.

I get that Switch on TV is lacking, but it’s such a fundamental part of the offering. I used it perhaps 30-50% of my total Switch playtime (*skewed heavily toward early generation, as I started to find TV play pretty ugly as the generation went on)

Deck has an optional dock, but nobody I know, among 5 (?) owners, has or uses one. That to me at least is a glaring disparity between the two devices. Switch 2 presents an opportunity to step up with a very competent TV offering, something Deck isn’t touching.
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Yeah, it's a non-starter. Maybe you want to wire your Deck up to a TV, but even if it were dead simple to do so, and there was some sort of immediately usable external controller - you would still have the problem that games aren't aware of it. You just get the lower resolution game, blown up. You can raise the settings, but you don't have a spike in performance to go along with it. You can uncap the power draw, but that's even more settings fiddling.
 
oldpuck said:
It's the RT cores, not the tensor cores (though Nvidia marketing makes the confusion understandable). But yes, Nvidia is way ahead. Basically, if two cards perform the same with RT off, the Nvidia card will be 30-50% better with RT on.
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Ah gotcha. Not sure why I thought they were the same thing. Thanks for the correction!
 
Trying to use the Steam Deck like a Switch is jank city. I shutdown every game before I dock so I don't have to deal with the headache of not automatically switching res/controller input.

Happy there's VRR though.
 
Codename_Steam said:
Could Nintendo add a 3D display to the Switch 2? I remember that Sony had a 3D display that allowed two players to see separate screens on the same display.
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According to Nintendo, the anamorphic 3D screws up touch functionality, which is why they didn't put in on the bottom screen of the 3DS.
 
Honestly I'd love to know what exactly happened behind the scenes with the Wii U. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of info about the Wii U's development, I don't think there was even much about it in the gigaleak. It feels as if the console just materialised out of nowhere. There was definitely a lot of mismanagement with the project and I don't think Iwata was at fault. It's as if all of the different departments at Nintendo stopped communicating. As if the Wii U was developed in a vacuum, first party software teams had no say in its design and had no idea what to do with it, different teams in marketing had completely polar opposite ideas about how the system should have been marketed etc.
 
PedroNavajas said:
I expect an even more baffling logic for 12GB: "Well, dev kits traditionally have more RAM than the system..."

This a traditionally Japanese company run by old conservative men after all. The same mind set as Kutaragi's "we don't want developers to max the system too early....".
Click to expand...
This is a really weird post and almost comes off as slightly xenophobic. It's also just not based in reality. Maybe at one point there was something to this, but Nintendo massively changed in the 2000s and has completely evolved again more recently.
 
Quailman said:
I follow Sakurai on youtube and recently saw that he posted this.

Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games4 hours ago
It's a bit late to be saying this, but...Happy New Year!I'm planning to wrap up Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games sometime this year. Until then, I hope you'll stay tuned!

He might be working on a new game this year or something else.

edit: could find this post under the community tab on his youtube page.
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he problably working on Super Smash Bros for Nintendo next console
 
Individualised said:
Honestly I'd love to know what exactly happened behind the scenes with the Wii U. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of info about the Wii U's development, I don't think there was even much about it in the gigaleak. It feels as if the console just materialised out of nowhere. There was definitely a lot of mismanagement with the project and I don't think Iwata was at fault. It's as if all of the different departments at Nintendo stopped communicating. As if the Wii U was developed in a vacuum, first party software teams had no say in its design and had no idea what to do with it, different teams in marketing had completely polar opposite ideas about how the system should have been marketed etc.
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I think:
  • Pressure from the "core" gaming industry. See the announcement of an "unprecedented" partnership with EA (which turned into nothing, but it was presented as the next big thing), the Batman games, Deus Ex, the partnership with UbiSoft... Nintendo wanted those games and devs back;
  • No sources on this, but I assume there were people inside Nintendo pushing for a "Wii 2", and other people pushing for a "DS Home";
  • The idea that Sony and MS weren't going into spec war again, so the Wii U wouldn't have been so underpowered. I'm 100% confident Iwata said so in an interview (before PS4 and One were announced);
  • Iwata was keen on maintaining BC with the Wii (which is, by itself, something commendable), but that resulted in a Frankenstein hardware;
  • Katsuya Eguchi is a great software director / producer, but he didn't have a great vision for the Wii U hardware. "Asynchronous multiplayer" was the original pitch for Animal Crossing, and it worked great for a game. Two of the console's USP were based on that (Miiverse's asynchronous communication and asymmetric multiplayer), but they were useful for a handful of games, and certainly not something to base the console on. This is something rarely talked about, but Miyamoto played a more limited role with Wii U and 3DS, leaving the hardware producer roles to Eguchi and Konno for the first time;
  • On the software side, nobody knew how to use the GamePad outside of maybe the Pikmin team (and still, Pikmin 3 played better with Wii Remote and Nunchuck at launch...), and Miiverse was "just there" (exception: NintendoLand and Splatoon, which were made by Eguchi's former team...).

So the end result did not have a single, defined direction. It tried to do multiple things without a clear vision.
 
Ashen_foefoe said:
So can we assume this is incorrect and way off of what we know?
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"Taiwanese Economic Forum reports the Nintendo Switch 2 will have a 120Hz screen and improved battery life, but only 8GB of ram and 64GB of Storage"
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I could actually see nintendo going 8gb of ram since apple stil uses that on macbookair ..... but 64gb of storage is so much non sense that is not true. They would be actually making it difficult to sell more games on eshop. That's actually working against more profits.
 
bmfrosty said:
I think it would be hard to break down everything that hurt the Wii U. I think the price for what you got was a big one. That they kept the GPU from the GC/Wii and just made it bigger hurt them in portability. The poor experience with the OS hurt them a bunch. The way that the GamePad hurt them was in the expense of it and that it was an underutilized concept.

You can see the way they backlashed in the OS design of the Switch. It's simple and boots fast. The OS on the Wii U was slow and quite clunky. It loaded a bunch of stuff that was superfluous to playing games.

That they didn't move to modern GPU model hurt them in portability. Like a lot. It hurt them in the original Wii, but that didn't matter so much because they sold the Wii Remote concept so well. They just didn't realize it at the time. A modern GPU in the Wii and/or Wii U would have made them a capable port machine like the Switch is. The biggest missed opportunity was a Wii HD in late 2009 with a CPU similar to what's was in the 360, a modern (and modest) GPU, and more RAM that the PS3 or 360. Could have been the bridge to more successful years on the Wii concept, a successful 3rd party port machine, and a bridge into the Switch.

The gamepad was a gamble that didn't pay off and it hurt them in every unit sold by sheer cost. If it were well used in every game, that would be one thing, but as it was, it wasn't.
Click to expand...
Makes you wonder had the Wii U been a massive success would the next Home Console offering have been more PowerPC to maintain the Wii ecosystem?


PedroNavajas said:
I expect an even more baffling logic for 12GB: "Well, dev kits traditionally have more RAM than the system..."

This a traditionally Japanese company run by old conservative men after all. The same mind set as Kutaragi's "we don't want developers to max the system too early....".
Click to expand...
DigitalFoundry seems to indicate that the Switch Devkits have 6GB of RAM and the OLED Devkits have 8GB
Which would make sense since you dont want the debugging and analytics software to take up resources that the games require

If a Switch 2 has 12GB of RAM, I expect the Devkit to have 16 at minimum

Notsowise said:
I could actually see nintendo going 8gb of ram since apple stil uses that on macbookair ..... but 64gb of storage is so much non sense that is not true. They would be actually making it difficult to sell more games on eshop. That's actually working against more profits.
Click to expand...
Breath of the Wild took up the entirety of the Internal Storage on Day 1, So 64GB of Storage is definitely not a nonsense prediction, It is 100% inline with something Nintendo would do and then make you buy external storage (And also sell their own branded MicroSD cards like they did for the Switch)
 
Individualised said:
I don't know why people think that a 120hz screen is extremely unlikely. It was considered for INDY.
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If all Switch 2 units with screens are OLED, maybe they could do a bigger range around 60hz like steam deck does and support VRR. Honestly VRR is a big wishlist item for me. I'd much rather play a game at close to 60 with VRR than locked at 30 without it, but I'd prefer locked at 30 to jitter and tearing at near 60.

Shubshub said:
Makes you wonder had the Wii U been a massive success would the next Home Console offering have been more PowerPC to maintain the Wii ecosystem?
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Probably. Probably.

I'm trying to deal with this shift in worldview that the Wii U wasn't stuck on a fixed pipeline. @Dakhil - you've rocked my world.

I'm going to have to rethink a bunch of things.
 
Individualised said:
I don't know why people think that a 120hz screen is extremely unlikely. It was considered for INDY.
Click to expand...
1. If they're not doing an OLED screen to save costs, why would they do a 120 Hz screen which would drive costs up even more?

2. Nintendo generally strived for visual parity between the Switch modes except for resolution, and the adoption of 120 Hz TVs are generally quite a bit lower than 4K or HDR TVs.
 
Individualised said:
I don't know why people think that a 120hz screen is extremely unlikely. It was considered for INDY.
Click to expand...
For me it's for parity reasons. The majority of their target market have 4KHDR sets at this point, so having handheld mode be 1080pHDR tracks with that. However, 4K120hz/VRR compatible sets, while available, are bluntly quite uncommon. You'd end up in a situation where most users are getting a higher refresh rate in handheld mode, while part of the concept is that kind of parity and minimal difference between modes. I think they want to avoid that, on top of the added costs of implementing it in both screen and dock, the USB-C connector, internal circuitry, or even making software to make use of it.

Nintendo's software is another point here. I saw someone say Splatoon is an example of a game that would benefit from 120hz- and I thoroughly disagree. It only trades packets every four frames, increasing the refresh rate of connected displays wouldn't improve that, instead things only update every eight frames. You could increase the tick rate, but there's a reason they haven't done that, too, because it would affect stability, something the game already struggles with. Splatoon is a very complex game with the whole map being recorded and shared across players in real time. 120hz support would also mean that the person who can pay for the 4K120 display and the wired fibre and rolls the dice to be the game host has a pretty significant advantage. Keeping multiplayer titles at a fixed frame rate for everyone is just plain good for fairness, and when most people just can't do 4K120, it makes the whole argument for 120 in Splatoon or any multiplayer Nintendo game rather shaky.
 
oldpuck said:
I think what hurt the Wii U wasn't a gimmick, but the gimmick.

Wii had a gimmicky controller, but you saw it, and you got it. It launched with Zelda and Wii Sports, two games with radically different audiences, but with the same pitch - what you do with your hand is reflected on screen.

Wii U didn't make sense immediately in the same way. And the games it launched with reflected that - NSMBU and Nintendo Land don't share a vision of the hardware. The crowd that came to gaming through the Wii didn't know what to make of the Wii U and the crowd that Nintendo lost with the Wii were put off by it.
Click to expand...
Could Nintendo do a reverse Wii U with the Switch 2? Like a Wireless HDMI.
 
So when do you guys think we will start hearing reports about manufacturing or devkits (from reliable sources)? Like I feel like if we are really getting new hardware this year, we would be getting some good leaks by now but realistically we haven't gotten anything good in many months (opinion). So when do you guys expect some good leaks to start occurring?
 
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necrolipe said:
If I lose, I'll change my avatar to shiba-inu for 2 weeks
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How is that a bad thing? :)

WMXJCFJ3ERCETA6TJNZ5NQPNKA.webp


Edit: Whoa, you are betting on 16 GB too.. I thought 12 GB was a safe bet..
 
Goodness, a certain other thread has reminded me of something. Nintendo handhelds have generally targeted the previous home console for performance, probably most obvious with GBA LITERALLY being designed to emulate and virtualise SNES features. But it's more generally true.

GBC - NES
GBA - SNES
DS - N64
3DS - GCN
New 3DS - Wii
Nintendo Switch - Wii U
Next Generation Nintendo Switch - ?

This doesn't exactly hold fast, but it's true for the games on these systems too, SMBDX on GBC, LTTP on GBA, Super Mario 64 on DS, Luigi's Mansion on 3DS, Xenoblade Chronicals on NEW 3DS and Mario Kart 8 on Nintendo Switch.

What we have next is a Nintendo handheld that can't pull from the respective home console equivalent, that's forging its own path entirely.

This is part of why I think next gen patches will be a thing, and quite a big thing! No more Skyward Sword HD, drop a 4K patch for BOTW and run a reprint. The back catalogue it's leaning on will be... Switch, and everything else that's come before it.

I'd really like to see Nintendo's whole catalogue from Wii U back playable in some form on NG Switch by the end of its lifetime.

Wii, released in 2006, had N64 Virtual Console, a gap of 10 years, NG Nintendo Switch in 2024 will play the 10 year old Mario Kart 8 right out the gate.
 
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Codename_Steam said:
Could Nintendo do a reverse Wii U with the Switch 2? Like a Wireless HDMI.
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Not practically, not for a salable price, not in 2024.

Theoretically yes, the technology exists for low latency 4K60HDR transmission over WiFi 6E, but it's relegated to the HIGHEST end of technology, not the consumer handheld segment Switch falls into.
 
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