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

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pelusilla6 said:
New OLED bundle with Mario Kart (surprising right? 😆)

Click to expand...

giphy.gif
 
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Switch 2 announcement impacting sales is a mute point, everything points to the Switch 2 being announced early next year, and sales of the Switch will be very low all year round next year, especially in the west. All the big releases to the console are done, there is no more OLED models coming to cause a temporary boost to hardware sales as well. So the Switch 2 will be announced when the Switch has just hit its saturation point as a system. Nintendo has already done everything they can to prolong Switch sales as long as possible except a price drop and that is the last tool they will use and it will be used when Switch 2 is revealed to the masses.
 
Danny said:
Switch 2 announcement impacting sales is a mute point, everything points to the Switch 2 being announced early next year, and sales of the Switch will be very low all year round next year, especially in the west. All the big releases to the console are done, there is no more OLED models coming to cause a temporary boost to hardware sales as well. So the Switch 2 will be announced when the Switch has just hit its saturation point as a system. Nintendo has already done everything they can to prolong Switch sales as long as possible except a price drop and that is the last tool they will use and it will be used when Switch 2 is revealed to the masses.
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Shuntaro Furukawa has stated they dont plan to do a price cut for Switch
 
Tron1 said:
Announce 2 and price drop 1. Issue solved.
Click to expand...

What's the benefit for Nintendo to do this? Only way this makes sense is if it's going to be released in the first 3-4 months of 2024. In that case they would begrudgingly suck up the hit to their holiday revenue to start the marketing cycle for Switch 2. (can't exactly rule it out yet, but doubt is creeping in)

I had thought for a while that there was a chance that they might have to acknowledge that the Switch 2 exists earlier than they wanted. But the number and intensity of the leaks has not been strong enough to move their hand. It's just been the report from Gamescom basically (and I'm not even sure how widespread into the general public that got). But they're not super worried about the niche audience that cares about ray reconstruction being confirmed or those studiously scouring shipping logs like

f998649db25e687002d170c44a7e482887817b9c.gif


Which I love and appreciate. Keep it up @LiC . Waiting on that fateful day you find the smoking gun (picture below)

MqAoZ1.gif
 
Danny said:
Switch 2 announcement impacting sales is a mute point, everything points to the Switch 2 being announced early next year, and sales of the Switch will be very low all year round next year, especially in the west. All the big releases to the console are done, there is no more OLED models coming to cause a temporary boost to hardware sales as well. So the Switch 2 will be announced when the Switch has just hit its saturation point as a system. Nintendo has already done everything they can to prolong Switch sales as long as possible except a price drop and that is the last tool they will use and it will be used when Switch 2 is revealed to the masses.
Click to expand...

Argh, You don't know any of this.

I'm feeling like I'm taking crazy pills; every single year of the switches life, at this point, we barely knew anything about the next years software lineup, but people keep insisting that this time for sure we know the lineup! The 3DS got support for a couple of years in to the switch. The PS/Xbox consoles are still in the cross gen period for those, 3 years after launch. There's also essentially guaranteed to be a strong crossgen period for the Switch which blew all of those out of the water in terms of success, either through backwards compatibility and titles continuing to release on switch and just so happening to be playable on Switch 2, or they go the extra mile and make significantly improved Switch 2 versions.

On top of that, there is zero reason whatsoever to assume there will be no more special editions. If anything, that flies in the face of all the previous hardware. The 3DS not only got new limited editions after the switch launched, it got an entire new model. It got new special editions throughout 2018!

They're selling 15m+ units this FY. Literally no console in history has gone from that to 'very low' the next year.
 
Goodtwin said:
Is this source credible? I mean, that is not an OLED model in the picture? Not that it would be surprising, it will make for an attractive Black Friday bundle.
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Yes, he's reliable. The image is just from the LCD Switch + MK8 bundle. What he's reporting is that a OLED + MK8 bundle will also be releases soon. No pictures of the packaging of this OLED+MK8 bundle yet.
Danny said:
I mean he would say that wouldn't he? You don't reveal a price drop in an interview long before said price drop is announced.
Click to expand...
The new bundle models are effectively a price cut. They bundle games + NSO subscription.

It's fair to say that Switch won't see price cuts, as Nintendo is already training consumers to not expect their consoles to drop prices.

Which makes sense, given that global economy is widly unpredictable lately and dropping prices in a rising cost and inflation macroeconomy scenario is a way to backfire at you.
 
Nintendo has “technically” discounted the Switch: via software bundles. If an OG Switch is $299 WITH some game alongside it, then there is a discount in there
 
Concernt said:
That... Isn't an OLED model in the picture.

This is their standard Mario Kart bundle with new packaging.
Click to expand...

I also wanted to play gotcha but they do acknowledge that fact in the article - the description below the image reads "the packaging of which strongly resembles the Switch pack shown here".
 
Hosermess said:
I also wanted to play gotcha but they do acknowledge that fact in the article - the description below the image reads "the packaging of which strongly resembles the Switch pack shown here".
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to "play gotcha", what an uncharitable read.

Pessimism, perhaps, or optimism, but not playing games!
 
wccftech.com

Alan Wake 2 PC Performance Impressions: NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 With Path Tracing Delivers Photorealistic Graphics

Alan Wake 2 is here with all its Path Tracing goodness that is further leveled up with NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 to deliver photorealistic graphics.
wccftech.com wccftech.com

"You might have noticed that Ray Reconstruction doesn't provide a benefit when enabled in RT Low mode. The most rational explanation here is that the in-game denoisers don't seem to be as intensive compared to the RR implementation. Hence, enabling RR becomes more taxing but at RT Medium and RT High modes, the denoisers are more taxing on the game which leads to RR being the most efficient approach. You will get higher visual fidelity with RR enabled at RT Low mode but you will also see a loss in FPS."

RR is extremely efficient relative to really good denoisers, but it is as expensive as less good denoisers that are good enough for lower quality RT right now. We will see how NVIDIA develops RR for lower quality ray tracing.

And RT is just very expensive as shown once again.

"We also have the performance comparison of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 running various RT modes. Going from No RT to RT Low leads to a -25% to -30% drop in FPS. Going from Low to RT Medium is another -30% hit in FPS while going from Low to RT High is a 36% FPS loss. Also, the difference in performance between the RT High and RT Medium modes is very close so you just rather have RT High enabled with DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction."
 
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uncommentedcode said:
The moment they announce the Switch 2, people aren't going to be as inclined to buy a current Nintendo Switch model.

They're going to want to wait to announce Switch 2, or even confirm new hardware is releasing, until as late as possible.
Click to expand...
Tell that to the people who bought a PS3 Super Slim, or an Xbox 360 E, or a Wii mini.

Look I'm not saying an announcement is imminent, but the overwhelming majority of people who are buying into the Switch ecosystem right now are ultra casual gamers. They're not buying into a new system right when it comes out, especially if it's going to be more expensive. The people who care most about getting the NG Switch right away are people who have had a Switch for years at this point or core gamers on other platforms who already know a successor is on the horizon and have no interest in the current Switch as it stands.
 
FUCKING FINALLY FOUND A LINK ON HOW OPTIX WORKS, THANK FUCK.

"
Now back to work. In the 16 seconds that pbrt-v4 spends in its Buildinstance BVHs phase, it does the following three things for each geometricobject that is instanced repeatedly in the scene:


  • Reads any geometry specified via PLY files from disk. (Any geometry notspecified in PLY files has already been read during regular parsingof the scene description.)
  • Converts the geometry into the in-memory geometric representation thatOptiX takes as input to its BVH construction routines.
  • Has OptiX build its BVH.

The first two steps run on the CPU and the third runs on the GPU."

Swallowing the Elephant (Part 9): We Got Instances

More work on performance with pbrt-v4 and the Moana Island scene, this time looking at getting object instances ready for rendering.
pharr.org pharr.org

So the steps are:

1. Do prep work on building BVH (CPU)
2. Build BVH (GPU via Async compute)
3. Do BVH traversal (ideally RT Cores only, but RT cores probably can't handle the load)
4. Denoise image (ideally tensor cores only, but tensor cores may not be able to handle entire load)


So this does have a heavy load on CPUs (as of now) if the BVH structure you need to create is complicated.

The CPU part applies mostly to CPU bound games like Zelda and....... Pokemon. And probably Xenoblade as well.

Zelda and Xenoblade may not be CPU bound on Switch 2 depending on their gameplay ambitions, but Pokemon is so ridiculously CPU bound that getting animations to run at even 15 FPS and having pop-in that isn't PS1 level will probably eat up all of the Switch 2's extra CPU cycles.

Steps 3 and 4 already have specialized hardware (NVIDIA may just need more RT cores) and step 2 will surely have specialized hardware in the future, but step 1 seems like it may stay on the CPU.
 
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Terrell said:
Yeah, truthfully, any decrease of Switch sales should have already happened, and it largely has (hence why Nintendo trended their annual sales forecast down this fiscal year), but it’s not the sudden or abrupt drop in hardware purchase interest some people expect there to be. And people buying a console at year 6 know exactly what they’re getting themselves into, nobody should get twisted up on that, it’s just a known reality. And such buyers are just far more likely to be late buyers of the next hardware, as well (aside from those year 6 buyers who are just replacing an old one with an OLED because OOO SHINY).

What happens to Switch post-announcement is going to depend on what Nintendo does with Switch after new hardware gets announced and launched, but there's no guarantee that consumers in year 6 or 7 are suddenly going to be any more down on it than they already would be by a gaming device in its sixth year.
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As with anything there will be that loud whiny person complaining online about buying the Switch "recently" after the Switch 2 is revealed and that seems to be the concern of a lot of posters. That is a perception issue and not the reality.
 
Probably Unreal 6 etc will focus a lot on how to generate the hyper detailed environments allowed by nanite while not putting a huge load on the CPU’s BVH prep.

(Yes, I know Nanite by itself lowers CPU usage by minimizing draw calls, but the sheer amount of detail probably does not help with BVH prep)
 
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Hosermess said:
What's the benefit for Nintendo to do this? Only way this makes sense is if it's going to be released in the first 3-4 months of 2024. In that case they would begrudgingly suck up the hit to their holiday revenue to start the marketing cycle for Switch 2. (can't exactly rule it out yet, but doubt is creeping in)

I had thought for a while that there was a chance that they might have to acknowledge that the Switch 2 exists earlier than they wanted. But the number and intensity of the leaks has not been strong enough to move their hand. It's just been the report from Gamescom basically (and I'm not even sure how widespread into the general public that got). But they're not super worried about the niche audience that cares about ray reconstruction being confirmed or those studiously scouring shipping logs like

f998649db25e687002d170c44a7e482887817b9c.gif


Which I love and appreciate. Keep it up @LiC . Waiting on that fateful day you find the smoking gun (picture below)

MqAoZ1.gif
Click to expand...
Whenever they announce 2 a price drop of 1 should follow. There are a lot of people that will pick up switch at 99-150. Especially if 2 is going to be as expensive as rumors suggest. People have to remember not every one can shell out 200 when they want. No everyone is in a financial situation to do that.
 
Regarding the speed of the Switch 2 SSD:
Wasn't there talk in the past about a minimum speed for some functions of the latest version of Unreal Engine? I don't remember if it was 500MB/s.

Is it wrong to think that Nintendo will do everything to reach that speed?
 
Intel demoing Meteor Lake integrated GPU running Dying Light 2 using XeSS (Intel Xe Super Sampling. An AI Upsampling solution like DLSS):


Teal'c said:
Regarding the speed of the Switch 2 SSD:
Wasn't there talk in the past about a minimum speed for some functions of the latest version of Unreal Engine? I don't remember if it was 500MB/s.

Is it wrong to think that Nintendo will do everything to reach that speed?
Click to expand...
The minimum of 500 MB/s was an estimation from developer Brainchild, who used to participate in this thread, about what minimum level of read speed his project/game would need for a Switch 2 port be feasible.

From Epic itself, with regards to Unreal 5 Nanite and Matrix Awakens demo, Epic has said that they need around 10MB/s per frame. So at a 30 FPS render, it would require 300MB/s.:
However, the whole point of the virtualised texturing system used by Nanite is that it's actually very lightweight in bandwidth - the only detail streamed in is that which is required onscreen at any given point. "This distinguishes it from traditional engines... [with Nanite] it's very gradual," says Michal Valient. "As you move around, it hovers at like 10MB per frame, because we stream bits of textures, bits of Nanite data... we stream textures or small tiles as you need them. As you render them, Nanite picks the actual little clusters of triangles you need to render that particular view. And we stream just that, so we don't over-stream too much. And that actually allows it to be really swift when it comes to just I/O and that throughput."

[UPDATE: After publication, Epic asked for a correction here, the original piece quoted Michal Valient as saying the data throughput is 10MB/s - it's 10MB per frame. At 30fps, this would be 300MB per second.]
Click to expand...
www.eurogamer.net

Inside The Matrix Awakens: a vision for the future of real-time graphics

For Digital Foundry, the highlight of The Game Awards wasn't actually an award as such or even a massive triple-A revea…
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net
 
Teal'c said:
Regarding the speed of the Switch 2 SSD:
Wasn't there talk in the past about a minimum speed for some functions of the latest version of Unreal Engine? I don't remember if it was 500MB/s.

Is it wrong to think that Nintendo will do everything to reach that speed?
Click to expand...
1GB, but that's after decompression. If the FDE/dedicated decompression block is efficient, it could be 300-500MB/s reads for the SSD, fed into the FDE for an effective speed of 1000MB/s.
 
robertman2 said:
Game Freak sucks at programming
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This statement is echoing the sentiments of the similarly intellectually lazy "lazy dev" rhetoric that people keep using to proudly flaunt their ignorance of the realities of software development.

Pokemon has an annual release cycle which means that production schedules are correspondingly tight. Optimization is the very last thing that occurs during development since implementing features and bug fixes are prioritized.
 
From what I can tell, Nanite is only useful in super high detail scenes and those super high detail scenes are only impressive at a resolution that the PS5 can’t render at while doing super high detail.

So I doubt the Switch 2 will use Nanite much at all so they probably don’t have to worry about the UE5 transfer speed requirements. 1 GB/s would probably just be really good for load times though.
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
From what I can tell, Nanite is only useful in super high detail scenes and those super high detail scenes are only impressive at a resolution that the PS5 can’t render at while doing super high detail.

So I doubt the Switch 2 will use Nanite much at all so they probably don’t have to worry about the UE5 transfer speed requirements. 1 GB/s would probably just be really good for load times though.
Click to expand...
nanite is useful in low detail scenes as well. Epic recommends using nanite regardless of polygon count unless your mesh fits in an edge case where nanite doesn't work.

Concernt said:
1GB, but that's after decompression. If the FDE/dedicated decompression block is efficient, it could be 300-500MB/s reads for the SSD, fed into the FDE for an effective speed of 1000MB/s.
Click to expand...
we don't know any speeds or any details about the FDE
 
InsaneZero said:
This statement is echoing the sentiments of the similarly intellectually lazy "lazy dev" rhetoric that people keep using to proudly flaunt their ignorance of the realities of software development.

Pokemon has an annual release cycle which means that production schedules are correspondingly tight. Optimization is the very last thing that occurs during development since implementing features and bug fixes are prioritized.
Click to expand...

A lot of optimization work at the end is just adding pop-in and cutting framerates and animations of distant objects... Which Pokemon SV has more of than any game in the last decade.

But like, why is the engine working so badly that it requires such severe optimizations? What is eating up all of these CPU cycles?
 
InsaneZero said:
This statement is echoing the sentiments of the similarly intellectually lazy "lazy dev" rhetoric that people keep using to proudly flaunt their ignorance of the realities of software development.

Pokemon has an annual release cycle which means that production schedules are correspondingly tight. Optimization is the very last thing that occurs during development since implementing features and bug fixes are prioritized.
Click to expand...
Game Freak sucks at balancing the realities of modern game development against their insane release schedule
 
InsaneZero said:
This statement is echoing the sentiments of the similarly intellectually lazy "lazy dev" rhetoric that people keep using to proudly flaunt their ignorance of the realities of software development.

Pokemon has an annual release cycle which means that production schedules are correspondingly tight. Optimization is the very last thing that occurs during development since implementing features and bug fixes are prioritized.
Click to expand...
Pokemon games have been held together with gum and string since the original Red/Green releases, and their other releases like Little Town Hero are usually pretty poor technically.

Game Freak genuinely sucks at the technical aspect of games.
 
kvetcha said:
Game Freak sucks at balancing the realities of modern game development against their insane release schedule
Click to expand...
Yes, but that's specifically a management problem rather than a programming problem.
 
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ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
A lot of optimization work at the end is just adding pop-in and cutting framerates and animations of distant objects... Which Pokemon SV has more of than any game in the last decade.

But like, why is the engine working so badly that it requires such severe optimizations? What is eating up all of these CPU cycles?
Click to expand...

I dont know if it is true what i have hear so people could correct me if im wrong, but from what i see Gamefreak has not updated their engine for the switch, so maybe is more of an engine problem that end up being more difficult for them to get it work in a short period of time
 
Regarding this Pokémon talk, before talking about programming, CPU costs, etc, it's more fair to delve into Game Freak CEDEC and JP CG industry interviews to try to get their workflow. Pokémon tech problems aren't one of talent but rather of development time. We also don't have much information about their workflows, tools, methods, etc, outside of what they share. So I think it's unfair to label as if they suck at what they do without even knowing what they're doing:

cgworld.jp

『Pokémon LEGENDS アルセウス』＆『ポケットモンスター スカーレット・バイオレット』ゲーム性もルックの方向性も異なる2つのタイトルを同時に開発するためのワークフロー～CEDEC2022（3）

『Pokémon LEGENDS アルセウス』＆『ポケットモンスター スカーレット・バイオレット』ゲーム性もルックの方向性も異なる2つのタイトルを同時に開発するためのワークフロー
cgworld.jp cgworld.jp
game.watch.impress.co.jp

「ポケモンSV」ポケモンの表現は部位ごとにこだわる！ クワッスの頭や汚れなど見た目の仕組みを解説【CEDEC2023】

　もはや生活の一部になったといっても過言ではないほど世界的に浸透している「ポケットモンスター」シリーズ。「ポケットモンスター 赤・緑」からはじまるナンバリングタイトルをはじめ、「Pokemon LEGENDS アルセウス」や「ポケモンスナップ」、「ポケモンGO」、「ポケモンスリープ」など多くのタイトルが発売されてきた。
game.watch.impress.co.jp
Teal'c said:
We still don't have any hard data about this dedicated decompression block, right?
Click to expand...
No. We know it exists, but we don't know which compression algorithm/s it support, what is the compression rate, how it does work, etc. At best we can guess that it will support GDeflate, which was co-developed by Nvidia, IHVs and Microsoft for DirectStorage. But that's about it:

developer.nvidia.com

NVCOMP

developer.nvidia.com developer.nvidia.com
developer.nvidia.com

Accelerating Load Times for DirectX Games and Apps with GDeflate for DirectStorage | NVIDIA Technical Blog

Load times. They are the bane of any developer trying to construct a seamless experience. Trying to hide loading in a game by forcing a player to shimmy through narrow passages or take extremely slow…
developer.nvidia.com developer.nvidia.com
 
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