I am a relative latecomer here to this discussion (I joined around the time of Gamescom leak), was wondering if power budget was something that might have been discovered in nvidia leak, or
You don't know it but you stepped on a landmine
There is basically
one reference to power draw in the leak, and it is
highly contentious what it means. Enough of this info has been shared outside of the thread, or at least outside of hide tags that I'm gonna give a brief, public summary.
"
Donut" is a test renderer used by Nvidia. It's basically as simple a piece of code as you could possibly imagine while still basically being a "modern" graphics renderer. It has a lot of interesting uses, but primarily it's for testing. New rendering technology? You could spend a month building an Unreal integration, or you could spend a day building a Donut integration. Unsurprisingly, most of DLSS's internal tests are built on Donut - both functional tests and performance tests.
Inside the NVN2 code there is a script that looks (to me, at least) like a solo developers personal testing tool that wraps the performance tests. It looks like there were a number of settings combinations they want to hit again and again. These combinations are labeled, and the label specifies wattages.
Personal opinion: these wattages have so little context that any conclusion you make from them is unfounded. There are those who have made the leap that these wattages represent T239 power targets, and that the clock speeds represent what they'll be in the various modes. I think that explanation is possible, but not likely. I do not have an alternative explanation that I think is more likely, because like I said there is so little context, I don't think you can make a founded opinion on it
at all.
if we have been working with assumption that they want to equal Switch v2's battery life or better all this time.
Back at the time of the GamesCom leaks, there were rumors flying everywhere. Because I had been following this stuff for a while, a couple of folks who went to GamesCom reached out to me to say "Look, this is what we heard at GamesCom, how much does this match up with the Linux/NVN2 leaks? Does this stuff track?"
I want to emphasize these are all
secondary sources, folks who were telling me what they had heard from the rumor mill at the GamesCom floor, either from folks who had seen the presentation, or more likely, folks who knew folks. Or "game of telephone where someone heard speculation and thought it was inside info, and it spread." Or possibly "pure bullshit made up by junior gamedevs for fake cred." I'm
continuing to highlight this because I have no desire to play insider, I'm only repeating it because this is all info I've said before.
I heard some stuff that one person would say, but that no other people would say, that's the stuff that's most likely bullshit. The things I heard from multiple people were - Nintendo was giving Switch 2 presentations, there was a demo, it was Zelda related, and the target was 3-6 hours of battery life.
I wouldn't put a
huge amount of stock into that 3-6 hour number, not (just) because I doubt the source, but because battery life ranges are a little misleading on a system where
Bayonetta and
Dr Kawashima's Brain Training are both million selling first party published titles. And where cross-gen and backwards compatible games will make a decent chunk of the launch library.
