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

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Nintendojitsu said:
I wonder if Scarlet/Violet's rushed release played a part in their departures.
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I don’t think so.

alfiehicks said:
I can't be the only one who feels like the new system has already overshadowed TotK by virtue of it being such a big unknown.
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Although I understand your point, I don’t think that’s happening.

D36 said:
Eh, I don't think they'll be swayed that easily. Now if this were the Wii U era, maybe, but I'm inclined to believe they'll be steadfast about how they handle their news.
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Word. We only know of this new version of the Switch because of the Nvidia leak. If that had never happened, we would have been worse, hahaa. Or at least start the hype after noticing Nintendo’s dry 2H lineup
 
I wonder what this year would have been like if TotK released last year as intended. I can't even really imagine.

The best I can hope for is that Nintendo planned to have revealed the new system by now, or that they're keeping us in the dark about a few shadow-drop games that'll come after TotK. I certainly think there's a big chance that they forced their own hand into having a shorter reveal-to-release cycle because of TotK's delay.
 
alfiehicks said:
I wonder what this year would have been like if TotK released last year as intended. I can't even really imagine.

The best I can hope for is that Nintendo planned to have revealed the new system by now, or that they're keeping us in the dark about a few shadow-drop games that'll come after TotK. I certainly think there's a big chance that they forced their own hand into having a shorter reveal-to-release cycle because of TotK's delay.
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In that case, we would have announced [REDACTED] in February or March.
Instead of TotK, Splatoon 3 could have been released in 2023.
 
majimazio said:
In that case, we would have announced [REDACTED] in February or March.
Instead of TotK, Splatoon 3 could have been released in 2023.
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I doubt it. Releasing an online-focused game for a system that is already confirmed to have a successor on the way does not sound like a good idea. The only way they would do that is if they also announced that there will be backwards compatibility at the same time as announcing the console itself. Even that would still be a bad idea, though, because then it wouldn't be clear if it was a true successor, or just an upgraded model.

When [REDACTED] is revealed, I fully expect them to not show BC at first. That way, people would immediately understand that it is a full successor, even if it still has 'Switch' in the name. Then, closer to the release, they could also make a big deal about it being able to run Switch games as well, but that should only be done after the system is established and known, and people have had a chance to get an idea of what it is.
 
alfiehicks said:
I wonder what this year would have been like if TotK released last year as intended. I can't even really imagine.

The best I can hope for is that Nintendo planned to have revealed the new system by now, or that they're keeping us in the dark about a few shadow-drop games that'll come after TotK. I certainly think there's a big chance that they forced their own hand into having a shorter reveal-to-release cycle because of TotK's delay.
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Metroid Prime R would have headlined as the April/May game is my bet. Or perhaps Pikmin 4 would have.
 
Zedark said:
Metroid Prime R would have headlined as the April/May game is my bet. Or perhaps Pikmin 4 would have.
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Yeah, I forgot that Prime Remastered was essentially a wildcard, since it was supposedly ready and waiting for years. The fact that they released it before the physical copies were ready does suggest that there was some sort of last minute change of plan.

I wonder why they chose to delay TotK to be so close to their investor meeting. Are they planning on saying yes if asked about new hardware, but then hoping that TotK will make everyone forget about it? Or are they going to go full steam ahead with the new system as soon as TotK is out?

Ugh, my kingdom for a leak, I swear 😓
 
Just my gut feeling, but i have that image in my mind about Nintendo's Ninja-Lawyers trying their best to keep anything new from leaking until Zelda is out for some time.
 
Bonejack said:
Just my gut feeling, but i have that image in my mind about Nintendo's Ninja-Lawyers trying their best to keep anything new from leaking until Zelda is out for some time.
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Maybe datamining TotK will yield results. If it uses some kind of temporal or spatial upscaling technique, then there might be a check to replace that with DLSS when running on [REDACTED]? The wishful-est of wishful thinking, I know, but it could happen.
 
alfiehicks said:
Maybe datamining TotK will yield results. If it uses some kind of temporal or spatial upscaling technique, then there might be a check to replace that with DLSS when running on [REDACTED]? The wishful-est of wishful thinking, I know, but it could happen.
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Gameplay footage has the same aliased look as BotW so I think we can rule out any fancy upscaling technique.
 
alfiehicks said:
Upscaling and anti-aliasing are not the same thing. TAAU and DLSS both upscale and anti-alias, but most upscaling techniques do nothing to alleviate aliasing.
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that's why I said 'fancy upscaling'.
BotW already uses upscaling, you can't do variable resolution without some kind of upscaling. There's no indication that TotK will be any different.
 
Stinky Horse said:
that's why I said 'fancy upscaling'.
BotW already uses upscaling, you can't do variable resolution without some kind of upscaling. There's no indication that TotK will be any different.
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Well in that case I didn't imply 'fancy upscaling'. Nevertheless, there's still a difference between basic-ass bilinear filtering and something like FSR, which has already been used in Switch games like Switch Sports and Sonic Frontiers.
 
alfiehicks said:
Well in that case I didn't imply 'fancy upscaling'. Nevertheless, there's still a difference between basic-ass bilinear filtering and something like FSR, which has already been used in Switch games like Switch Sports and Sonic Frontiers.
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I don't believe Switch Sports uses FSR, but my goodness the anti-aliasing is actually reallly good in that game, it looks SO clean.
 
Concernt said:
I don't believe Switch Sports uses FSR, but my goodness the anti-aliasing is actually reallly good in that game, it looks SO clean.
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Well, I haven't played the game because it looks like it follows the trend of modern Mario Sports games, and overall I prefer the more fantastical activities in Resort moreso than sports.

Point is, I don't know if it ended up using FSR or not, since I'd need to see for myself, but FSR was listed in the licenses, so there is evidence that Nintendo have at least experimented with using FSR in their games.
 
ILikeFeet said:
It shows in the copyright but we haven't seen it in motion
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It doesn't matter if Switch Sports actually uses it or not: the precedent is still set for Nintendo to use FSR.

The recent gameplay footage for TotK is too abhorrently crusty to actually tell if it's using FSR, so we'll just have to wait and see. But if it does, and if [REDACTED] is backwards compatible, and uses DLSS, then they'd likely need to disable the FSR pass so that DLSS could look better.

Yikes, talk about tangentially related 😬
 
alfiehicks said:
It doesn't matter if Switch Sports actually uses it or not: the precedent is still set for Nintendo to use FSR.

The recent gameplay footage for TotK is too abhorrently crusty to actually tell if it's using FSR, so we'll just have to wait and see. But if it does, and if [REDACTED] is backwards compatible, and uses DLSS, then they'd likely need to disable the FSR pass so that DLSS could look better.

Yikes, talk about tangentially related 😬
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TotK is definitely not using FSR. as you said it's crusty as hell, which is proof that FSR ain't being used
 
I wonder if any Switch games have ever used Nvidia Image Scale, which is Nvidia's alternative to FSR. Given how involved Nvidia is with the Switch's design, this seems very likely, but I don't recall reading anything about it since 2017.
 
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oldpuck said:
Oh yeah I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I just don’t think it’s a slam dunk launch title. And thus we can’t infer hardware launch timing from its placement



One of the reasons RT gets a bad wrap is because people look at games that have been updated for RT, see marginal improvements, then wonder why they're paying so much performance for it. It's hard to overstate how much you can do with an RT native lighting solution that you can't do by bolting RT on top of baked lighting.

Similarly, DLSS works best when the underlying assets are scaled for the output resolution, and Tears still has plenty of assets from the Wii U days that would need to be rebuilt or upscaled.

The Zelda team has put in a huge amount of work, but the additional power of the Switch seems to be used making traversal possible - Link falls over a chunk of the map that speedrunners have shown would make the BotW engine crawl. The low-res shadow maps, and the assets of the Ground World remain the same.

Simply building a 4k, RT game from scratch and scaling it down for cross-gen would provide. But more importantly - Tears looks like Breath of the Wild. A REDACTED native Mario game would have the sheer visual advantage of looking new. Even if technically it is no more impressive than an uprezzed Tears, the danger with making an uprezzed title your flagship of a system whose unique selling point is "the same system, but better" you risk telling a story of "this new hardware isn't really transformative".

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of Series S/X exclusives that we could look to by way of comparison to see what a 4TF RT Zelda might look like. But compare RT Zelda demos with, say the Everwild showcase. Zelda looks... awful, in my opinion, but put that aside, I just don't think there is a huge win there. It looks like Zelda. There is no way it would run on Switch, for obvious reasons, but it doesn't look like a leap to me, and I think it would look even less so to the average consumer.

But Everwild, just because it looks new says "This game couldn't run on the previous hardware" which, true or not, I think sells the system better.
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Yeah, those "8K RTX HDR Breath of the Wild! WOW!" YouTube videos look terrible, and I think they're actually a pretty good illustration of why taking a game like BoTW and trying to shoe-horn on more advanced lighting techniques doesn't work. Obviously Nintendo would do a better job than a random YouTube user, but the game simply wasn't designed for those kind of lighting techniques. A large part of the reason the game looks as good as it does, aside from strong art direction, is that everything was implemented with the lighting model in mind, from the creation of assets to the placement of light sources to the baked lighting, etc., etc. This has historically been one of Nintendo's strengths, and it's why games like Mario Galaxy hold up so well, and I have no doubt BoTW and ToTK will similarly hold up well in the future.

But holding up well doesn't mean looking as good as more recent games. Mario Galaxy holds up well, but Mario 3D World is obviously a generational leap, and Odyssey looks better again. Breath of the Wild's lighting system was chosen probably around 2012, based on what would work well on Wii U's GPU (which was based on a 2008 GPU architecture). The game was then built to look as good as it could within that lighting system. Tears of the Kingdom, being a direct sequel to BoTW, reuses the same lighting system for visual consistency. I haven't been watching the trailers, but I'm sure ToTK will also look very good within that lighting system.

I have no doubt ToTK at a higher resolution would hold up well on [redacted], just as Mario Galaxy at a higher resolution would have held up well on Wii U, but exclusive launch titles for [redacted] will have lighting technologies chosen in probably 2020 or 2021, based on what will work well on T239's GPU (using a 2020 GPU architecture), and then have a game built around those technologies. When people say that an exclusive 3D Mario wouldn't be a better showcase for the hardware than ToTK, I think they're vastly underestimating the architectural, algorithmic and raw performance improvements we've seen in lighting technology in the last decade.
 
Thraktor said:
I have no doubt ToTK at a higher resolution would hold up well on [redacted], just as Mario Galaxy at a higher resolution would have held up well on Wii U, but exclusive launch titles for [redacted] will have lighting technologies chosen in probably 2020 or 2021, based on what will work well on T239's GPU (using a 2020 GPU architecture), and then have a game built around those technologies. When people say that an exclusive 3D Mario wouldn't be a better showcase for the hardware than ToTK, I think they're vastly underestimating the architectural, algorithmic and raw performance improvements we've seen in lighting technology in the last decade.
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Indeed.

I imagine Metroid Prime 4 could be a showcase for lighting as well.
 
Thraktor said:
Yeah, those "8K RTX HDR Breath of the Wild! WOW!" YouTube videos look terrible, and I think they're actually a pretty good illustration of why taking a game like BoTW and trying to shoe-horn on more advanced lighting techniques doesn't work. Obviously Nintendo would do a better job than a random YouTube user, but the game simply wasn't designed for those kind of lighting techniques. A large part of the reason the game looks as good as it does, aside from strong art direction, is that everything was implemented with the lighting model in mind, from the creation of assets to the placement of light sources to the baked lighting, etc., etc. This has historically been one of Nintendo's strengths, and it's why games like Mario Galaxy hold up so well, and I have no doubt BoTW and ToTK will similarly hold up well in the future.

But holding up well doesn't mean looking as good as more recent games. Mario Galaxy holds up well, but Mario 3D World is obviously a generational leap, and Odyssey looks better again. Breath of the Wild's lighting system was chosen probably around 2012, based on what would work well on Wii U's GPU (which was based on a 2008 GPU architecture). The game was then built to look as good as it could within that lighting system. Tears of the Kingdom, being a direct sequel to BoTW, reuses the same lighting system for visual consistency. I haven't been watching the trailers, but I'm sure ToTK will also look very good within that lighting system.

I have no doubt ToTK at a higher resolution would hold up well on [redacted], just as Mario Galaxy at a higher resolution would have held up well on Wii U, but exclusive launch titles for [redacted] will have lighting technologies chosen in probably 2020 or 2021, based on what will work well on T239's GPU (using a 2020 GPU architecture), and then have a game built around those technologies. When people say that an exclusive 3D Mario wouldn't be a better showcase for the hardware than ToTK, I think they're vastly underestimating the architectural, algorithmic and raw performance improvements we've seen in lighting technology in the last decade.
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Good points all around. Generally, you need to build the look of the game around everything in it. The textures, lighting, landscape, art design, artstyle, and potentially visual effects. Changing the resolution doesn't effect that. It's only really an egregious change if, say, the game used the crunchier pixels to hide imperfections (such as Xenoblade 1 on the Wii). Framerates are also like that, all it does is make the game smoother and more appealing (actually can use Xenoblade 1 on Dolphin as an example of that. Game is smooth as hell with that mod, however cutscenes remain 30fps because... reasons). Changing the lighting does, and that's why those RTX BotW videos can suck my left nut.

You can separate game graphics into two things. Internal (those being within the game itself and little to do with the tech) and external (resolution and framerates). The former is more important, as shown with most good modern Nintendo games... and hell even retro ones.

Also, and this is an opinion thing so... idk feel free to disagree somewhere that isn't here, but I don't think the Switch 2 needs RTX. Like... cool beans if you do add it for select games, but it's far from a requirement. Literally having any game from the current 9th generation (that being literally any modern AAA game) run on the Switch 2 would be a good enough selling point.
 
ILikeFeet said:
TotK is definitely not using FSR. as you said it's crusty as hell, which is proof that FSR ain't being used
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😑

I meant that the compression is so awful that it makes it impossible to tell. FSR 1.0 isn't a magic bullet, it just adds a subtle level of percieved clarity in a way that would not be apparent in such compressed footage.
 
alfiehicks said:
😑

I meant that the compression is so awful that it makes it impossible to tell. FSR 1.0 isn't a magic bullet, it just adds a subtle level of percieved clarity in a way that would not be apparent in such compressed footage.
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Fsr1 is trash, and that would be noticeable because it'd make TotK look worse than it does now through compression. It's not recommended unless you're on the dire end for a reason
 
ILikeFeet said:
Fsr1 is trash, and that would be noticeable because it'd make TotK look worse than it does now through compression. It's not recommended unless you're on the dire end for a reason
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No, it looks better than bilinear scaling when used appropriately. Calling technology "trash" because it looks bad in some situations is stupid.
 
ILikeFeet said:
Fsr1 is trash, and that would be noticeable because it'd make TotK look worse than it does now through compression. It's not recommended unless you're on the dire end for a reason
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To aid in my argument, here's some comparisons. I ran Link's Awakening at 810p, upscaled to 1080p using bilinear filtering, versus FSR 1.0.

Bilinear:
ttVrFqW.jpg


FSR:
J8snW0r.jpg



Close-ups:
lLoIuj0.png


nS9L47N.png
 
Machrider said:
That's interesting. The FSR definitely looks better, definitely looks like a resolution jump.
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Exactly. I'd say it almost looks as good as native 1080p, which is impressive considering it's closer to 720p.

Even if TotK is still only rendering at 900p, same as BotW, then it would probably look even closer to 1080p. At the very least, FSR could help it look better than BotW even if there's no resolution bump.
 
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Thraktor said:
Mario Galaxy holds up well, but Mario 3D World is obviously a generational leap, and Odyssey looks better again. B
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Nintendo was absolutely brilliant with their art decisions in Mario Galaxy. When I played Mario Galaxy on Switch I was floored how well it holds up. There were times when I found it to be more aesthetically pleasing than Mario Odyssey. Its easy to dive in to the game technically and see that Odyssey is doing far more technically than Galaxy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Galaxy really does look great and the bump to 1080p resolution really helped the art shine. Nintendo typically does a good job of not letting their ambition get away from them overstepping what their hardware can actually do. Zelda BotW was close to doing this since it had more framerate dips than is normal for a Zelda game, but most of the time Nintendo is technically sound.

alfiehicks said:
Maybe datamining TotK will yield results. If it uses some kind of temporal or spatial upscaling technique, then there might be a check to replace that with DLSS when running on [REDACTED]? The wishful-est of wishful thinking, I know, but it could happen.
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I'm not sure TotK will even need DLSS to get to 4K. If Drake ends up going a 3+ Tflop SOC, that is probably adequate to render TotK natively at 4K. I'm still waiting to see if TotK uses the image reconstruction technique implemented in XBC3. XBC3 looked clean but very soft because actual rendering resolution was only 540p and then reconstructed to 1080p. If TotK could render internally at 720p and then reconstruct to 1080p, this would result in a clean image with less blurriness compared to XBC3.
 
Goodtwin said:
Nintendo was absolutely brilliant with their art decisions in Mario Galaxy. When I played Mario Galaxy on Switch I was floored how well it holds up. There were times when I found it to be more aesthetically pleasing than Mario Odyssey. Its easy to dive in to the game technically and see that Odyssey is doing far more technically than Galaxy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Galaxy really does look great and the bump to 1080p resolution really helped the art shine. Nintendo typically does a good job of not letting their ambition get away from them overstepping what their hardware can actually do. Zelda BotW was close to doing this since it had more framerate dips than is normal for a Zelda game, but most of the time Nintendo is technically sound.



I'm not sure TotK will even need DLSS to get to 4K. If Drake ends up going a 3+ Tflop SOC, that is probably adequate to render TotK natively at 4K. I'm still waiting to see if TotK uses the image reconstruction technique implemented in XBC3. XBC3 looked clean but very soft because actual rendering resolution was only 540p and then reconstructed to 1080p. If TotK could render internally at 720p and then reconstruct to 1080p, this would result in a clean image with less blurriness compared to XBC3.
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Of course. The only reason any of this is being discussed is because of the minute possibility that datamining TotK would reveal some kind of check to disable image reconstruction / upscaling when running on the new hardware.

It could easily be using the Xenoblade technique, especially given Monolith's involvement with development. Forgive me, though, I've never even seen a single screenshot of XC3 because it 's just not on my radar whatsoever, so I don't know what the reconstruction tech looks like in action.

I'd also hope that [REDACTED] is capable of running BotW at 4K without DLSS, but that depends on if it's running natively or not. I'd still be perfectly happy with DLSS 4K, though.
 
And here's the same thing with Breath of the Wild. The results here aren't quite as transformative, unfortunately. I think BotW's smoother, more painterly artstyle might not play as nicely with FSR. Regardless, here's the comparison:

Bilinear:
sReb7sO.jpg


FSR:
9wiu1vB.jpg



Close-ups:
PNmHgfd.png

46U6Yft.png
 
@alfiehicks How does FSR hold up under motion. It's being a spatial, rather than (spatio-)temporal method makes temporal artifacts one of its worries (same is true for bilinear, of course). My question would be how it holds up compared to the native 810p (or whichever resolution) image under motion.
 
Zedark said:
@alfiehicks How does FSR hold up under motion. It's being a spatial, rather than (spatio-)temporal method makes temporal artifacts one of its worries (same is true for bilinear, of course). My question would be how it holds up compared to the native 810p (or whichever resolution) image under motion.
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Well, I don't have a way to capture video, but I can tell you that there's no noticeable temporal artefacts. In motion, it looks just as much better compared to default bilinear as it does in these stills.
 
Erika said:
This means nothing.
For marketing purpose, nobody at NoA will add the word ‘legacy’ in such a tweet.
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Except they always have and always must. 😃

Nintendo has always been open and forward about FIFA games being Legacy Editions on their console, they've never hid that fact.
 
alfiehicks said:
And here's the same thing with Breath of the Wild. The results here aren't quite as transformative, unfortunately. I think BotW's smoother, more painterly artstyle might not play as nicely with FSR. Regardless, here's the comparison
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Zedark said:
@alfiehicks How does FSR hold up under motion. It's being a spatial, rather than (spatio-)temporal method makes temporal artifacts one of its worries (same is true for bilinear, of course). My question would be how it holds up compared to the native 810p (or whichever resolution) image under motion.
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FSR 1.0 (and I'm emphasizing the 1.0 nature here) has a bad temporal stability problem. That's not surprising as it is trying hard to push the scaling factor. I don't think stills make FSR's flaws clear, but I also think how poorly FSR interacts with cel shading is obvious in even the stills. Breath of the Wild, like most Nintendo games, is built for sharpness, and I think FSR looks particularly awful, though I admit that is personal preference

The reason it's pretty clear that Tears isn't using FSR 1.0, despite the YouTube compression artifacts, is that while YouTube compression can eliminate the smoothness FSR adds, it can't eliminate the temporal instability. My eye isn't so trained that I'm 100% convinced, but I don't see any of FSR 1.0's tell-tale wobble. it would be easier if we had any rain effects in the video we've seen, where Breath of the Wild has a particularly obvious aliasing fizz that is distinctively different from FSR's temporal artifacting.
 
SoldierDelta said:
I'm going to wait for this to actually mean anything because it could literally just be a legacy edition under a different name.

Still... odd.
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Yeah. It's. Interesting!

Frostbyte is absolutely possible on Switch. Wonder if this is part of their cross gen strategy. Or this is non-Frostbyte. Or this is only next gen with a cloud version on Switch!
 
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After hearing the Mario Movie did amazingly well at the box office on opening night, it seems a lock that it will be a financial success. Which again brings me back to pricing for Switch 2. This time around Nintendo is going to have a few more revenue streams than last gen (theme park, movie, and mobile games) Could they safely afford to sell at a slight loss this time around? I’m hoping so, not for affordability, but for a bit more advanced tech for a lower price (LPDDR5X, bigger emmc, etc.) yes, these decisions were already made months ago, and Nintendo would have had to gamble with unknowns back then, but the price of REDACTED can change late in the game, right? $399 looks a lot better than $449.
 
Thraktor said:
Yeah, those "8K RTX HDR Breath of the Wild! WOW!" YouTube videos look terrible,
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I think if they weren't running at 60fps, then even the people who "like" them might suddenly not. The 60FPS smoothness in motion plus the smooth edges are what most people are reacting too.

Using materials crafted for specular highlights and then adding RT always make things look "shinier", and in Breath of the Wild specifically it runs counter to the cel-shaded approach that makes everything look like a plastic toy.

Some of this remains preference. Understandably, some folks are just more sensitive to the way light moves in a 3D space than they are to unified aesthetics. One of the reasons I love Nintendo games is simply because Nintendo is very good at an aesthetic design that sacrifices realism for legibility, and I'm not a very good gamer, and need that leg-up.
 
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