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

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Here is an article about SD express. Sounds like a pretty massive leap.

The New SD Express Card Explained: Everything You Need to Know

Learn about the new SD Express card from our comprehensive article. We have covered its architecture, PCIe and NVMe technology, transfer speed and more.

beebom.com

This doesn't seem even slightly viable.

"However, the big issue with SD cards, in general, is that they consume too much power in comparison to UFS or eMMC. Traditionally, SD cards need 3.3V to initialize the card and 1.8V to perform operations. In contrast, UFS needs 0.2V to 0.4V to initialize and perform operations."

Why would Nintendo ever use this compared to UFS 4.0

 

[ZachyCatGames]

I just had chatgpt break down what you said. Quoting from Chatgpt here

"

Sure, let me break it down for you in simpler terms:

A kernel is the central part of an operating system. It directly interacts with the hardware of the computer, and provides services for the rest of the operating system, like file handling, memory management, and device control.

I'll give a better one.

Yes-ish. Horizon is designed differently from most of the operating systems we all use. It's what's called a microkernel, the design philosophy for which is essentially "if something can be in userspace, it goes in userspace", so it only really handles basic process/resource management, fs and device drivers go in userspace processes.

Mapping a DTB (Device Tree Blob) is like creating a guide or map for the system. The DTB is a data structure that describes the hardware components of a system (like what devices are part of the system, how they are connected, etc.). So, mapping a DTB is essentially making this information available to the system.

Correct.

Address space refers to the range of addresses that the system can use. It's like the total area that a system has for storing data and instructions.

Not wrong, but not overly useful.
There's both physical and virtual address spaces. The physical address space is what's exposed directly to your processor, different hardware is mapped at different locations here. i.e. on t210 the sdmmc hardware IO starts at address 0x700B0000 and dram starts at 0x80000000.
Then on top of the physical address space your CPU has something called a memory management unit which acts as a layer of abstraction on top the physical address space and allows having "virtual" addresses that get translated to a corresponding physical address (usually done with page tables) when a read/write is performed. When page tables are used the mappings are managed by your operating system and each process will typically be given its own unique virtual address space. When the MMU is enabled your code will only see this virtual address space, which can help with security (i.e. when using pagetables, processes can only see what the kernel has mapped into their virtual address space) and adds some convenience (i.e. if each process has its own address space, you can have multiple processes that think they're at the same address).
So in this context, if your process has access to the DTB the kernel will add a mapping to your virtual address space that points to wherever the DTB is in the physical address space (probably somewhere in dram), then you can use svc::QueryIoMapping to retrieve that virtual address.

svc::QueryIoMapping is a function (a piece of reusable code) provided by the system, in this case, the kernel. This function allows you to request the kernel to map a DTB into the address space.

It allows retrieving any mappings your process has access to.

 

[ILikeFeet]

This doesn't seem even slightly viable.

"However, the big issue with SD cards, in general, is that they consume too much power in comparison to UFS or eMMC. Traditionally, SD cards need 3.3V to initialize the card and 1.8V to perform operations. In contrast, UFS needs 0.2V to 0.4V to initialize and perform operations."

Why would Nintendo ever use this compared to UFS 4.0

because SD Express is about a removable storage medium, unlike UFS4.0

if they can lower the power consumption at the expense of speed, then it could be viable. and SD Express slots are compatible with SD Cards so people can reuse what they have for Switch

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

because SD Express is about a removable storage medium, unlike UFS4.0

if they can lower the power consumption at the expense of speed, then it could be viable. and SD Express slots are compatible with SD Cards so people can reuse what they have for Switch

Yeah, I think people would be fine with 256 to 512 GBs of internal storage you could run games from, and then you just use SD cards for expandable storage that you can't run software off of (basically as a fridge or backup)

The electricity gap here is just way too massive for the minor convenience saving and I'm guessing SD Express is way more expensive as well as no one seems to use it.

 

[Deleted member 887]

Yeah, sorry to drop and then run, lunchtime.

This repo is, essentially, a fork of Linux 4 Tegra, Nvidia's Linux distribution. I link to it because GitHub is a much nicer interface than Nvidia's.

In the NX days, L4T was full of Switch stuff, a lot of it labeled as "Odin" the internal project codename. Nvidia has been more careful this time, moving T239 dev out early. But that seems to be almost exlusively the graphics host drivers, and a lot of other code is shared with Orin, and that stuff continues to crop up.

Advanced Microcontroller Master Bus Architecture: AMBA, the standard set of busses that are provided on ARM chips
AHB: AMBA High Speed Bus, a set of additional busses that extend AMBA. AHB peripherals have their own DMA (direct memory address) for extra speed
APB: AMBA Peripheral Bus, a simpler bridge for getting additional peripherals to connect to AMBA.

What this shows is that in April of last year, around the time we have other evidence of T239 hardware sampling, Nvidia updated their internal Linux to support SD Express on T239 only, not on T234, as the Orin devkits don't have on-board SD Express (those PCIe lanes are used elsewhere).

Because Orin support wasn't updated, it seems unlikely this update was made simply as part of Normal Tegra Testing Procedure, but it doesn't guarantee that [redacted] will use SD Express either. Just that Nvidia was putting T239 in motherboards that ran SD Express, and found bugs they thought needed fixing.

 

[AshiodyneFX]

Yeah, I think people would be fine with 256 to 512 GBs of internal storage you could run games from, and then you just use SD cards for expandable storage that you can't run software off of (basically as a fridge or backup)

Why create a poor user experience? Support the standard and the people that want to use it will use it, issue with SD express is support, very little supports it as it is very immature because no one needs its speeds, this creates a use case for it which will drive the cost down over the course of its life

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Why create a poor user experience? Support the standard and the people that want to use it will use it, issue with SD express is support, very little supports it as it is very immature because no one needs its speeds, this creates a use case for it which will drive the cost down over the course of its life

Would people rather have the inconvenience or have $20 in features (due to the additional cost, I have no idea how much more it is than UFS 4.0 but I'll say $20 for convenience) stripped back from the Switch 2 and have the CPU and GPU get less electricity so the Switch 2 ends up being a lot weaker than if it used UFS 4.0.

 

[BDGAME]

Today I noticed something quite interesting. The way Nintendo displays people holding joy-cons is totally wrong:

No one holds them as if they were snapped into a switch. that would leave your wrist hurting in no time. The truth is that, playing a joy-con in each hand, one tends to leave the hand more straight in relation to the arm, like the one on the right in this photo below:

Notice how the joy-con is curved. And since I only play with my joy-con this way, one in each hand, I never felt discomfort, but I bet that for any other way to play, the person ends up with hands hurting after some gameplay

A possible solution That can work, if Nintendo try to maintain de joy-con format is made de console in a trapezoid format, like this:

Goodbye hand pain. But What Nintendo can do in that space between the screen and the Joy-con? More buttons? Bigger Speakers, like my mock? Other things?

 

[ILikeFeet]

Yeah, I think people would be fine with 256 to 512 GBs of internal storage you could run games from, and then you just use SD cards for expandable storage that you can't run software off of (basically as a fridge or backup)

The electricity gap here is just way too massive for the minor convenience saving and I'm guessing SD Express is way more expensive as well as no one seems to use it.

I don't see SD card being cold storage since it renders even having it useless. it's better to just have load times be longer and have games designed around not needing to load large objects immediately

 

[Shoulder]

Today I noticed something quite interesting. The way Nintendo displays people holding joy-cons is totally wrong:

No one holds them as if they were snapped into a switch. that would leave your wrist hurting in no time. The truth is that, playing a joy-con in each hand, one tends to leave the hand more straight in relation to the arm, like the one on the right in this photo below:

Notice how the joy-con is curved. And since I only play with my joy-con this way, one in each hand, I never felt discomfort, but I bet that for any other way to play, the person ends up with hands hurting after some gameplay

A possible solution That can work, if Nintendo try to maintain de joy-con format is made de console in a trapezoid format, like this:

Goodbye hand pain. But What Nintendo can do in that space between the screen and the Joy-con? More buttons? Bigger Speakers, like my mock? Other things?

Enter the Satisfye grip:

Never had issues holding it, even for extended periods. Even on an 8hr flight recently, my hands never felt tired or sore while playing TOTK. It’s awesome.

 

[Deleted member 887]

Well, you didn't miss it. :p


Just discussion of an old update to T239 code (which was first found along with the rest of the public L4T commits last September).

Haha, I can't tell if I am more brilliant or more stupid than I expected.

In retrospect, I did miss the relevance. It does seem substantially more likely to me now that this was Nintendo related. Not confirmed, certainly, but I don't think it was idle.

 

[Νεφέλωμα]

Today I noticed something quite interesting. The way Nintendo displays people holding joy-cons is totally wrong:

No one holds them as if they were snapped into a switch. that would leave your wrist hurting in no time. The truth is that, playing a joy-con in each hand, one tends to leave the hand more straight in relation to the arm, like the one on the right in this photo below:

Notice how the joy-con is curved. And since I only play with my joy-con this way, one in each hand, I never felt discomfort, but I bet that for any other way to play, the person ends up with hands hurting after some gameplay

A possible solution That can work, if Nintendo try to maintain de joy-con format is made de console in a trapezoid format, like this:

Goodbye hand pain. But What Nintendo can do in that space between the screen and the Joy-con? More buttons? Bigger Speakers, like my mock? Other things?

I think it could be possible. I bet the Switch 2 won't have the design of a simple tablet

 

[Dark Cloud]

Can someone explain what's going on?

 

[Quailman]

Yeah, I think people would be fine with 256 to 512 GBs of internal storage you could run games from, and then you just use SD cards for expandable storage that you can't run software off of (basically as a fridge or backup)

The electricity gap here is just way too massive for the minor convenience saving and I'm guessing SD Express is way more expensive as well as no one seems to use it.

I have a 1TB micro SD card for my switch so I would like Nintendo to continue to use SD card slots as a way to expand storage.

At least what I understand, SD Express is essentially turning an SD card in to a SSD. Nintendo, would probably need an alternative solution for fast storage and SD Express would probably that alternative. So instead of forcing people to change from micro SD cards to an alternative storage medium, people should be able to reuse their current sd card for the NG switch.

Also I found this video from Digital Foundry informative. They talk about the importance of ssd and RTX IO according to them "[it] combines a new texture compression format with GPU-accelerated decompression". This could be a useful tool for Nintendo.

 

[Deleted member 2]

The code was updated to not unmap the apbmisc_base registers on T239, a.k.a. Drake, a.k.a. the SoC for Redacted.

It's not immediately clear what apbmisc_base is (quick google search more or less just returns various versions of this code), but the commit message suggests that it is needed for SD Express support, the newest and fastest (but also very immature) SD card interface.

Okay, I see. I could make out what the code does, but I was wondering which exact part screamed "Nintendo" and my answer is just the reference to the 239... is that right?

This could've been a much shorter exchange!

 

[Deleted member 887]

We've gone in some circles on expansion storage, and the truth is that Nintendo doesn't have great choices here. SD Express never really found a market. I'm not sure there are any MicroSD Express cards on the market despite the standard existing. CF Express is, only a purely technical level, a superior solution, and there are some Type A cards (type A being the "micro" variety) on the market, but they're expensive.

So the question has been how would Nintendo make storage faster, in the age of NVMe, and how would Nintendo make expansion storage able to keep up. One solution would be to go with SD Express, which would leave you with a slot that is backwards compatible with the MicroSD cards people already have, and then partner with another company to make MicroSD Express cards, probably Nintendo branded, and say "hey, if you want fast storage, you gotta buy these".

There are lots of downsides to this strategy, but there are downsides to every strategy. This one would at least allow users to continue to use their existing expansion cards (reducing backlash) and would give Nintendo the ability to sell some new branded accessories. The cost would be that the necessary controllers in the hardware itself are nasty, and the cards themselves more expensive to make than CF Express. I don't know about the power consumption differences, but I would bet that SD Express is also less power efficient than CF Express, but only when running at those higher speeds

 

[Pokemaniac]

Yeah, I think people would be fine with 256 to 512 GBs of internal storage you could run games from, and then you just use SD cards for expandable storage that you can't run software off of (basically as a fridge or backup)

The electricity gap here is just way too massive for the minor convenience saving and I'm guessing SD Express is way more expensive as well as no one seems to use it.

Nintendo was heavily criticized for making the Wii work like that, and for good reason. Not having expandable storage that games can run off of is a non-starter.

Okay, I see. I could make out what the code does, but I was wondering which exact part screamed "Nintendo" and my answer is just the reference to the 239... is that right?

This could've been a much shorter exchange!

Yeah, the connection is the SoC, which is seemingly pretty exclusively for Nintendo. It is unclear if this is just part of a test board or not, though.

 

[MP!]

I mean technically couldn’t they just make a backwards compatible UFS/microSD card slot?

Meaning so long as the contacts line up you could stick either or?

 

[John Omaha]

A possible solution That can work, if Nintendo try to maintain de joy-con format is made de console in a trapezoid format, like this:

Goodbye hand pain. But What Nintendo can do in that space between the screen and the Joy-con? More buttons? Bigger Speakers, like my mock? Other things?

This is awful if you need to reach down for the bottom inputs often. The reason why it works in split Joycon mode is that your wrists and hands can move more freely and slightly reposition the Joycons to better reach the Dpad or right analog.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Nintendo was heavily criticized for making the Wii work like that, and for good reason. Not having expandable storage that games can run off of is a non-starter.

Yeah, the connection is the SoC, which is seemingly pretty exclusively for Nintendo. It is unclear if this is just part of a test board or not, though.

It was also a non-starter because the Wii had 512 MBs of storage.

If the options for Nintendo are:

-Fast internal memory with expandable storage that can't run the software off of
-Fast but expensive and electricity hungry storage with (very expensive) expandable storage you can run games off of
-Long term storage that is not fast at all but you can run games off cheap expandable storage.

Then there are pretty huge issues for each. Option 2 would make the Switch 2 probably a lot weaker while forcing very expensive pseudo memory cards as the only expandable storage option while option 3 makes it difficult for the Switch 2 to stream assets and would make load times a good bit longer.

 

[Pokemaniac]

It was also a non-starter because the Wii had 512 MBs of storage, lol.

WiiWare was 40MB maximum. 512GB of non-expandable storage on Switch 2 is not that much better.

Using the memory card as cold storage could be workable if it's only for native games and it's just a stopgap until storage is upgraded to a new format that games can run directly from.

 

[MP!]

This is awful if you need to reach down for the bottom inputs often. The reason why it works in split Joycon mode is that your wrists and hands can move more freely and slightly reposition the Joycons to better reach the Dpad or right analog.

Yeah for real
This is the opposite of ergonomics

 

[Ojoloco]

Our favourite mockup man

 

[Hermii]

This doesn't seem even slightly viable.

"However, the big issue with SD cards, in general, is that they consume too much power in comparison to UFS or eMMC. Traditionally, SD cards need 3.3V to initialize the card and 1.8V to perform operations. In contrast, UFS needs 0.2V to 0.4V to initialize and perform operations."

Why would Nintendo ever use this compared to UFS 4.0

One of the first comments on the article:

"
I have comments on two mistakes:
1) The mentioned power consumption and Operational voltages (for init and operation) and comparison to UFS and eMMC are not correct. You have mixed between supply voltage and I/O voltages.
Supply voltages in all these devices are usually two supplies either 3.3/1.8v or 2.5/1.2. While the I/O – fir the differential PCIe interface a 0.8v is used.
More information on power advantages in SD Express can be found in this white paper : https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/pl...oSD_Express_BestChoice_WhitePaper20200519.pdf
2) The 4GB/s performance is not associated with the SDUC type of card. The performance of the interface type (ie UGS-I, UHS-II, SD Express PCIe G4L2 etc) and the card’s capacity types (SDHC, SDXC, SDUC etc.) are two different and un related characteristics .

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

WiiWare was 40MB maximum. 512GB of non-expandable storage on Switch 2 is not that much better.

Using the memory card as cold storage could be workable if it's only for native games and it's just a stopgap until storage is upgraded to a new format that games can run directly from.

My issue here is that I don't know if there's going to be an expandable storage method that comes about that is close to financially viable in the Switch 2's life cycle.

Tech improvements and cost declines are driven by demand for a product and like

The Switch 2 is the only hypothetical device I could think of that might need very fast and very electricity cheap expandable storage.

This isn't a thing any other device needs...

It feels like if you have non-cold expandable storage, you're immediately going to run into the PS Vita/Xbox Series S|X issue of proprietary storage that is so expensive that it damages the brand of your system.

I think it's either running the games from UFS (with only cold storage available for expansion) or the transfer speed gets hugely throttled so that games can run from a normal SD card or a game cart.

 

[ILikeFeet]

I have a 1TB micro SD card for my switch so I would like Nintendo to continue to use SD card slots as a way to expand storage.

At least what I understand, SD Express is essentially turning an SD card in to a SSD. Nintendo, would probably need an alternative solution for fast storage and SD Express would probably that alternative. So instead of forcing people to change from micro SD cards to an alternative storage medium, people should be able to reuse their current sd card for the NG switch.

Also I found this video from Digital Foundry informative. They talk about the importance of ssd and RTX IO according to them "[it] combines a new texture compression format with GPU-accelerated decompression". This could be a useful tool for Nintendo.

this wouldn't be usable for drake because it already has a dedicated decompressor. And since there's a shared pool of memory, the other benefits of directstorage/rtx io aren't applicable

 

[ILikeFeet]

I think it's either running the games from UFS (with only cold storage available for expansion) or the transfer speed gets hugely throttled so that games can run from a normal SD card or a game cart.

why do we even think this situation is going to happen? will it be slower? probably. will it be prohibitively so? I don't think so, so I ask why do you think so

 

[Deleted member 887]

Also I found this video from Digital Foundry informative. They talk about the importance of ssd and RTX IO according to them "[it] combines a new texture compression format with GPU-accelerated decompression". This could be a useful tool for Nintendo.

Short version: RTX IO and DirectStorage are mostly about letting PCs catch up to stuff consoles can already do.

Slightly longer version:

On PC, it's Bad News to give programs direct access to hardware. If a program has direct access to the GPU, it can read your bank information right out of your open browser, for example. PC has a hefty driver/kernel design to prevent that kind of access, at the cost of performance.

On console you generally give much closer access to the raw hardware, and lock down the OS elsewhere - mostly by not letting people run any program they get from the internet.

On PC, you have two pools of RAM - the system RAM, and the VRAM the GPU has. Getting data into VRAM involves a copy from one to the other.

On console you have one unified pool of RAM, so the copy is unnecessary.

What DirectStorage does is create a special path from storage to VRAM, so that PC can behave more like console. The problem is that if you have a compressed texture on disk. You can copy that straight to VRAM, but the GPU doesn't speak that compressed format natively. You'll need to create a shader (a GPU program, basically) that can do the decompression.

RTX IO solves that problem. It creates a new compression format that is extremely fast on the GPU, and builds the tools for managing that format into the driver (and possibly into the hardware, going forward).

This lets you (losslessly) compress textures very small on disk, smaller than a CPU based scheme would allow. Having them be small makes them faster to copy. DirectStorage then can copy that very small bundle of data to VRAM directly. Then the GPU can deflate that texture itself, without the developer having to manage a custom shader for the job.

All of that is amazing, especially when paired with a super fast SSD. But consoles not only can do all these things natively, they have the advantage of custom decompression hardware, meaning that the decompression requires neither the CPU or the GPU to operate. This is essentially Xbox's Velocity Architecture, but Playstation has a similar setup, and it seems like Switch NG does too.

 

[LiC]

Our favourite mockup man

So now they're pretending to have photos from inside a space where the controllers are actually being designed. This is adorably incompetent.

 

[Mirev]

Reading the PS5 Pro rumors from Henderson makes me even more impatient for this Switch 2, it's taking so long

 

[BowserIsMyFather]

So now they're pretending to have photos from inside a space where the controllers are actually being designed. This is adorably incompetent.

It's a lot of effort to go to for some short-lived clout.

 

[Mobius]

So now they're pretending to have photos from inside a space where the controllers are actually being designed. This is adorably incompetent.

There are real peoples who believe this is real, it really shows how easy you can fools peoples.

 

[ILikeFeet]

It's a lot of effort to go to for some short-lived clout.

after the 3D printed NX leak, anything else is child's play

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

why do we even think this situation is going to happen? will it be slower? probably. will it be prohibitively so? I don't think so, so I ask why do you think so

Will 100 MB/s be very limiting with regards to the Switch 2 having very short load times and good engine support? We may see I guess.

I do wonder if this uses UFS 2.1 for internal storage, but normally throttles it to 100 MB/s, if they'll encourage devs to let the internal storage run at max speed (along with the decompressor) during load screens for games that are installed to the built-in storage.

Don't know how complex that would be.

 

[BowserIsMyFather]

after the 3D printed NX leak, anything else is child's play

Wild times.

 

[Adulfzen]

regarding external storage, I think Nintendo is more likely to go for the solution that allows users to reuse their old sd cards rather than forcing a new standard unless they go for a dual slot solution which doesn't sound likely but isn't impossible either.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Wonder how Nintendo will position Prime 4 if the Switch 2 launches like November 2024.

-Prime 4's earliest possible release date is probably like June 2024, but all the way up to like November 2025 is also probably possible.
-Prime 4 was definitely designed for the Switch in mind.

If it's not done until after the Switch 2 releases, then you just make the game cross-gen and that's fine I guess... I don't know what they'll do exactly if Prime 4 is done before the Switch 2 releases though.

"A graphically intensive Nintendo Switch game? But the Switch 2 is coming soon. I'll just wait to play this on the Switch 2."

Could see this being held for release until the Switch 2 is out (probably shortly after as well)

Then again, it's very possible the game just isn't completed until (or after) November 2024 and the Switch 2 could be a 2025 or 2026 release as well.

 

[Deleted member 887]

So now they're pretending to have photos from inside a space where the controllers are actually being designed. This is adorably incompetent.

I mean, considering they designed them, I guess they're not wrong?

 

[Discostew]

The thing about 100MB/s for microSD is that is specifically for sequential data transfers. You'll hit that target if the files are large, but if you're dealing with a LOT of small files, that target won't get hit because each file tacks on a random access delay. But let's say there's no other option but to use microSD for external storage. Outside of mandatory installs to internal storage, what could they do to speed things up?

What if they reserved space in either internal storage and/or RAM that held a mass of small frequently-accessed files, transferred over in large clumps when launching a game? The discussion of RAM capacity led to the idea of that 12GB would be plenty for games + system, but what if it was bumped to 16GB, and 4GB was reserved for this purpose?

 

[Deleted member 887]

Report by Tom Henderson:

PlayStation 5 Pro ‘Project Trinity’ Details And Release Date

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keytogaming.com

What the fuck? I'd sorta convinced myself that they were going purely in an Elite direction, but this would be a proper PS5 Pro.

30 WGP is insane. The PS5 is 16 WGP, by comparison. They've gotta be pushing clocks, at least a little bit, too, I would assume, because they have to be building on a 4nm. That's a 19 TFLOP machine, at minimum

 

[Hajeman]

Our favourite mockup man

Why I think this is real. Sliding buttons & joystick part up & down is the gimmick of a Switch 2. Hmmmmm

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

The thing about 100MB/s for microSD is that is specifically for sequential data transfers. You'll hit that target if the files are large, but if you're dealing with a LOT of small files, that target won't get hit because each file tacks on a random access delay. But let's say there's no other option but to use microSD for external storage. Outside of mandatory installs to internal storage, what could they do to speed things up?

What if they reserved space in either internal storage and/or RAM that held a mass of small frequently-accessed files, transferred over in large clumps when launching a game? The discussion of RAM capacity led to the idea of that 12GB would be plenty for games + system, but what if it was bumped to 16GB, and 4GB was reserved for this purpose?

This seems to add a lot of complications to developers, lol.

But yeah, I guess like 16 GBs of internal storage set aside for storing data could theoretically work if the game was built around it very carefully... Would have to be very clever about when to move stuff from the SD card/cart into the fast storage.

 

[Deleted member 645]

Reading the PS5 Pro rumors from Henderson makes me even more impatient for this Switch 2, it's taking so long

What’s weird is the people that make it seem like we are crazy for wanting a new console.

 

[snorkellingfish]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, because I'm not a tech person, but what would an external-storage-as-cold-storage solution mean for game cards? Would it imply forced installs, or are game cards faster than the feasible external storage options?

(Also, I just googled SD express out of interest to see what sort of prices we're talking about in AUD, and I'm not seeing any for sale. Is there some brand name that I should be looking for, or are they just that non-mainstream?)

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, because I'm not a tech person, but what would an external-storage-as-cold-storage solution mean for game cards? Would it imply forced installs, or are game cards faster than the feasible external storage options?

(Also, I just googled SD express out of interest to see what sort of prices we're talking about in AUD, and I'm not seeing any for sale. Is there some brand name that I should be looking for, or are they just that non-mainstream?)

Yes, this whole discussion is only relevant if the Switch 2 has mandatory installs. The game carts are fairly slow so if Nintendo allows games to be run directly from the cart, the storage will likely be limited to whatever slow speed the game cart runs at so then SD cards are fine.

And no device currently uses SD Express I believe.

 

[Hermii]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, because I'm not a tech person, but what would an external-storage-as-cold-storage solution mean for game cards? Would it imply forced installs, or are game cards faster than the feasible external storage options?

(Also, I just googled SD express out of interest to see what sort of prices we're talking about in AUD, and I'm not seeing any for sale. Is there some brand name that I should be looking for, or are they just that non-mainstream?)

Far from every game would require very fast storage to function well. Only those using Nanite or similar tech, or ding something crazy like rift apart.

So Nintendo could do a forced install only for select games that require it.

 

[YugamiSekai]

I'd be down with a hybrid D-Pad where the buttons are physically seperate but stretch in towards the middle of the diamond, like a Playstation D-Pad without the pivot.

If I can't press buttons on the opposite side of each other, they can keep it, IMO.

 

[Discostew]

This seems to add a lot of complications to developers, lol.

But yeah, I guess like 16 GBs of internal storage set aside for storing data could theoretically work if the game was built around it very carefully... Would have to be very clever about when to move stuff from the SD card/cart into the fast storage.

I wasn't thinking about devs controlling what files get moved over to this temp storage while the game is running. I'm thinking of analysis during development phases like QA to determine what files would best fit to be compiled into a group to be auto-loaded during a game's boot sequence.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

I wasn't thinking about devs controlling what files get moved over to this temp storage while the game is running. I'm thinking of analysis during development phases like QA to determine what files would best fit to be compiled into a group to be auto-loaded during a game's boot sequence.

Even then, if they want to move over like 8 GBs to the internal storage and the cart/card managed to transfer at 100 MB/s... That's still a fairly lengthy boot-up sequence that devs may want to avoid.

 

[Sol]

Our favourite mockup man

Has this person admitted to faking these? I'll be honest....it's one thing to have the artistic ability to create some pretty good looking fakes, but to think long and hard about some novel controller concepts and to then go all out in making fakes based on those concepts is on another level.

I really like this animation below....it's very smooth and very well designed. Very much feels like something Nintendo (or even Apple) would do:




They also say that no one figured out how the Joy-Con design works. He seems to be implying that different Joy-Con positions function as an input themselves, or that different positions lead to different kinds of inputs on the controller.