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

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Do y’all think any of the stuff in this video is still relevant?

Obviously, DLSS has been updated and refined since then, plus they didn’t have a clue what ships/technology Nvidia and Nintendo would be using by the year 2024.

I was just curious if any of the technical hurdles and such still add anything to the conversation today based on what we know now.

(As an aside, it’s been a little annoying hearing so many podcast with smart people discussing all the Switch 2 rumors, but they seem to be missing a ton of the technical details leaked from Nvidia that this board seems to have a lot of familiarity with.)
 
Serif said:
Official 4K 'bullshots' from Nintendo during BotW's reveal.

Fuel for the imagination.

The fact that we may able to play the game at this level of fidelity or better on official hardware next year is very exciting.
Click to expand...
It certainly is, I'm drooling at the prospect.
 
Skittzo said:
I feel like that's oversimplifying it a lot.

DLSS has a cost, it's not free. It's very small and it's mostly in terms of a handful of miliseconds but it's there. And there's also the power cost for powering the tensor cores.

However FSR having no dedicated hardware puts a lot more of the cost on the GPU cores themselves, which makes it cost a lot more than DLSS.
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Perhaps I should have make it clear, but I'm writing from the perspective of a PC gamer that has to decide between FSR, DLSS or Native rendering. Of course DLSS has some cost, but when you have a 4k monitor and activate DLSS Quality, you are now rendering 60% of the resolution (over the axes), so the performance hit from the actual DLSS tensor math more than covered over by the performance gains.
 
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ReyVGM said:
The Wii U was already 2 years out on the market, why would they use a development PC?

That demo reveal is using the same engine and graphics, it's just that the final game has some sort of blur filter on the top 70% of the screen that makes everything look like Wii graphics.
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Sometimes developers still use development PC's to show games off, I'm guessing it has to do with how far along the game has come in development, what kind of things are gonna be shown off in the early trailers (maybe only cutscenes, or a specifically crafted scene that isn't even gonna be in the game) and other factors. Two pretty clear examples that come to mind of Nintendo games being run on development hardware in trailers (at least from what it seems) are Xenoblade X and Xenoblade 2 in their first trailers. They look pretty noticably different than how they look like in their final games. I'm pretty sure I also remember hearing from one BOTW interview that what was in the 2014 trailer was basically more a mock up for what they wanted the game to be, and it helped finalize the direction they wanted to go, so what is in the trailer isn't the game but esentially just one scene specifically made to figure out how it was gonna look like, so definitely built for a development PC im guessing.
 
TheSentry said:


Do y’all think any of the stuff in this video is still relevant?

Obviously, DLSS has been updated and refined since then, plus they didn’t have a clue what ships/technology Nvidia and Nintendo would be using by the year 2024.

I was just curious if any of the technical hurdles and such still add anything to the conversation today based on what we know now.

(As an aside, it’s been a little annoying hearing so many podcast with smart people discussing all the Switch 2 rumors, but they seem to be missing a ton of the technical details leaked from Nvidia that this board seems to have a lot of familiarity with.)
Click to expand...

this was made before the Nvidia leak and when we were still thinking Dane (at the time) was 768 cores to 1024 cores on 8nm. probably not too relevant now, especially when there could be a hypothetical "drake algorithm" still.

DF will most definitely talk about the Gamescom stuff, so we should here their updated expectations regarding DLSS on monday
 
Serif said:
Official 4K 'bullshots' from Nintendo during BotW's reveal.

Fuel for the imagination.

PDQBATl.jpeg

HCIoZ2G.jpeg

siZ3K65.jpeg


The fact that we may able to play the game at this level of fidelity or better on official hardware next year is very exciting.
Click to expand...
It feels so weird to see that second picture without various Pokemon photoshopped over it and someone saying "what couldve been..." below said picture.
 
Skittzo said:
We have no idea what the BOTW tech demo looked like, the specifics were not leaked in any way.
Click to expand...
That's true, but if Nintendo wanted to aim for the most ''impressive'' quality difference with their BOTW tech demo, they probably did go for a 4k/60 fps build for it.
 
Giancarlo said:
dont look different to Breath of the Wild development build
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I mean the only thing they did was a fast updated version of BOTW, an already made Wii/ USwitch game. If we want to see how a made from the ground up Zelda game will look on the Switch 2 we will have to wait for the next Zelda game in 5-6 years or so.
 
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Serif said:
Official 4K 'bullshots' from Nintendo during BotW's reveal.

Fuel for the imagination.

PDQBATl.jpeg

HCIoZ2G.jpeg

siZ3K65.jpeg


The fact that we may able to play the game at this level of fidelity or better on official hardware next year is very exciting.
Click to expand...
Every time I see these screenshots, I start to drool a bit. That that the game we got looks bad, but man...

Nintendo are gonna do some great things with next-gen

Giancarlo said:
so we all thinking Breath of the Wild will look like this? on Switch sucessor

Click to expand...

I'm thinking better. Look at the difference between that footage and the bullshots @Serif posted. The emulated footage looks great, but it's just running the current assets at a higher res + some LOD stuff pushed out. The assets themselves aren't higher res assets. Not anywhere close to what Nintendo could do if they did a full next gen upgrade.
 
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Going off the info we have

My assumption is that the BOTW could have been the “look how easy it is to patch existing games” pitch

The unreal matrix demo is “look how easy it is to port your games” pitch
 
I feel like Nintendo had to experiment with more than just a resolution/framerate buff... if they are showing it off they must have really tweaked it up, right? It would need to look substantially improved or you have that "this looks basically as I remember it" effect going, which would actually be a negative for the Switch 2.
 
Danny said:
That's true, but if Nintendo wanted to aim for the most ''impressive'' quality difference with their BOTW tech demo, they probably did go for a 4k/60 fps build for it.
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I was more thinking they'd do more then just that, like add new lighting or RT.
 
mjayer said:
I feel like Nintendo had to experiment with more than just a resolution/framerate buff... if they are showing it off they must have really tweaked it up, right? It would need to look substantially improved or you have that "this looks basically as I remember it" effect going, which would actually be a negative for the Switch 2.
Click to expand...
Depends on how notable the buff was. If it's a jump to 60fps and 4K (with DLSS of course), it'd be fairly obvious. Additionally, a tech demo can literally just be something simple to showcase what devs can do now. Doesn't need to flex a specific part of the hardware like the Super FX chip, 3d hardware, or even Mario 128, it can just be showcasing the power over the original device.
 
MP! said:
Going off the info we have

My assumption is that the BOTW could have been the “look how easy it is to patch existing games” pitch

The unreal matrix demo is “look how easy it is to port your games” pitch
Click to expand...
I can see this being not far off as this would be likely after the widespread delivery of devkits to devs, and Nintendo's first official presentation on it.

at least accounting for the July/August leaks indicating a very high chance that representative devkits (IE: Close to final hardware wise, only thing left is the "Mass Production Corrected" Devkit that includes adjustments to clocks/tooling from the Retail units found/tested during mass production)
 
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TheSentry said:


Do y’all think any of the stuff in this video is still relevant?

Obviously, DLSS has been updated and refined since then, plus they didn’t have a clue what ships/technology Nvidia and Nintendo would be using by the year 2024.

I was just curious if any of the technical hurdles and such still add anything to the conversation today based on what we know now.

(As an aside, it’s been a little annoying hearing so many podcast with smart people discussing all the Switch 2 rumors, but they seem to be missing a ton of the technical details leaked from Nvidia that this board seems to have a lot of familiarity with.)
Click to expand...

I think most of this is still pretty relevant. I'm not sure about the tops number we can expect from Drake, and how it would compare or Orin ADAS which Alex is using for reference here.

Edit: rewatching the video, you probably should take his ms calculations with a grain of salt, but there's still a ton here that's relevant. Ultra performance mode will probably be a lot used on Drake.
 
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Giancarlo said:
so we all thinking Breath of the Wild will look like this? on Switch sucessor

Click to expand...


Breath of the Wild could theoretically look much better on the Switch 2. You have to take into account that the video you posted has 4K graphics but low-res textures from the Wii U game. Nintendo, if they want to, could remaster BotW with 4K graphics AND high-res textures.
 
mjayer said:
I feel like Nintendo had to experiment with more than just a resolution/framerate buff... if they are showing it off they must have really tweaked it up, right? It would need to look substantially improved or you have that "this looks basically as I remember it" effect going, which would actually be a negative for the Switch 2.
Click to expand...
depends on what they are trying to show. this is for developers, who are more interested in the nitty gritty than merely how the game looks
 
If BoTW was to be fully ported to the new system and released to the public (EDIT, clarified since I forgot what they showed was technically a port), and again, worth stating that we've been explicitly been told this was only a developer-focused demo and not an indication of a planned product/patch for the public, I think the idea that they WOULDN'T upgrade the textures to take advantage of the 12GB, and probably more than 3 times available for game, memory would be insane. Even for the Switch only ToTK, the style shines through the texture work, but also, the texture work definitely isnt the greatest on the system (for understandable reasons) and it would be impressive to see that game not just in 4k but with improved assets.

However, to get to my main point, it doesn't sound like that's what was shown, it seems like it was just the resolution and framerate bump, not as much "look how good BoTW looks on the new hardware" and more of "look at how impressive the jump in performance is on our hardware".
 
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tgtCG said:
If BoTW was to be ported to the new system, and again, worth stating that we've been explicitly been told this was only a developer-focused demo and not an indication of a planned product/patch for the public, I think the idea that they WOULDN'T upgrade the textures to take advantage of the 12GB, and probably more than 3 times available for game, memory would be insane. Even for the Switch only ToTK, the style shines through the texture work, but also, the texture work definitely isnt the greatest on the system (for understandable reasons) and it would be impressive to see that game not just in 4k but with improved assets.

However, to get to my main point, it doesn't sound like that's what was shown, it seems like it was just the resolution and framerate bump, not as much "look how good BoTW looks on the new hardware" and more of "look at how impressive the jump in performance is on our hardware".
Click to expand...
Just from a business/ marketing perspective I expect TOTK to be patched before botw. If only one of them gets patched, it would be totk.
 
tgtCG said:
If BoTW was to be ported to the new system, and again, worth stating that we've been explicitly been told this was only a developer-focused demo and not an indication of a planned product/patch for the public, I think the idea that they WOULDN'T upgrade the textures to take advantage of the 12GB, and probably more than 3 times available for game, memory would be insane. Even for the Switch only ToTK, the style shines through the texture work, but also, the texture work definitely isnt the greatest on the system (for understandable reasons) and it would be impressive to see that game not just in 4k but with improved assets.

However, to get to my main point, it doesn't sound like that's what was shown, it seems like it was just the resolution and framerate bump, not as much "look how good BoTW looks on the new hardware" and more of "look at how impressive the jump in performance is on our hardware".
Click to expand...
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the context was more 'look how robust NVN2 is: We were able to develop a compatibility patch for Breath of the Wild with less than two weeks of effort.' Give people no reason not to update their existing games for the new platform.
 
Hermii said:
I think most of this is still pretty relevant. I'm not sure about the tops number we can expect from Drake, and how it would compare or Orin ADAS which Alex is using for reference here.

Edit: rewatching the video, you probably should take his ms calculations with a grain of salt, but there's still a ton here that's relevant. Ultra performance mode will probably be a lot used on Drake.
Click to expand...
Well ADAS Orin (in the form in the slide) never materialized,

The closest thing to it nowadays would be the Jetson Orin Nano 4GB which even then is double the TOPs of ADAS

Problem there is the Orin Nano 4GB is only 4SMs (1TPC), 6 A78AEs and a max power draw of 10W.

So you could make a potential guess it'd be 10TOPs like ADAS at 5W? But that is ignoring that they disable 2 CPU cores and clock everything lower in the 7W Mode for the 8GB model which likely will be the same for the 4GB model.

EIther way, T239 has a enabled GPU that is literally 4 times the size of Orin Nano 4GB. But Docked T239 (The config in question for 4K output) also would also run at nearly 3x the clock of the ~400MHz 7W profile for Orin Nano's GPU (The Clock could be lower for the actual 4GB Nano as that figure is derived from the 8GB's readout in PowerTool)

Orin AGX 32GB, which is 14SMs at 930MHz is 200 TOPs
 
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I saw a few Reddit posts referencing Famiboards when it came to hardware speculation.

You guys really are at the core of all the hardware talk.

Ilikefeet, Thraktor, oldpuck, Zombi3. There are more of you too and I am sorry if I didn't mention. You all are killing it lol.

EDIT: bonus me at my 9-5 software engineer job trying to understand you guys talking about hardware:

giphy.gif


Hermii said:
Just from a business/ marketing perspective I expect TOTK to be patched before botw. If only one of them gets patched, it would be totk.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be surprised if BoTW is released as a remaster with better textures, lighting, resolution, and performance bundled in with all the DLC. While ToTK gets a big next-gen patch as you said. I could also see ToTK get a remaster down the line but I feel that it makes more sense for BoTW at the moment since it was a Wii U port.
 
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oldpuck said:
A few things

The Unreal Demo wasn't for marketing. It was part of a developer communication to invited parties that very much was not supposed to become public. Nintendo is likely trying to genuinely show what the hardware can do.

Yes, it seems like it was running on non-NIntendo hardware "specced" to the performance target. But you can go buy a 3050 right now and get an Ampere GPU very close to Drake's design. You can get Orin with an Ampere GPU and and ARM CPU. It seems likely that you could get such a machine really close to final performance.

As Thraktor and others point out, yes, there will be tuning up till late in the production process as battery life and thermal properties get dialed in. But unless there is a serious fuck up, that's unlikely to be a gigantic change from the target.

This is almost definitely not stock Unreal on an underclocked PC, with someone tweaking settings. It's a beta of Unreal running on Nintendo's software stack, NVN2. This isn't just Nintendo demoing hardware, it's them demoing the most popular gaming engine in the world, ported to their stack.

"We have full Unreal 5 running. Ray tracing is running using our RT pipeline. Nanite is here, using mesh shaders and asset streaming from disk. Mass AI is running for the NPCs, so no worries about these mobile CPUs. Full fat DLSS is integrated for resolution scaling. And rather than just tell you we have these things, let me show you, so you can see that when I say 'acceptable framerate' you can see I really mean it."

Such a demo is designed to answer all the detailed questions faster than a specc list. If you've been in this thread for a while, you know "but can DLSS 2 really do that" or "you think they're going to add real RT in 10W of power?" come up a lot. It's not arguing about the spec, it's asking how far can the spec deliver, and what is it going to look like when dialed down that far.
Click to expand...
from your percpective, did the matrix demo make full of use of the hardware specs as well as DLSS? as well as, was it able to deliver as expected or slightly better?
 
Sol said:
What is this from? This enviornment alone looks infinitely more layered and interesting than anything in Scarlet and Violet.

Imagine exploring this area with really good lighting at 60 FPS.
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AFAIK, it's concept art that was shared from Game Freak for Sca/Vi. Of course, it's fairly obvious that uhhh... yeah that ain't the game.

I'm curious as to if their change in approach will result in much better games later for the Switch 2, but that concept art when compared to the actual game is kind of the "Food in promotional material vs. Food when ordered" version of games.
 
TheSentry said:
Click to expand...

Funny to go back to that video, and see/hear multiple mistakes. For one, the chapter about Orin has it named Nvidia Oren. Then in that same chapter when they showed the image of the L2+ Autopilot with up to 200 TOPS, they referred to the TOPS acronym as Tensor Operations Per Second.
 
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A few thoughts instead of trying to respond to parts of this very lengthy discussion:
  • We don't have any evidence whether the tech demos were running on a PC or real hardware, just that they weren't running on real hardware physically present there at Gamescom. They could have been video footage from real hardware.
  • Regardless, Nintendo knows what the hardware can do by this point and would have created representative target footage. To the extent tech demos can be unrepresentative, it has nothing to do with the hardware power, but the fact that they're not fully playable games and don't need to follow the same design principles as real games.
  • If clock speeds were to change between now and release, they'd go up, not down.
 
MadMarvainy said:
I saw a few Reddit posts referencing Famiboards when it came to hardware speculation.

You guys really are at the core of all the hardware talk.

Ilikefeet, Thraktor, oldpuck, Zombi3. There are more of you too and I am sorry if I didn't mention. You all are killing it lol.
Click to expand...
This thread got 6 million views, more than the total of Steam Deck sold!

Useless comparison aside, I often see this thread referenced.
 
I only exist to post hi-res Zelda thirst traps

wya7gupfeifb1.jpg


Sol said:
What is this from? This enviornment alone looks infinitely more layered and interesting than anything in Scarlet and Violet.

Imagine exploring this area with really good lighting at 60 FPS.
Click to expand...
 
Hermii said:
Just from a business/ marketing perspective I expect TOTK to be patched before botw. If only one of them gets patched, it would be totk.
Click to expand...
Yup. I think the ship has sailed on them trying to sell people on BoTW when ToTK exists. BoTW was just what they used to present to developers, as others have added, probably because ToTK wasn't ready in time for them to make the demo.
 
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kvetcha said:
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the context was more 'look how robust NVN2 is: We were able to develop a compatibility patch for Breath of the Wild with less than two weeks of effort.' Give people no reason not to update their existing games for the new platform.
Click to expand...
Yeah it really depends on WHAT was said and we don't have the info. Were the exact resolution and frame-rates given? Did they describe the porting process. Hard to say, we just know a basic upgraded version of some sort was shown.
 
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Mobius said:
This thread got 6 million views, more than the total of Steam Deck sold!

Useless comparison aside, I often see this thread referenced.
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This is actually impressive on both fronts lol.

One, holy crap at the amount of views (I hope this translate to Switch 2 being another megahit even though that's not how things work).

And two, that's actually pretty impressive for the Steam Deck. Portable gaming is in a healthy spot at the moment it seems.
Serif said:
I only exist to post hi-res Zelda thirst traps

wya7gupfeifb1.jpg



Click to expand...

To think some day these might be taken natively from a Nintendo console.
 
SoldierDelta said:
Depends on how notable the buff was. If it's a jump to 60fps and 4K (with DLSS of course), it'd be fairly obvious. Additionally, a tech demo can literally just be something simple to showcase what devs can do now. Doesn't need to flex a specific part of the hardware like the Super FX chip, 3d hardware, or even Mario 128, it can just be showcasing the power over the original device.
Click to expand...

I dunno man, you might be right about developers looking at it differently but I keep pulling up these videos of 4K BOTW for years now and always being disappointed with how same it looks to me. Side-by-side huge difference, ya, and maybe on a HUGE screen the difference will be super clear as well... but on a medium size screen it feels very meh to me. The 60 fps is something that makes me desire it but that doesn't change the look. So I'm just wondering what was this really showing off?

Draw distances? Meh. Could they have implemented RTX in it? Has it been a testbed for all the wizbang new features of drake and they got something going that's pretty damn impressive?
 
mjayer said:
I dunno man, you might be right about developers looking at it differently but I keep pulling up these videos of 4K BOTW for years now and always being disappointed with how same it looks to me. Side-by-side huge difference, ya, and maybe on a HUGE screen the difference will be super clear as well... but on a medium size screen it feels very meh to me. The 60 fps is something that makes me desire it but that doesn't change the look. So I'm just wondering what was this really showing off?

Draw distances? Meh. Could they have implemented RTX in it? Has it been a testbed for all the wizbang new features of drake and they got something going that's pretty damn impressive?
Click to expand...
Using a previous generation game is not meant to show off how pretty the potential graphics are; that's what the Matrix demo was for (which had the audience so hyped they started making irresponsible PS5 comparisons). If BotW was running at 4K res and 60 fps, that's 5.76 times more pixels than the original (dynamic) 900p while doubling the framerate, so more than 11 times as much GPU work done per second, all for the low cost of switching NVN to NVN2. Anything else would be a bonus.
 
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