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

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Lancelot said:
I'm wondering then, what are the handheld values on that case? If Docked is going to draw beefy 20W, then what's Handheld going to draw? 9W? That's basically Switch Docked, just curious since the calculations on this have been obfuscated and twisted around all the time.
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Just a heads-up, but Switch Erista alone could draw close to 9W at max brightness. That being said, I think 8 - 10/11W for Portable Profiles power draw is entirely reasonable when we think from high-level (Accounting for the whole system, weight, cooling solution, battery size, etc).

And 8 <-> 11W, extending up to around 20W Docked is something that can be soaked off/cooled fairly easily with modern cooling solution + material and design engineering. Specially for an active cooled device.

As I said, even if fabbed on 4N, T239 SoC design is just too big and faster for it to meet Erista Switch power draw. Unless Nintendo clocks the CPU, GPU, Memory, etc are below the expectations of this thread.

edit: To answer you further, on portable Nintendo can do some power optimizations beyond just lower GPU clocks. Limiting Memory Speed is one of them and is already done currently on Switch. The reason why I think it's possible for Switch 2 Portable power draw to actually be closer to Erista TX1 is due to it (possibly) being fabbed on 4N/ TSMC N5 family, which is a very efficient node and can achieve very low vMin x Clocks.

LiC said:
Well, we don't know that for sure, either.
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Right. I just said it so that people don't keep creating expectations from it as if they're the clocks Nintendo will use or are actual power draw figures from a tested T239
 
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lemonfresh said:
It's happening isn't it
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JK0sLuV.png
 
Ghostsonplanets said:
Just a heads-up, but Switch Erista alone could draw close to 9W at max brightness. That being said, I think 8 - 10/11W for Portable Profiles power draw is entirely reasonable when we think from high-level (Accounting for the whole system, weight, cooling solution, battery size, etc).

And 8 <-> 11W, extending up to around 20W Docked is something that can be soaked off/cooled fairly easily with modern cooling solution + material and design engineering. Specially for an active cooled device.

As I said, even if fabbed on 4N, T239 SoC design is just too big and faster for it to meet Erista Switch power draw. Unless Nintendo clocks the CPU, GPU, Memory, etc are below the expectations of this thread.
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So 8-11W while handheld and likely 20W when docked? The later is quite the increase for sure but nothing that can't be cooled normally, I suppose they're not considering an increase to handheld due to it getting potentially uncomfortable to hold, otherwise that'd be an absolute heat monster that's going to be sold to kids and families... Thanks for the heads-up.
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
For the record, the other consoles were like 1080p internally iirc and used TSR to give a higher quality image
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also important to remember that the demo was also letterboxed to save performance

given there were probably improvements and settings being scaled, I think 540p and 720p-1080p are some good resolutions to expect from the demo
 
Concernt said:
Who's we?

At 4N, original Erista power consumption for the SOC would suit T239 quite well, and we even have some wattages listed for the GPU's power consumption in the Nvidia leak, indicating extremely similar power consumption to Erista.

There are real technical reasons Nintendo Switch didn't exceed 15W, and cannot exceed 15W, in TV mode. These are electrical, these are to do with the USB PD standard. I'm not discounting the possibility that Nintendo ups the minimum wattages, but I absolutely question the cost benefit ratio. This thing still has to function only through USB power, it still has to have workable battery life as a handheld, and additional power consumption in TV mode means higher cooling requirements, making the device larger and heavier, something extremely undesirable when so many elements of the device already make it a hard sell as a handheld.

Nintendo makes handhelds. That's what they're good at. Anything that pushes against that likely would have been crushed by marketing execs before the engineers can get it made into a blueprint.
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So, 15W is a physical limit, not Nintendo choice?

I was wandering if in the end of 2025, if Ps5 pro is in the market and current Ps5 became a 1080p native machine, if Nintendo can increase the power consume of switch 2 to 25W on dock and 15W on portable to gain a extra power and don't loose any third party game.

But if the physical limit is the same as the first model, then that will not be possible. Hope they keep that possibility open.
 
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Lancelot said:
So 8-11W while handheld and likely 20W when docked? The later is quite the increase for sure but nothing that can't be cooled normally, I suppose they're not considering an increase to handheld due to it getting potentially uncomfortable to hold, otherwise that'd be an absolute heat monster that's going to be sold to kids and families... Thanks for the heads-up.
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Yes. The reason why I think there will be such a huge jump from Portable Max to Docked is that (I think) memory will be limited to up to 4800/5500 MT/s while Portable and will go up to 6400 MT/s Docked (I'm assuming they're using LPDDR5). And the GPU Clocks Docked will be clocked at past the peak efficiency point, at around 900MHz - 1GHz. Granted, the 20W Docked figure I expect is more like "around" 20W.

Also, of course, all of that assuming T239 is fabbed on 4N. If it's fabbed on a node with worse performance characteristics, Nintendo will need to either clock at lower clocks or increase the power draw. But the latter isn't something I expect because I still expect Switch 2 to be a Nintendo like portable machine.
 
Ghostsonplanets said:
Yes. The reason why I think there will be such a huge jump from Portable Max to Docked is that (I think) memory will be limited to up to 4800/5500 MT/s while Portable and will go up to 6400 MT/s Docked (I'm assuming they're using LPDDR5). And the GPU Clocks Docked will be clocked at past the peak efficiency point, at around 900MHz - 1GHz. Granted, the 20W Docked figure I expect is more like "around" 20W.

Also, of course, all of that assuming T239 is fabbed on 4N. If it's fabbed on a node with worse performance characteristics, Nintendo will need to either clock at lower clocks or increase the power draw. But the latter isn't something I expect because I still expect Switch 2 to be a Nintendo like portable machine.
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Admittedly I wouldn't have a problem if they made a handheld monster but it's a mass market device and its portability still needs to be somehow usable. With the 8 inch screen leak, that should be roughly around Rog Ally's size no? Assuming they won't cut the bezels all that much to offset the size increase.
 
Lancelot said:
Admittedly I wouldn't have a problem if they made a handheld monster but it's a mass market device and its portability still needs to be somehow usable. With the 8 inch screen leak, that should be roughly around Rog Ally's size no? Assuming they won't cut the bezels all that much to offset the size increase.
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People smarter than me have said and calculated (On private discords) that an 7.91/8-inch screen could fit into Switch OLED body, but it would need razor thin bezels. But, yes, I assume it will be a bit bigger than current Switch. Not ROG Ally though IMO

Portables-TGogether.jpg
 
Ghostsonplanets said:
People smarter than me have said and calculated (On private discords) that an 7.91/8-inch screen could fit into Switch OLED body, but it would need razor thin bezels. But, yes, I assume it will be a bit bigger than current Switch. Not ROG Ally though IMO

Portables-TGogether.jpg
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Damn, those are some non-existent bezels lol. That looks huge but still portable, kinda...? It's not all that far from the Rog at least from this angle, might be the soft spot the N is looking for, size wise.
 
Lancelot said:
Damn, those are some non-existent bezels lol. That looks huge but still portable, kinda...? It's not all that far from the Rog at least from this angle, might be the soft spot the N is looking for, size wise.
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Yeah. And mind you that this is a 16:10 7-inch screen. So it will be interesting to see how Nintendo will tackle the issue of the bigger screen. They will need a similar level of bezel-less for make it fit on current (or similar) Switch sized body.
 
In case Doctre's lurking, I just want to say that he wasn't included in my disparagement of lurking YouTubers. That was meant for SMD and the NintendoPrimes of the world.
 
oldpuck said:
It’s sometimes said that Nintendo doesn’t “push the hardware” but I think the opposite is true. Nintendo knows how to squeeze every drop of performance out of their limited machines. They’re going to have the highest end RT accelerators in a console. They're moving to a unified engine across EPD. So yeah, I expect a scaled down RTGI solution to be near universal from them
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Where have they mentioned they're moving to a unified engine?
 
To be clear, 0 Sony or Microsoft published games have used Ray traced GI.

Forza plans to add it to the PC version, but the game is terribly programmed and thus the game eats CPUs to the point where they can’t add relevant ray tracing.

But Starfield and Spider-Man 2 both skipping ray traced GI despite its obvious potential benefits in those games makes me very doubtful of how common ray traced GI will be for the Switch 2.
 
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Ghostsonplanets said:
People smarter than me have said and calculated (On private discords) that an 7.91/8-inch screen could fit into Switch OLED body, but it would need razor thin bezels. But, yes, I assume it will be a bit bigger than current Switch. Not ROG Ally though IMO

Portables-TGogether.jpg
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A razor thin bezel that isn’t possible with an LCD display, fwiw.

So you need a larger than the OLED device.

LCDs need that bezel.
 
The Switch needs extra bezels because of the joy-cons and the railing mechanism. It’s not a one whole system. The controllers need something sturdy to attach to the sides. I don’t know how that would work if the screen is edge-to-edge. I feel like it would be less sturdy, and the constant daily usage of the joy-cons (removal and reattachment) could cause physical damage to the screen over time, would it not? Right now, if you lift the joy-cons up, there are chunks of plastics that you can grip and the pressure/force to take it off is on the extra “bezels” not really on the screen. It’s there to cushion that action. If the screen goes all the way, that would mean that force is transferred directly onto the screen every time you take the joy-cons off/put the joy-cons back in. I don’t think that‘s a good thing. I guess you can make it bezel-less vertically but not horizontally because you need a big chunk of plastic on the sides. And that‘s not really bezel-less.

In short, I can’t see bezel-less being a thing as long as the Switch is modular. The new Switch Lite, however, is entirely possible.
 
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FireGrey said:
Where have they mentioned they're moving to a unified engine?
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Dakhil said:
Dataminers found that several recent games developed by Nintendo (Super Mario Bros Wonder, Splatoon 3, and Tears of the Kingdom) run on the engine dataminers call "SystemModule".
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And Switch Sports. If you recall, there was talk of FSR in Switch Sports, because it was found in data mining, but it wasn't actually used. Then, low and behold, it was used in Tears.

Takuhiro Dohta, the lead programmer on Breath of the Wild has been given a new position. He's listed as Head of Programming Management Group on Tears of the Kingdom, which seems to be new (as is the Design Management Group, though I believe "Sound Management Group" previous existed).

With Dohta the head of a new Programming group, and the engine he was the lead dev on being used in the latest games from EPD 4, EPD 5, EPD 9 and EPD 10, it sure seems like Nintendo is consolidating. Of the remaining EPD teams, all the rest either work with outside developers or coordinate with non-EPD Nintendo studios (Retro, NLG, Monolith, etc) - except for EPD 8. EPD 8 is the only major EPD team who hasn't moved to ModuleSystem. Probably because EPD 8 is the 3D Mario team, and they haven't released whatever they've been working on for the last 7 years.

Of note - ModuleSystem uses Physically Based Rendering, Probe Based GI, and Upscaling all in it's rendering pipeline. It's not only very modern, but it is set up for an easy conversion to RTGI and DLSS.
 
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Ghostsonplanets said:
Yes. The reason why I think there will be such a huge jump from Portable Max to Docked is that (I think) memory will be limited to up to 4800/5500 MT/s while Portable and will go up to 6400 MT/s Docked (I'm assuming they're using LPDDR5). And the GPU Clocks Docked will be clocked at past the peak efficiency point, at around 900MHz - 1GHz. Granted, the 20W Docked figure I expect is more like "around" 20W.

Also, of course, all of that assuming T239 is fabbed on 4N. If it's fabbed on a node with worse performance characteristics, Nintendo will need to either clock at lower clocks or increase the power draw. But the latter isn't something I expect because I still expect Switch 2 to be a Nintendo like portable machine.
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I don't think it's a good idea to have different RAM speeds as It's gonna be another Xbox Series S/X scenario.
 
I don't think I've been this excited for a Nintendo console in a long time, having played every system since the SNES.

It's incredible what developers could do with the Switch given how little power the system had. Ports such as The WITCHER, Wolfenstein, Doom, Dying Light, NIER or Alien Isolation etc.

To think what they could do with a system that has power similar to the previous generation along with modern technology like DLSS and RR is almost to good to be true.

Makes me wonder what the new Metroid could look like, or a new Wave Race (reflections in the water & water simulation).
 
RumHamRigRunner said:
IIRC Final Fantasy XVI was being ported to the next Nintendo platform as well.
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It isn't. That was fake.
ertaboy356b said:
I don't think it's a good idea to have different RAM speeds as It's gonna be another Xbox Series S/X scenario.
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Different memory speeds between each mode is already how current Switch works. Portable can only go up to 2666 MT/s while Docked can go up to 3200 MT/s. Portable mode don't need the same amount of bandwidth as Docked and thus Nintendo can save some power for better battery life.

4800MT/s(~77GB/s) or even 5500 MT/s(~88GB/s) are perfectly acceptable for Switch 2 Handheld mode and let the device use lower energy and generate less heat while portable.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
That's not how nintendo operates with visuals. That's like saying they won't use physically based rendering because it doesn't serve a gameplay purpose
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did you forget Nintendo used light for some Ocarina of Time/Majora Mask puzzles, that a gameplay aplication for light, Nintendo is always thinking of ways how to do gameplay mechanics vwith everything they have in hand
 
I haven't hope, the reason is that the power is limited to around 10-20W, so going down clocks, so it would have less power that T239 in default settings.
 
Onizuka said:
I haven't hope, the reason is that the power is limited to around 10-20W, so going down clocks, so it would have less power that T239 in default settings.
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Whatever Nintendo chooses ARE T239's "default settings".

And from where I stand they're likely to be below 15, nevermind 20W.
 
RumHamRigRunner said:
IIRC Final Fantasy XVI was being ported to the next Nintendo platform as well.
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From what I've understood of that specific leak, there isn't anything really disproving it but a lot of Switch 2 and FF leakers basically said "Everything we've heard contradicts it".
Granted, there is a spoiler from that leak that has the potential to make or break their credibility so we'll see if they had any sort of basis when FF7 Rebirth releases.
 
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BDGAME said:
In that video DF says one of the reason that Series S don't have more Ray tracing games is the small 10 GB memory. If switch 2 have 12 or 16 GB, maybe it can have more ray traced games than Series S in the end.
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Hmmm… So, Not only do we have a tweet from the official Nvidia account which alludes to 16GB RAM as the closest thing to a nailed-on RAM spec, we now have DF stating that 10GB is as good as paltry for RT - Now, Yours Truly told everybody this much earlier in the year, while a basic Internet search of “How much RAM for RT and DLSS?” will show a consensus of 16GB RAM minimum requirement for competent performance. “Overly Optimistic”, I was told in this thread over a year ago, but then, I understood that a successor built to play “more XB1/PS4 ports which the current Switch can already have in some capacity” and not PS5/XS games would be nothing short of an all-round embarrassment and straight-up pathetic… BTW, that’s being as polite as possible.

It turns out that the leaked GPU is better than the one in the XSS (there’s a lot of denial about this, but it’s true). More RT games on it ought to be the expectation because the narrative on this successor matters. Once more, I feel not enough users on here, and taking part in general discussions elsewhere fully understand this. It’s not enough to have a more powerful system. Especially if the contemporaries are seen or perceived to do things better than it - It might be enough for YOU personally, but we’re talking about growing the platform into one that can easily outsell the PS2, push closer to 200m AND sell closer to 2 billion software units, if not more.

I know I’m very much a broken record at this point, but that’s OK when the song slaps harder than E.Honda and his hundred hands - Ultimately, we know that RT is a lock-in. We know DLSS is a lock-in. We know less powerful contemporaries have 16GB RAM, and we know that phones will adopt it rather quickly. It’s on the expectation officers to reconcile what we’ve heard and know with what they think “expectations in check” looks like… But the tweet I posted earlier in the thread won’t be talked about enough because of “Because Nintendo” vibes, although it’s from a proper source. Not Nate, Not Necro, Not DF rumour mills, ALL of which are NOT sources. The case for 16GB RAM has been getting ever stronger and, at this point, more realistic, tbqh.
 
Angel Whispers said:
Hmmm… So, Not only do we have a tweet from the official Nvidia account which alludes to 16GB RAM as the closest thing to a nailed-on RAM spec, we now have DF stating that 10GB is as good as paltry for RT - Now, Yours Truly told everybody this much earlier in the year, while a basic Internet search of “How much RAM for RT and DLSS?” will show a consensus of 16GB RAM minimum requirement for competent performance. “Overly Optimistic”, I was told in this thread over a year ago, but then, I understood that a successor built to play “more XB1/PS4 ports which the current Switch can already have in some capacity” and not PS5/XS games would be nothing short of an all-round embarrassment and straight-up pathetic… BTW, that’s being as polite as possible.

It turns out that the leaked GPU is better than the one in the XSS (there’s a lot of denial about this, but it’s true). More RT games on it ought to be the expectation because the narrative on this successor matters. Once more, I feel not enough users on here, and taking part in general discussions elsewhere fully understand this. It’s not enough to have a more powerful system. Especially if the contemporaries are seen or perceived to do things better than it - It might be enough for YOU personally, but we’re talking about growing the platform into one that can easily outsell the PS2, push closer to 200m AND sell closer to 2 billion software units, if not more.

I know I’m very much a broken record at this point, but that’s OK when the song slaps harder than E.Honda and his hundred hands - Ultimately, we know that RT is a lock-in. We know DLSS is a lock-in. We know less powerful contemporaries have 16GB RAM, and we know that phones will adopt it rather quickly. It’s on the expectation officers to reconcile what we’ve heard and know with what they think “expectations in check” looks like… But the tweet I posted earlier in the thread won’t be talked about enough because of “Because Nintendo” vibes, although it’s from a proper source. Not Nate, Not Necro, Not DF rumour mills, ALL of which are NOT sources. The case for 16GB RAM has been getting ever stronger and, at this point, more realistic, tbqh.
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If there's one thing we know about the Switch 2 as a hard and fast fact, RT exists for it. I do want to check with this because, while I don't know much about it, it's still relevant to the conversation.
Does ARM and X64 architecture have any impact on the potential for RT on a system? Like do they effect the memory enough to make it harder to run RT on a device? My logic is that if ARM makes it slightly easier to run RT on the Switch 2 than RT on the XSS, that could sway things just enough to make 12GB on the Switch 2 possible to run RT, but I don't know for sure.
 
I don’t see T239 being used elsewhere because it surely raises security and piracy questions. Also, it’s a fully custom SoC built to client requirements.
 
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