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

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VagrantValmar said:
They will also likely upgrade the visuals in which case 4k60 is way too much imo
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I mean yeah, but to be fair, we won't know what they will do with the next AC. I hear they will bring back the city. That would be nice.
OctoSplattack said:
They definitely aren't going to say anything on Golden Week, so the last week of the month is out. I think next week is a possibility if only because they have announced a new console outside an earnings release or trade show once or twice this century. But if I had to bet, it's probably going to be the earnings release.
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Oh I see.
 
Steve said:
Your actually right.
Somehow the game always felt like 60fps. Most likely the beautiful visual, that makes it unnoticeable
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The visuals are beautiful for a reason. If anything, its setback nature allows the team to push the visuals way further than any other switch exclusive. I absolutely expect the next one to be a showcase, especially now that it likely has a massive budget scaled to the quintillion copies it sold.
 
Soralink91 said:
So if we don't get the acknowledgement in the next 2-3 weeks than we could be in for a long long wait?
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Yup that’s where we are at. If nothing is mentioned, then it’s quite possible we won’t hear anything about Switch 2 at all until October maybe.

I am hoping Nintendo don’t do that route
 
darthdiablo said:
Yup that’s where we are at. If nothing is mentioned, then it’s quite possible we won’t hear anything about Switch 2 at all until October maybe.

I am hoping Nintendo don’t do that route
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Meanwhile there’s me waiting for a dev kit leak or hear some insider talks about it, since those been on developers hands for a while, with Sega going absolutely ham. I’m extremely curious about the Ram, since we have 12-16 in mind

Like I’m still surprised That we know more about the Ps5 pro than the switch 2
 
oldpuck said:
This video, in an offhand comment, answered about a hundred questions I had about Nvidia's architecture, and lead me to the exact documentation I needed.
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Oh man now that you mentioned it, I looked at the linked documentation from that video and this thing is a gold mine. So much good info.

Anybody who has any questions or any interest in how Ampere works, this thing will probably answer, like, all of your questions. Should make our speculation a little more educated. It makes me feel smart, anyway... Very much looking forward to how this changes things for your analysis - if at all - oldpuck.
 
Giancarlo said:
Animal Crossing is not a franchise that demands a lot for a console, it will be easy to do 4K60 on Animal Crossing 6.
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When I did an analysis on New Horizons a few years ago I was surprised to find out that it ran at only 30 fps, but really it's a reminder that graphics rendering isn't the only constraint on frame rate, and the overall design of a game will affect how quickly frames can be processed.

My guess is that there are multiple components competing for frame time budget and there isn't just one culprit. The game has object permanence, so depending on the game logic and how the data for that are structured and accessed, there may have not been much room for that and the high fidelity graphics to fit within 16 ms for a single frame. There's also the possibility that the 30 fps cap was chosen for worst case scenarios of too many objects loaded in memory impacting performance. Of course this is just speculation but it was a curious case nonetheless.
 
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oldpuck said:
This video, in an offhand comment, answered about a hundred questions I had about Nvidia's architecture, and lead me to the exact documentation I needed.
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I never picked up on this prior, but the comment about completing DLSS for the previous frame while rendering for the next frame in order to run all systems concurrently was quite interesting.
 
Giancarlo said:
Animal Crossing is not a franchise that demand a lot for a console, it will be easy to do 4K60 on Animal Crossing 6
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On the one hand, I think you're right in the sense that the game design of Animal Crossing doesn't require a system as powerful as Switch 2 to run the game at 60fps. For example, I believe the original Animal Crossing on GameCube ran at 60fps, and people like that game a lot. On the other hand, I think you could probably take a system as powerful as Switch 2 and have it render a single rock, and depending on the fidelity of that rock and the effects applied to it, I imagine you could use every resource of the system to render it at 1080p and 30fps.

I find it really hard to predict what resolution and framerate a game will run at without knowing the developer vision for the project. When it's a port of an existing game, I find it more doable. For example, perhaps New Horizons could run at 4K60 on Switch 2, depending on how big of a hardware jump we're expecting and if DLSS is being used.
 
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The wait until May 7th is getting more and more excruciating this is like January all over again, hopefully it doesnt have the same results what followed in February
 
The next Animal Crossing will probably be one of the biggest and most ambitious Nintendo games ever, so 4k 60 fps is far from a given
 
Shoulder said:
I never picked up on this prior, but the comment about completing DLSS for the previous frame while rendering for the next frame in order to run all systems concurrently was quite interesting.
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Yeah - that's why something like 15ms of DLSS cost actually doesn't make 4k60 DLSS impossible on Drake. Upscaling can be happening on the next frame without interfering with the frame's rendering.

I'm not actually sure if Wolfenstein used this technique. It's a little silly on a PC game, though perhaps it's enabled only when settings are pushed to max? It really seems like Nvidia showing how far developers could push it, more than how far they should.

lattjeful said:
Oh man now that you mentioned it, I looked at the linked documentation from that video and this thing is a gold mine. So much good info.
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It's great - I had read that paper before. If you compare all the Nvidia architectures since the 360 era, they all kinda look alike - except Turing, which looks very strange, before Ampere reverses course. I had wondered why that was the case and this offhand comment not only explained it, but lead me to realize that Ampere isn't a course reversal like I thought. If you really care, I'll give you a dump but warning DEEPLY ESOTERIC BULLSHIT BELOW (also, paging @Thraktor, since we talked about this in the past)

Pascal organizes an SM like this: Each SM has 4 partitions, each partition has 32 CUDA cores, and a scheduler.
Turing organizes an SM like this: Each SM has 4 partitions, each partition has 16 CUDA cores, plus 16 Integer cores, and a scheduler
Ampere organizes and SM like this: Each SM has 4 partitions, each partition has 32 CUDA cores, and a scheduler. Half the CUDA cores support Integer operations

It looks like Pascal had a basic way to organize SMs down, Turing took this wild bet on integer math that kinda makes no sense for a GPU, and then Ampere comes back to Pascal's structure, with some small extra support for integer math.

The problem is that Nvidia's architecture papers, in their rush to make themselves sound good and brand everything, have obscured some of the details. That's not actually what's happening, but to get there, I needed to know why Nvidia thought they needed so much integer power in a GPU, which is basically a floating point machine.

The answer, which was in the video, is ray tracing. When you're navigating large data structures in memory, you do a lot of pointer arithmetic. If you want the 10th item in a list, the awful way is to start at the beginning of the list and scan all of memory till you find the one labeled "10." The faster way is to make every entry in the list the same size. Multiply that size by ten, added to the address of the beginning of the list, and you'll be right there.

That math is all integer operations, and ray tracing makes lots of complex data structures. Hence the need for lot of integer support. But why did Ampere pull it back? The answer is, they didn't.

If you go back to Pascal, each SM has 4 partitions, each partition has a scheduler. On the surface that means that each partition can execute one instruction across 32 cores, and each SM can execute 4 instructions at a time. But actually Pascal's schedulers have two dispatch units. Each partition has the ability to execute 2 instructions at the same time, but if and only if the 2 instructions never share a resource at any time.

This is called Instruction Level Parallelism. There is this tension in GPUs - you want to add cores for more power. You need to keep all those cores fed. Lots of partitions, with only a few cores a piece, it's easy to full load a partition, but it can be hard to make enough threads that all the partitions have something to do. Smaller number of partitions, with more cores, it's easier to make sure all the partitions have work, but each partition might contain cores that are twiddling their thumbs.

ILP is really hard to take advantage of, unfortunately, and it adds complexity to everything. Turing came up with a totally different solution that allowed them to eliminate the hardware that makes ILP possible, but actually increase parallelism. Here is how.

Pascal's CUDA cores actually weren't just FP32 units. They were also integer units. But an integer operation would take an instruction, and prevent any FP32 instructions from running in that partition at the time. No worries, in most shaders, integer ops are rare. Now along comes ray tracing and increases integer operations.

Turing's design doesn't add special Int units like it seems to. It just breaks the existing CUDA cores into two pieces. One piece is just the INT ALU, the other piece is just the FP32 ALU. It actually removes the ability for the scheduler to dispatch two instructions at once. But since most instructions take multiple clock cycles to run, the schedule has a chance to fire of a second instruction while the first is running. And if the first is a FP instruction, it knows for a fact that the INT pipeline is free, or vice versa.

This is a much simpler way of deciding when two instructions can run at the same time, and it's much easier to take advantage of, as long as you have a good mix of Integer and integer operations. Which Turing does... in games that use ray tracing.

As the video says, the result was that there was just enough of a bump in performance that you could get the same frame rates with RT, as you used to be able to get without RT. Which is a huge accomplishment, but as the video points out, is less than people expected. What the video also doesn't mention is that this design, because it removes even the small ILP that Pascal was able to get to, when RT is off, the leap in performance is lower than expected. The design isn't as efficient.

Now Ampere starts to make sense. Instead of being a return to the Pascal design, it is more like an evolution of Turing. It keeps Pascal's structure of having no second dispatch port, and instead getting parallelism by having two data paths. It just restores that combined INT/FP ALU design in one of the two paths. And it goes further, allowing the schedulers to dispatch to the RT units or the tensor unit as well. Again, instructions take multiple clocks to run, so instead of the scheduler issuing an instruction, going to sleep till it completes, then waking up again, the scheduler is constantly able to dispatch instructions, at the cost potentially leaving one of the paths inactive for an instruction or two.

The downside of this design is that while on-paper the amount of INT compute has stayed the same, it's now competing with FP compute again. They're not blocking each other like before, but they do share resources and can compete. That's probably good, the amount of INT compute was probably too high, even for RT workloads. But it means the RT core needs to claw back a little of the performance lost from having to compete for the INT/FP32 data path.

Part of Nvidia's solution is to just allow the RT cores to run in parallel with everything else. That hides the cost of RT. But that doesn't make RT faster, it just lets the cost hide as long as it's not the slowest operation. You still need to speed up the RT core. That's why the second gen RT core was such a redesign. It needed to run faster. Nvidia hasn't talked much about how they doubled throughput on the RT core, but at least part of the solution was upping the size of the L1 cache in each SM.

Right now, none of this changes my thoughts on what Ampere can do in the Switch, but it makes some of the decisions click for me in a new way. If nothing else, the emphasis on parallel operation shows how much dedicated ports might be able to squeeze extra performance by overlaying RT/Upscaling/Rendering tasks in ways that PC games don't
 
We are neither getting 4K nor 60fps for Animal Crossing lol. And not because switch 2 would not be capable of such a thing. in fact, if any Nintendo game could get away with that, it would be Animal Crossing. But Nintendo just doesn't care about that sort of thing for this particular game. Aside from the recent Pokemon titles, Animal Crossing is the only other series that Nintendo just doesn't seem to think is worth pushing the graphics to anything more than an acceptable level. Remember, Animal Crossing for the GameCube was literally a port of the N64 game with - as far as I know - literally no graphical changes whatsoever!
 
CAPTAIN'S LOG, SUPPLEMENTAL ESOTERIC BULLSHIT:

It's worth noting, this is probably at least part of AMD's rasterization advantage. Nvidia's solution is really clever, and it's a much simpler way to get most of the FP32 utilization of more elaborate scheduling strategies, while opening up the ability to farm out these new instruction types (RT, tensor, INT8) also in parallel.

AMD doesn't have those alternate types, and can lean into making their scheduler as complex as necessary to milk every drop out of every FP32 core. It'll be interesting to see if AMD's catchup to treat matrix math and RT ops as first class operations results in a degradation of their raster performance, or if they're able to maintain that advantage while bringing the rest of it up to snuff.
 
kingman said:
We are neither getting 4K nor 60fps for Animal Crossing lol. And not because switch 2 would not be capable of such a thing. in fact, if any Nintendo game could get away with that, it would be Animal Crossing. But Nintendo just doesn't care about that sort of thing for this particular game. Aside from the recent Pokemon titles, Animal Crossing is the only other series that Nintendo just doesn't seem to think is worth pushing the graphics to anything more than an acceptable level. Remember, Animal Crossing for the GameCube was literally a port of the N64 game with - as far as I know - literally no graphical changes whatsoever!
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This is completely contradictory - if a game is not "pushing graphics", then the upper limit on resolution and framerate is higher. This also completely ignores the most recent and most successful game in the series, which absolutely delivered modern graphical techniques on the Switch.
 
VagrantValmar said:
Hmm the whole "adding upgrades patches" to NSO doesn't sound too wild. Buy it for 10 or just sub to NSO. Kinda like Mario Kart.
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I can see that happening too, but assuming the subscription remains exactly the same as it is today that would likely imply support for a VERY small subset of titles; that, OR a vast catalog of patches will also bring a significant increase in the cost of the annual NSO subscrition (that doesn't necessarily include an increase in the cost per se: they might just reduce the amount of people that are allowed to share the subscription, which I'm fairly sure is currently a very high number)

Not really a fan of this specific option to be honest, as I prefer to "own" as much stuff as possible... but if that's going to be the only way to enjoy improvements to already purchased games I'll very likely bite the bullet.
 
KarlRemarx said:
This is completely contradictory - if a game is not "pushing graphics", then the upper limit on resolution and framerate is higher. This also completely ignores the most recent and most successful game in the series, which absolutely delivered modern graphical techniques on the Switch.
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As I said it's not a question of whether switch 2 or even Nintendo is capable of making Animal Crossing 4K or 60fps. it's just that they simply don't want to put in any additional effort to do so.

And Animal Crossing for the switch is not impressive by any stretch.
 
kingman said:
As I said it's not a question of whether switch 2 or even Nintendo is capable of making Animal Crossing 4K or 60fps. it's just that they simply don't want to put in any additional effort to do so.

And Animal Crossing for the switch is not impressive by any stretch.
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As I said: you don't know what you're talking about if you think Nintendo has the option of hitting 60fps in a flagship game and is simply choosing not to because "additional effort".
 
KarlRemarx said:
As I said: you don't know what you're talking about if you think Nintendo has the option of hitting 60fps in a flagship game and is simply choosing not to because "additional effort".
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Im not sure we get any patches at all. Nate the hate stated that he thinks its likely that Switch 2 will just have basic backwards compability, you can play Switch 1 games on Switch 2 but nothing more fancy than that. Nintendo is not Sony or Microsoft and is not likely to go the same route as them when it comes to bc.
 
kingman said:
So then why do YOU think they didn't?
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They "didn't" because they couldn't achieve it on Switch 1 hardware. Like, this is really obvious in a game that is completely open-ended about letting you tank the framerate by freely placing hundreds of objects with modern, good quality PBR style materials in a single scene. This isn't an "effort" issue, it's the nature of what the game offers - an almost entirely terraformable environment (which you can do in real time, and NPCs will dynamically pathfind around your work as you do it) with thousands of different placeable assets.
Danny said:
Im not sure we get any patches at all. Nate the hate stated that he thinks its likely that Switch 2 will just have basic backwards compability, you can play Switch 1 games on Switch 2 but nothing more fancy than that. Nintendo is not Sony or Microsoft and is not likely to go the same route as them when it comes to bc.
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I'm not talking about whether we get them or not, I agree the most likely outcome is that we get whatever baseline enhancement comes from running them on better hardware but with no additional enhancement work done. I'm just talking about the false narrative that Nintendo simply doesn't care about graphics in Animal Crossing, when the most recent game completely overhauled the artstyle to include modern material rendering, which they could absolutely have gotten away with excluding, given the art and technical demands of implementing it.
 
Danny said:
Im not sure we get any patches at all. Nate the hate stated that he thinks its likely that Switch 2 will just have basic backwards compability, you can play Switch 1 games on Switch 2 but nothing more fancy than that. Nintendo is not Sony or Microsoft and is not likely to go the same route as them when it comes to bc.
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Well, nobody of us (not even Nate) knows. For me personally new games are more important than graphical patches (even though I‘d appreciate them). So it wouldn’t really bother me if they don’t offer them.
 
Darknut85 said:
Well, nobody of us (not even Nate) knows. For me personally new games are more important than graphical patches (even though I‘d appreciate them). So it wouldn’t really bother me if they don’t offer them.
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It's worth pointing out that we don't even know with 100% certainty from any source that we're getting BC. Sure there's so much implication that it may as well be true, but still.

Graphical patches would be ideal, especially since there's a lot of games that would benefit from the increased frame rate, resolution and texture quality, but I can live without them. I just hope Switch 1 games are playable at all on Switch 2.
 
Shareholder Chad said:
d7273bc66e176b9d2fe977caecf22207.gif



Hang in there friends. I know we've taken a bad beat this year but we gotta hold hope we are in the timeline that sees the Switch 2 become the best and most successful it can be. Now is a great time to explore franchises you haven't tried before, Destroy your backlog, or even try out some old classics that gave you joy in the past.
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May 7th is coming up whether we want it or not.
 
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