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

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Dakhil said:
GHz ≠ TFLOPs

GHz = the number of instructions the GPU can execute per second (i.e. the GPU frequency)
TFLOPs = the number of arithmetic operations (e.g. addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) involving numbers with decimal points (floating point numbers) the GPU can do per second

Considering Samsung mentioned planning on launching LPDDR6 in 2026 at the earliest, I think Nintendo's more likely to use LPDDR6 than LPDDR5X-10700 for a revision since JEDEC's going to more likely than not officially validate LPDDR6, which likely enables Nintendo to source the LPDDR6 modules and the LPDDR6 controller from more than one company. On the other hand, I think Samsung's more likely than not going to be the only provider of the LPDDR5X-10700 modules and the LPDDR5X-10700 controller.

And Samsung's press release mentions Samsung starting mass production of LPDDR5X-10700 modules in 2H 2024.

In the best case scenario, Nintendo thinks that VRR is an important enough feature is important enough to support in handheld mode and TV mode.
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The Steam Deck's GPU has 512 Pipelines so its clock speed and GFLOPs are very close, 1600 MHz = 1638 GFLOPs
 
Jake said:
So now that Endless Ocean is out, we’re down to just three upcoming first party Nintendo games:
1. Paper Mario TTYD
2. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD
3. Pokemon Legends Z-A
If you also count Metroid Prime 4, then that’s four. I’m just counting the three that have release dates.
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We're going to need that June direct to cover things for the latter half of the year.
 
Darknut85 said:
Seems like you’ve stronger believe than the whole of the Silksong fandom, congratulations.
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Did you see the recent id@Xbox stream? The whole love chat was demanding for Silksong.
Langstonboy said:
HDR is a must on the Switch 2, and it better be the best HDR in any game console, nice and bright and full DCI-P3 color, none of this 1000 nits max HDR, let me use these new 5000 nits Mini-LED TVs in some ultra bright colorful HDR Mario games! (Sorry for the rant lol)
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I am looking forward to seeing Mario in HDR.
 
Shoulder said:
Would be something if Nintendo became the first console to support 240hz…

Sony, and Microsoft pushing for 120hz on their systems, and Nintendo comes out with a 240hz mode because…Nintendo.
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Nintendo using frame prediction? 🤔

gdcvault.com

144FPS Rendering on Mobile: Frame Prediction in 'Arena Breakout' (Presented by Tencent Games)

With the advancement of hardware technology, an increasing number of mobile devices support high screen refresh rates such as 120Hz, 144Hz, and even higher. This creates the challenge of increasing frame rates without sacrificing image quality in...
gdcvault.com gdcvault.com
 
SwitchEmUp said:
I'm glad Nintendo are going for the full 4TF in Docked Mode.

For RT in handheld mode, DLSS Ray Reconstruction will help a lot, even if the ray resolution is tweaked to be much lower than the options on PC (which is what I assume most developers will do).

The next Super Smash Bros is gonna look soooooooo good, I'm predicting it will probably look just like the CGI in the Smash 4 trailers (in particular Charizard's trailer, it's been 10 years since that trailer!)




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In all honesty i think @Concernt mentioned it the best, that the best possible future would be

Concernt: If this turns out to be a 4N, 16GB LPDDR5X machine hitting 3.5TF peaks I will personally squee.
I... Need to change my title, because I don't expect that! 4N, sure, but 3TF and 12GB of LPDDR5 has been expectation as of late

Like there is so much to be excited about the Switch 2, since i presume we will have Furukawa and new blood under the helm
 
Jake said:
So now that Endless Ocean is out, we’re down to just three upcoming first party Nintendo games:
1. Paper Mario TTYD
2. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD
3. Pokemon Legends Z-A
If you also count Metroid Prime 4, then that’s four. I’m just counting the three that have release dates.
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Z-A doesn't have a release date, just a release year. I consider that second party, myself, but I know that gets contentious. Regardless, I think we got even lower in the run up to last Summer.
 
Steve said:
In all honesty i think @Concernt mentioned it the best, that the best possible future would be

Concernt: If this turns out to be a 4N, 16GB LPDDR5X machine hitting 3.5TF peaks I will personally squee.
I... Need to change my title, because I don't expect that! 4N, sure, but 3TF and 12GB of LPDDR5 has been expectation as of late

Like there is so much to be excited about the Switch 2, since i presume we will have Furukawa and new blood under the helm
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I don't think 4TF sustained is realistic, correct, but it seems 3.5TF is possible and that is. Leaving me a little breathless.
 
oldpuck said:
Z-A doesn't have a release date, just a release year. I consider that second party, myself, but I know that gets contentious. Regardless, I think we got even lower in the run up to last Summer.
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Z-A can be also a cross release , since it release in 2025 and we probably will know about the release of switch 2 , if not already release
 
oldpuck said:
Z-A doesn't have a release date, just a release year. I consider that second party, myself, but I know that gets contentious. Regardless, I think we got even lower in the run up to last Summer.
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At this point last year, there was just Tears Of The Kingdom, but that’s such a massive title that Nintendo could have realistically gone the rest of the year just with that. They don’t have anything near that level right now.
 
Concernt said:
I don't think 4TF sustained is realistic, correct, but it seems 3.5TF is possible and that is. Leaving me a little breathless.
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I think there's a high possibility of 3.5TF, since we recently had the rumour of the Dock being different and having a larger back, which would either mean a fan or a cooling system.
 
I think Pyoro's hint boils down to the DIP switches on the cartridge. I note that SW3 is in the on position. I interpret it as SW1=Switch 1, SW2=Switch Lite, SW3=Switch OLED, and SW4=Switch 2. SW3 is in the on position because it is the current and more recently released model, and SW4 is on the horizon imminently as it's next in line...?
 
heyonme said:
I think Pyoro's hint boils down to the DIP switches on the cartridge. I note that SW3 is in the on position. I interpret it as SW1=Switch 1, SW2=Switch Lite, SW3=Switch OLED, and SW4=Switch 2. SW3 is in the on position because it is the current and more recently released model, and SW4 is on the horizon imminently as it's next in line...?
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this can be the interpretation too

probably SW means switch , but there something that we arent getting right
 
heyonme said:
I think Pyoro's hint boils down to the DIP switches on the cartridge. I note that SW3 is in the on position. I interpret it as SW1=Switch 1, SW2=Switch Lite, SW3=Switch OLED, and SW4=Switch 2. SW3 is in the on position because it is the current and more recently released model, and SW4 is on the horizon imminently as it's next in line...?
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I don't think we should go that far to the conclusion, image was not edited, in the end it's probably just the SW2 on an official Nintendo product that was the hint
 
If so confused about that cart, first it says on when the white is at the top, then right next to it it says white at the bottom is on.
 
Quoted by: LiC
1
oldpuck said:
Debugging setting? It doesn't quite fit, but there are lots of reasons to have no vsync in development, both for performance testing and bug testing. This isn't video game development, but for some applications we'd turn off vsync and then capture the output buffer in automated testing in order to do analysis after the fact.
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Well, I did mention it's possible to disable Vsync on Switch devkits, or when running your game on Windows. So the feature would be usable in that context. But still, adding engine feature support for variable frame rate just for testing seems weird, especially if this setting didn't exist until now, 7 years after launch.

As for whether or not it did exist previously, I can't find evidence of config settings one way or the other -- me only having access to similar datamining stuff -- but I can see that the editor had some settings or functions like "SetFrameRateConstantEnabled" ("Specify true to use a fixed frame rate, or false otherwise"). These might be more related to delta time, engine sub-stepping types of things, and not presentation frame rate, but then again so might the new(?) settings.

SwitchEmUp said:
I'm glad Nintendo are going for the full 4TF in Docked Mode.
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This is the definition of getting your hopes up. Wait, I can't even keep track of which unreliable rumor this one is from, is this from the MLID video? Jeez, between the magnets, MLID, and NWC riddle, I think people are setting themselves up for some huge disappointments.
 
The framerate thing at least strongly points to Switch 2 supporting more than 60 FPS. For a moment I worried Nintendo would cap it to 60 Hz on tv mode for some reason.
 
ERezaSwitch said:
I don't think we should go that far to the conclusion, image was not edited, in the end it's probably just the SW2 on an official Nintendo product that was the hint
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I don't want to go too far with the speculation but Pyoro could've used any other available image for the cartridge that had all the switches in an off position for example. IDK... I think there's more to it
 
0
NZZN said:
The Steam Deck's GPU has 512 Pipelines so its clock speed and GFLOPs are very close, 1600 MHz = 1638 GFLOPs
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Yes. I've edited my original post to clarify that I was talking about in general and not specifically about Van Gogh's GPU's TFLOPs performance.

Van Gogh's GPU's TFLOPs performance is indeed very close to Van Gogh's GPU frequency, but is pedantically speaking not equal.

More often than not, the GPU frequency's very different from the GPU TFLOPs performance. One example is that the Xbox Series X's GPU runs at 1.825 GHz, but has a TFLOPs performance of 12 TFLOPs.
 
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Steve said:
I think there's a high possibility of 3.5TF, since we recently had the rumour of the Dock being different and having a larger back, which would either mean a fan or a cooling system.
Click to expand...
I don't think these rumours are related, personally - given my understanding of T239's thermal profile on 4N, 3.5TF would actually be a similar thermal profile to the original Nintendo Switch. There's also a bunch of technical hurdles to putting the fan in the dock (increased dock power consumption, for example), when you could just have one fan for all modes that speeds up when in TV Mode. I guess based on that, I should have expected it. I imagine that battery life will be better than the launch Switch not from reduced power consumption, which I now doubt, but solely increased battery density and size. We could see launch Switch thermals but still managing a V2-like battery life thanks to an improved battery.

I suspect a changed dock, if it is true, is for the following two reasons:

Product differentiation. To make it LOOK different.

Adjusted design to fit the LAN Port, and possibly others - the current Dock with LAN Port (OLED Model's) has a specific indent to fit a LAN cable, which was a design challenge as we know from the design inrwrviews. Building a design ground up with it in mind means that the dock would almost certainly need to be deeper from front to back. Additional size could also make room for an additional USB port, say two or three on the side and one on the rear. The Dock with LAN Port as it exists now sacrificed one of its USB ports to fit a LAN Port, a newly designed Dock wouldn't have to.

Unless it's some innovative but slightly nutty design relying on passive cooling in handheld mode, with a large fan in the dock for TV mode (as Oldpuck has rightfully pondered), I doubt we see a fan in the dock at all. I think a fan in the system is entirely reasonable, and having another fan pushing air through a tiny internal fan isn't going to help all that much, realistically, when you're better off just running that one small fan faster. Remember, again, that 3.5TF with T239 on 4N is, if I'm not mistaken, thermally similar to the original Nintendo Switch - it wouldn't NEED an additional fan, and if the new cooling system is better designed, it could achieve the same cooling with an even smaller or thinner fan.
 
Concernt said:
I don't think these rumours are related, personally - given my understanding of T239's thermal profile on 4N, 3.5TF would actually be a similar thermal profile to the original Nintendo Switch. There's also a bunch of technical hurdles to putting the fan in the dock (increased dock power consumption, for example), when you could just have one fan for all modes that speeds up when in TV Mode. I guess based on that, I should have expected it. I imagine that battery life will be better than the launch Switch not from reduced power consumption, which I now doubt, but solely increased battery density and size. We could see launch Switch thermals but still managing a V2-like battery life thanks to an improved battery.

I suspect a changed dock, if it is true, is for the following two reasons:

Product differentiation. To make it LOOK different.

Adjusted design to fit the LAN Port, and possibly others - the current Dock with LAN Port (OLED Model's) has a specific indent to fit a LAN cable, which was a design challenge as we know from the design inrwrviews. Building a design ground up with it in mind means that the dock would almost certainly need to be deeper from front to back. Additional size could also make room for an additional USB port, say two or three on the side and one on the rear. The Dock with LAN Port as it exists now sacrificed one of its USB ports to fit a LAN Port, a newly designed Dock wouldn't have to.

Unless it's some innovative but slightly nutty design relying on passive cooling in handheld mode, with a large fan in the dock for TV mode (as Oldpuck has rightfully pondered), I doubt we see a fan in the dock at all. I think a fan in the system is entirely reasonable, and having another fan pushing air through a tiny internal fan isn't going to help all that much, realistically, when you're better off just running that one small fan faster. Remember, again, that 3.5TF with T239 on 4N is, if I'm not mistaken, thermally similar to the original Nintendo Switch - it wouldn't NEED an additional fan, and if the new cooling system is better designed, it could achieve the same cooling with an even smaller or thinner fan.
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Thanks for the thorough response, always appreciated.
dance-happy.gif
 
prizna said:
If so confused about that cart, first it says on when the white is at the top, then right next to it it says white at the bottom is on.
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I can't believe I'm contributing to this madness, but: The diagram is using the filled black regions to indicate the position of the switches. Moving the switch up is on. Down is off. The top left is just reproducing what the switches look like in a pictograph, including the text "ON" which is physically printed above them. In that pictograph, the four switches are all in the off position.
 
HankyPanky said:
if the bird knows something we have to presume it's related to marketing? nobody would need to know if they'll casually admit it exists at the investor meeting...
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if they make a marketing announcement , they will need to prepare for a wave of questions from the investidors

and also will for now make a excuse for the games news dry for now
 
LiC said:
I can't believe I'm contributing to this madness, but: The diagram is using the filled black regions to indicate the position of the switches. Moving the switch up is on. Down is off. The top left is just reproducing what the switches look like in a pictograph, including the text "ON" which is physically printed above them. In that pictograph, the four switches are all in the off position.
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Oh, I see it now, thanks. I dunno why I couldn't see it like that.
 
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