But some of these aren't predictions. Nintendo cannot turn back time and slice off half of T239. And to what end? It's already an affordable SOC on a mass market node.
Well, it's not like Orin is a chip designed for phones, it's meant for cars and robots. Still, the smartphone market definitely made ARM much more viable as an architecture for a game system.
And you just want that to continue that? For $10 more, this cycle doesn't need to continue. I'm not even saying put Panic Button or the other studios out of business for $10, they'll still get plenty of work as support studios doing the same thing. It just won't be nearly as hard, time consuming, or expensive to port games if Nintendo goes with more than 8gigs for ram. More games will be ported by more studios because it will be cheaper on a more powerful Switch 2.
Your other comment here confuses me as well. This worked fine and well for the Switch, there's a ton of games, but we can still have these types of games and get the other 3rd party multiplatform games? Monster Hunter World couldn't be ported to Switch so Capcom made Rise. Why not just make the Switch 2 capable enough in the first place to make a game like Monster Hunter World possible?
It's not just the chips though. The manufacturing process, batteries, die shrinks, all that is thanks to phones.
Yes, the 40FPS is I think the biggest reason for a 120 Hz screen. 40 FPS on 120 Hz looks much better as on a 60 Hz, because it is a multiple of 120, but not 60. So very graphic heavy games could target rather 40 FPS as 60.
RE5 is a native port on Switch
i think for nintendo, if they continue with the minimum specs approach but also have some alternatives in helping expanding the library (whether it's 3rd party studio outsource or cloud liveservice approach), it's a much easier & cheaper approach for them since again they're not in the same path as xbox or sony or anyone else
We've long had a pretty good idea what the hardware is. At this point the main determinant in system power is how fast/cool they're able to make it run. But they're well past "Let's cut something to make it less capable and save $10". Absolutely estimating up to 4 teraflops docked is on the optimistic edge, but either they're able to run it that fast or not.
I still think things could go either way.
zippospeaks.blogspot.com
You really think saving $10 on RAM is more important than getting games like the next Elden Ring, GTA VI, etc on the device?
For what its worth the only reason the Switch has 4GB of RAM is because Nintendo explicitly asked Developers (Notably Capcom regarding Resident Evil) otherwise it would've shipped with 3GB
Don't worry about it, the cloud will save gaming on a portable handheld hybrid device! Its not that hard to understand...
If we're going by the way Nintendo operates, they delivered a mobile console ~10 years after the Xbox 360 and PS3 that surpassed both those consoles in handheld mode, with a downclocked off-the-shelf Tegra chip.
I don't think that the creation of the Switch is a 1:1 comparison to the Switch 2. There weren't a lot of developers wanting a piece of the Wii U pie (there was no pie, just an empty dish) and a lot wrote off Nintendo before the Switch came out. I'm sure Nintendo has talked to a lot more developers who have seen the Switch become the biggest console on the market and realize if they want in. Nintendo doesn't even need to go to a developer to know how much RAM the system needs, there's been article after article written about how developers think the Series S needs more RAM. MS even had to respond to the wants of said devs and update their OS to free up more space for games.
T239 is a new Tegra supposedly derived from T234 Orin with changes for Nintendo's use case. The NVIDIA stolen data from a few years ago gave a pretty good idea of the specs of it they were building around, and other data narrowing down things like CPU information has trickled out from various places since. I don't know if this is absolutely the best article on the subject, but here's a top Google result from one of the Digital Foundry guys.
I'm sure that Nintendo was going to go with 4GB, not 3GB.
Yeah, it's... Absolutely ridiculous. An iterstion on a device IS a new generation - see GBA, SNES, GCN and 3DS.
As far as I know there is no available information on how much RAM it would have originally shipped with. Leaked info shows they had planned 4 GB as far back as 2015.
I believe the basic parts of this “Leak” as it’s very safe and expected from what we know about the hardware and what it can do. Yeah the next big Mario game is probably coming this year, yeah it probably will have DK in a major role due to the movie, it’s probably going to be a technical and visual showcase for the hardware because every major flagship Mario other than 3D World was. And yeah it’s probably going to be one of the best looking Switch 2 games this year like Odyssey was in 2017.The Next 3D Mario Is Ready To Go.
2024 is here, and after an insanely long six years of waiting, I'm now hearing that the next 3D Mario, set to launch with Nintendo's brand...
The reputation of this guy has been discussed ad nauseam, but does he not go too far that this is kind of it if he lies or gets it wrong? Like no one would believe him anymore if he blows this one.
I want to believe though !
Obviously absurd for a console, I wonder what a device with 0 RAM (and 0 storage) looks like, storing and working with only its internal registers and cache. If I'm not mistaken, the Headstart Explorer stored GUI settings in internal registers. Now I wonder if there's ever been a chip with RAM and CPU not merely mounted on the same substrate, but made from the same sheet of silicon...As far as I know there is no available information on how much RAM it would have originally shipped with. Leaked info shows they had planned 4 GB as far back as 2015.
So it ended up being the same amount as devkits. Thank goodness they didn't go with 16 GB for the storage.
Note that the number is bolded so it may have been changed from some smaller number. Maybe 3, maybe 2. Maybe 0.
With the added advantage of hardware raytracing and DLSS.
That wouldn't be a bad assumption, though if the upper end of tflops suggested is actually inline with the Series S too. Not quite the One X's 6 flops but the newer hardware and technology helps close the gap.
That's not about how Nintendo operates. That's about the hype cycle and how you handle your own feelings. Nothing wrong with that, but good to be honest about it.
TL;DR: I'd take the RAM. Which I was going to say when you asked, but then I had to check a bunch of benchmarks to be sure, because I Have A Problem(tm).
audience can't fathom how much mobile technology has advanced since the Switch was being developed (2015~). The smartphone market absolutely exploded (even more) since, and led to a huge amount of R&D cash influx, resulting in stuff like fully-fledged power hungry console games being ported to a small, pocket-sized device without active cooling, like RE4Remake - though some were dissapointed by performance woes in that case, but I guess that just goes to show how crazy high our expectations are nowadays.
They really like her videos
I destroyed the rubber on the Circle Pad playing the demo.
Could something like eDRAM be used for Handheld devices like the Switch?TL;DR: I'd take the RAM. Which I was going to say when you asked, but then I had to check a bunch of benchmarks to be sure, because I Have A Problem(tm).
This is another place where Steam Deck changed my mind. The OLED I bought has a nice bandwidth bump, and yes, it does improve performance, and it doesn't matter. It smooths out dropped frames in some games, in some places, but it doesn't make them go away. And it doesn't give a high enough performance bump for you to up the frame cap or increase visual quality.
The extra RAM means you that regardless of the frame rate, or even the resolution you're looking at highest quality textures. That's a definite win. But AMD and Nvidia are obviously different architectures, which is why I had to check benchmarks.
The 3070 is one of the more bandwidth starved cards in the RTX 30 line up. The 3070 Ti has only 6% more compute power, but it's got a whopping 35% more memory bandwidth, putting it on the high end for bandwidth. Digital Foundry has a bunch of benchmarks for these cards, and... it's 6% faster. Slightly higher on 4k games, but lower on 1080p games. Same on the RT benchmarks.
The 3080 has a 12GB version that is much the same. Only 3% different in TFLOPS, but a 20% increase in memory bandwidth... and a 6% improvements in actual games, disappearing quickly as you drop to 1080p.
I'm sure that software developers optimizing for the hardware could do amazing things with the extra bandwidth. But it doesn't look like existing engines are really hitting bandwidth limits on Ampere hardware, so staying in line with the rest of the RTX 30 series seems like 3rd parties will be in great shape. And as for first party stuff, Nintendo has the most bandwidth optimized engine on the market. What they're doing with Tears of the Kingdom and 25GB/s of bandwidth is insane.
Side Note: Since I have all these benchmarks and specs in a spreadsheet (I SAID I HAVE A PROBLEM AND THE FIRST STEP IS RECOGNIZING IT) I decided to look at the less sexy parts of the architecture. ROPS, TMUS, and the L2 cache. All of these systems interact in various ways to create the final efficiency of the system.
There are folks hoping for 4 MB of L2 cache, and not the 1 MB (as the leak is ambiguous). If you look at cache as a proportion of the memory bandwidth available, 1 MB is already more than any desktop card. 4 MB would be beyond generous, and likely pretty expensive. 1MB is already luxurious.
Texture mapping units are part of the SM design, so the ratio there always matches. Sufficient or insufficient, there is no way to tell, because it's locked into the Ampere/Lovelace design.
ROPs are a little different. They're by GPC, so sometimes you get extra ROPS relative to SMs after binning. With just one GPC, that isn't happening on T239, but it also doesn't seem to matter, Performance doesn't seem to track with ROPS in a way that indicates it would be a problem.
If Nintendo wants to save money, RAM would be the last thing they cut down. 16gb ram vs 8gb ram rn is literally a $10 difference, there's so much more they could cut down on like the 1080p screen. Plus, we have people here like Nate and Necro who say that's just not the case.
For the record, I don't think we are getting 8gb of RAM. I am on #Team12GB. What I have in my mind though and where expectations should be set. To me, Switch 2 will be something like a steam deck (with some graphical enhancements in certain areas due to nVidia vs. AMD), but with some things "stripped away" until Nintendo hits that massive $400-$450 profitable number. I just don't want people to be upset when this thing drops and isn't as capable as a Steam deck in most scenarios for games that can run on both.
imo if they can’t handily outperform a Steam Deck with a couple years of lead time, low level API, and insane economies of scale, something is very very wrong.
Actually this is him
Lobotomy Kaisen? In my hardware speculation thread?More like
iykyk
To be clear, it never "would have originally shipped with" any amount other than 4 GB. That PowerPoint slide is from 3 months after they signed a contract with Nvidia to develop the Switch hardware. They had produced one hardware prototype breadboard by that point, and it already had 4 GB. There was never any version of the Switch with any other amount of RAM.
