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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (New Staff Post, Please read)

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oldpuck said:
I can't find any specific examples, just because I don't feel like combing through every DF Direct, but my recollection is that this is slightly askew from history. I remember DF warning folks to not expect a 20-30 W device from Nintendo, the context being folks in their YouTube comments saying "8 TFLOPS like the ROG Ally or DOA". And I'm with them there.


How much it costs Nintendo, no. How much it costs to source replacements from the same manufacturers. Replacement LCDs at least used to be in the area of $40 USD, and OLED screens were $140.
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Especially since the ROG Ally is only 8 TFLOPS if you count the dual issue (which devs rarely use).
 
redmutineer75 said:
Is there any way to view all of these details on the minutiae of T239?
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There are so many summary posts, but I actually couldn't find one that lined up with this, probably because it's pretty in the weeds, even for this thread. Lemme throw one together for you. Going mostly by memory here (which is a little horrifying), so folks may need to correct me

CPU:
8x A78C cores in a single cluster.
L3 Cache: unknown, up to 8MB
Clock speeds: Unknown

GPU:
1 Ampere GPC, pretty much exactly the stock desktop RTX 30 design
  • 6 TPC/12 SM/1536 Cuda Cores
  • 48 Tensor cores
  • 12 RT cores
  • 48 Texture Mapping Units
  • 16 Raster Operation Units
  • Clock unknown
Memory Architecture:
LPDDR5*, 128-bits wide
2x64 bit modules
Max 102GB/s of bandwidth
1 MB of L2 Cache**

*possibly 5x, max 135 GB/s
** possible 4 MB

Note: T239 supports a power saving tech called FLCG. The nature of this tech is somewhat ambiguous, and may be a feature of the GPU or the memory controller

OFA:
Optical Flow Analyzer
Standard in Nvidia GPUs
Seems to match the same design as other Ampere cards

NVENC:
NVidia ENCoder, hardware accelerated video encoding
8th gen, as per Lovelace/Orin, instead of 7th gen as per Ampere
8th gen adds AV1 support

NVDEC:
NVidia DECoder, hardware accelerated video decoder
Version unknown, likely also supports AV1

APE:
Audio Processing Engine
Muxing/demuxing/multi-channel mixing/sampling/parametric equalizing
Has itty bitty teeny weeny low power ARM core for real time programmable audio effects
Hardware accelerated sound decoding for both lossless (LPCM) and lossy (AC3, DTS5.1, MPEG1, MPEG2, MP3, DD+, MPEG2/4 AAC,TrueHD, DTS-HD) formats

FDE:
File Decompression Engine
A totally new hardware block, exact feature set unknown

DisplayPort controller:
Two PCIe lanes, sufficient bandwidth for 4k HDR

USB Controller:
Up to 3 USB2/3 ports

UFS:
Some form of UFS controller, like UFS 4?
Nvidia has been slippery with the documentation on this for Orin, so it's hard to reverse engineer T239's support

eMMC:
On board eMMC controller, likely version 5
"Does this mean we get eMMC storage???" - no.
Switch uses eMMC as a sort of "bridge protocol" between the cartridge reader and the SOC.

PCIe lanes:
I believe there are 2 left unattached to anything?
One is likely for the BT/WiFi chip which will live outside the SOC
The other is probably for the Joy-Con rails

edit: posted too early
 
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SoldierDelta said:
I'm pretty sure that Panic Button are just made of developers who all have a background in porting Doom 1993 onto obscure devices because they're pretty damn good at porting games.

I feel like the modern feature sets of the Switch 2 (combined with more modern, stable hardware) will help a lot of Switch ports in the future. I wouldn't be all too shocked to see a game like Alan Wake 2, an extremely graphically-intensive game on PC, run just fine at 30fps on the device even with RT on. We'll have to see of course, but I'm fairly optimistic.
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You're not far away from that, but it's more than that actually. Panic Button are made up of a who's who of industry vets who worked with the likes of Acclaim, Midway, Retro, Vigil, etc (So think of all the games made from those devs). In essence, if it was a developer from the 80s and 90s from Austin, TX, chances are they're working for Panic Button, or did at some point (and by extension worked at Retro during the Prime Trilogy era).

A lot of those devs from that era are masters of their craft. I do recommend you checking out Kiwi Talkz on YouTube as he has interviewed a lot of the former Retro devs, and they go into details on the kinds of shit they pulled off. It's madness. The 3rd-person camera system in Metroid Prime? That was I believe ONE guy who created it, and before he passed, wrote the book on how to do 3D camera systems.
 
Shoulder said:
You're not far away from that, but it's more than that actually. Panic Button are made up of a who's who of industry vets who worked with the likes of Acclaim, Midway, Retro, Vigil, etc (So think of all the games made from those devs). In essence, if it was a developer from the 80s and 90s from Austin, TX, chances are they're working for Panic Button, or did at some point (and by extension worked at Retro during the Prime Trilogy era).

A lot of those devs from that era are masters of their craft. I do recommend you checking out Kiwi Talkz on YouTube as he has interviewed a lot of the former Retro devs, and they go into details on the kinds of shit they pulled off. It's madness. The 3rd-person camera system in Metroid Prime? That was I believe ONE guy who created it, and before he passed, wrote the book on how to do 3D camera systems.
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Mad stuff. I'll definitely check out that video, thanks for the recommendation.

I do want to see them work on more projects in future because they're really doing an excellent job. Wizards I tell ya'.
 
oldpuck said:
There are so many summary posts, but I actually couldn't find one that lined up with this, probably because it's pretty in the weeds, even for this thread. Lemme throw one together for you. Going mostly by memory here (which is a little horrifying), so folks may need to correct me

CPU:
8x A78C cores in a single cluster.
L2 Cache: unknown, up to 8MB
Clock speeds: Unknown

GPU:
1 Ampere GPC, pretty much exactly the stock desktop RTX 30 design
  • 6 TPC/12 SM/1536 Cuda Cores
  • 48 Tensor cores
  • 12 RT cores
  • 48 Texture Mapping Units
  • 16 Raster Operation Units
  • Clock unknown
Memory Architecture:
LPDDR5*, 128-bits wide
2x64 bit modules
Max 102GB/s of bandwidth
1 MB of L2 Cache**

*possibly 5x, max 135 GB/s
** possible 4 MB

Note: T239 supports a power saving tech called FLCG. The nature of this tech is somewhat ambiguous, and may be a feature of the GPU or the memory controller

OFA:

FDE:
File Decompression Engine
A totally new hardware block, exact feature set unknown
Click to expand...
Only the L3 cache can have up to 8 MB, not the L2 cache, for the Cortex-A78C.

And I think AV1 encode support via NVENC (here, here, and here) is another feature worth mentioning for T239.
 
Dakhil said:
Only the L3 cache can have up to 8 MB, not the L2 cache, for the Cortex-A78C.

And I think AV1 encode support via NVENC (here, here, and here) is another feature worth mentioning for T239.
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Oh god, yes! If we can save higher quality videos without taking up as much space I will be a happy camper. I love saving small memories but the quality sure isn't the best...
 
its crazy how for me from July when we got that first batch of news leaks from everyone to December time seemed to fly by but January has been excruciating slow and filled with bad fake rumors.

Please Nintendo put us out of misery come February because if they remain mum, the wait until May is going to be torture dealing with all these fake rumors for months and months on end.
 
1x6GB + 1x8GB = 14GB RAM on nuSwitch

System OS on the larger 8GB RAM card taking up 800MB or so, screencapture function on the faster 6GB RAM card to allow for 1080p/full minute.

If everyone else gets to concern troll about 8GB RAM for the new console, then I can be insane too!
 
NintenDuvo said:
its crazy how for me from July when we got that first batch of news leaks from everyone to December time seemed to fly by but January has been excruciating slow and filled with bad fake rumors.

Please Nintendo put us out of misery come February because if they remain mum, the wait until May is going to be torture dealing with all these fake rumors for months and months on end.
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I remain with hope that the misery could end this month.
 
Bored and daydreaming so I rewatched the DF clip simulating Switch 2 performance with the 2050 and compared with Death Stranding running on Steam Deck "docked".




So that's the RTX 2050 with 4 GB of VRAM at 750 Mhz running at 1440p DLSS performance, default settings
vs. Steam Deck, >4 GB of VRAM, GPU >~1 Ghz running at 1440p FSR quality, default settings but low shadows

Just a quick glance it looks like the "Switch 2" is getting more stable 30 FPS in the overworld traversal. But so many caveats. The Deck needs to do more GPU work because FSR Quality has a higher internal res, though I'm wondering if that's balanced out by the specs of the 2050. I wish they tested FSR Performance here. It's also hard to tell on a laptop screen how FSR Quality fares against DLSS Performance.

Still I like the results here. This anemic hardware simulation can still match / exceed the Steam Deck with the right configuration and running at lower clocks and memory. And that's without the benefits of console-specific optimization.
 
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NintenDuvo said:
its crazy how for me from July when we got that first batch of news leaks from everyone to December time seemed to fly by but January has been excruciating slow and filled with bad fake rumors.

Please Nintendo put us out of misery come February because if they remain mum, the wait until May is going to be torture dealing with all these fake rumors for months and months on end.
Click to expand...
January is always just an awful month in general, holidays are over and everything is slow.
 
Zedark said:
January is awesome. My birthday is in January.
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In my life, January has two important events in it, both at the very end of the month. The first is my mum's birthday for obvious reasons, but the second is that spells the end of January so more interesting months can happen.
 
Nintendo won't want the next system to cost 500€. Me and many others on this nice forum of ours would be more than willing (maybe even preferring) to pay that sum for a longer lasting platform. But I just don't see that happening. 400€ are likely, anything beyond would be very surprising to me.
 
Enton said:
Nintendo won't want the next system to cost 500€. Me and many others on this nice forum of ours would be more than willing (maybe even preferring) to pay that sum for a longer lasting platform. But I just don't see that happening. 400€ are likely, anything beyond would be very surprising to me.
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In a good way or a bad way?
 
Safe to say this video has aged well ya? Nothing significant has come up since.



I still point people to it who ask me for a light tech breakdown of Switch 2 since people hate reading and tend to watch videos more.
 
gnetc said:
January is always just an awful month in general, holidays are over and everything is slow.
Click to expand...
There's a reason Red Letter Media calls it "Fuck You, It's January!" Nothing good comes out this month since America and Europe already blew most of their disposable income during the Christmas season, and Asia doesn't spend its big bucks until February for the Lunar New Year.
 
redmutineer75 said:
There's a reason Red Letter Media calls it "Fuck You, It's January!" Nothing good comes out this month since most Americans and Europeans already blew most of their disposable incomes during the Christmas season, and Asians don't spend their big bucks until February for the Lunar New Year.
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Weird how I remember quite a few people a month ago or so saying that January is the big month for gaming news and that we should expect a lot of leaks this month. Why the split opinion?
 
MadMarvainy said:
Safe to say this video has aged well ya? Nothing significant has come up since.



I still point people to it who ask me for a light tech breakdown of Switch 2 since people hate reading and tend to watch videos more.
Click to expand...

Basically, except that the assumption in the video seems to be that the process node will be different from (worse than) 4N based on the estimated 768 MHz, and TFLOP estimates have grown a bit to 3+ TF since 2022 in my view.
 
FernandoRocker said:
What are you planning to do with your current Switch 1 once the Switch 2 gets released?

Are you keeping it for your collection, or are you selling it to make the Switch 2 more affordable?

Myself I'm selling it. I hope stores (GameStop in this case) has decent trade-in deals towards a Switch 2.
Click to expand...
I'll probably keep mine until my grandnephew is old enough to start playing it.
 
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Dakhil said:
I don't think multiple hardware SKUs can be completely ruled out.
Click to expand...
I am not entirely opposed to that; Switch 2 with Dock, Switch 2 without dock.

I would be shocked if they need new dock internals that aren't already found in the upgrades the OLED dock provides. Hell I'd be shocked if the nuSwitch isn't compatible with old docks at all.

V1 dock, Switch 2 outputs 1080p60 at most but games still get the boosted CPU/GPU power of the system.
OLED dock, 4K60 available once it receives that update dock option that's been unused (as far as I'm aware) since added to the Switch firmware in version 12.0.0 in April 2021
Switch 2 Dock...what could be added that OLED dock doesn't already have? It has HDMI 2.0, it won't have supplementary computational power, 4K120 is beyond its capabilities, adding extra USB slots for the sake of it can be solved with a dongle if OLED dock owners are pressed for ports, and the ethernet port gets some acceptable speeds when using a wired connection even if it is throttled.

Mostly, the concept of a dockless Switch 2 SKU could easily knock $50 off the price and reduce overall waste and weight

NateDrake said:
January was never going to be a month for big leaks. People simply wanted to will it into existence.
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You're goddamn right, and there's still 15 and a half days to make it happen! #TeamJanuary4lyfe
 
Darknut85 said:
In a good way or a bad way?
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Depends on they system. If e.g. 16 GB or > 128 GB internal memory are included at 450€, I'll be positively surprised that we won't immediately shift discussion on to 'NSW 2 Pro when???'.

If it's 500€ and nowhere to be found b/c too few units had been produced in time, I'll be surprised that Nintendo at least learned to get their own bag from the scalpers' market.
 
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Dakhil said:
If Nintendo wants to support VRR in TV mode and handheld mode, then Nintendo probably needs to support HDMI 2.1 for Nintendo"S new hardware's dock since HDMI 2.0 doesn't natively support VRR.
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...🙃

Goddammit Nintendo, couldn't have splurged for the HDMI 2.1 when you had the chance.

I mean, end of the day, I'm still fine with a dock and dockless SKU so long as I can still get 4K60 out of my OLED dock. Sure, my C1 does support VRR and it would be nice to have the feature given how much I nudged the idea for 40Hz months ago...but if I can save the $50 now and pick up a new dock down the line when I'm for real finally seeing the video benefits (and also not feeling the current economic pinch), I'd be okay to kick that can down the road. At least like others have mentioned, it doesn't appear that VRR is fully saturating the HDTV market just yet. At least this way Nintendo making an educated guess about when it'll pick up steam means they won't be caught with their pants around their ankles like Wii was when HDTVs were adopted faster than expected.
 
This has certainly been a boring month so far. Hoping we get something exciting to talk about soon. I would have to imagine manufacturing would be beginning soon if Nintendo was targeting a release this year (let's say rumored September target) so hopefully the floodgates will finally blow open relatively soon.
 
Dakhil said:
If Nintendo wants to support VRR in TV mode and handheld mode, then Nintendo probably needs to support HDMI 2.1 for Nintendo's new hardware's dock since HDMI 2.0 doesn't natively support VRR.
Click to expand...

I have a dumb question: Why is VRR such a big deal for some? Even factoring in that VRR can reduce stutters, and/or screen tearing since it's adjusting the display's refresh rate on the fly (Like FreeSync, or GSync on PC), is it considered a better solution than just locking a frame rate? I know depending on the buffering solution, latency could be an issue with regards to controller input (V-Sync I believe is notorious for adding additional latency to a player's input), so is VRR meant to counter that?

And I suppose also, in the PC spectrum, why would you let your PC always run at max frames all the time? For me personally, if I can run a game at let's say a rock solid 60fps, but could vary up to 100fps, I guess I'd rather limit the frames possible (through something like RivaTunerStatistics through MSI Afterburner), and save on the resources so my computer isn't running at 100% max power all the time.

I guess my main question is: Is VRR the be all end all solution, or is it overhyped? What are the disadvantages of using it as well as the advantages?
 
I would love a premium SKU at launch. Something about the Switch had me treating it like I do my phone - it’s a more personal feeling device, and I covet the idea of better finishes, a better screen, etc.

I think there’s appetite for it among fans, but I don’t know if Nintendo will bother at launch.
 
NateDrake said:
January was never going to be a month for big leaks. People simply wanted to will it into existence.
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Can I be that guy and ask if you've narrowed down the next podcast date? I know there probably won't be much if any info in it bc it's January, but y'all tempted me with leaks and now it's just interesting to listen to you and MVG talk about whatever.
 
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