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

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darthdiablo said:
Switch mass production began in October 2016, around same time they made the reveal.

SWOLED mass production also began around the same time they announced, July 2021.

I would tend to think they'd want to reveal around the time they begin mass production, to get ahead of leaks about the Switch 2 unit itself (mass production is a big logistical thing). If we think they'll begin mass production before October 2024, then I think it's also reasonable to think they'll reveal Switch 2 before October 2024 too.
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so the switch began 5 months before release and the swoled 3 months.
For a release this calendar year should they start now?
 
Shareholder Chad said:
I don't know. This still doesn't press play with my logic. Its been 2 years of low active development for Switch games that werent simple remakes or remasters. Plenty of time to garner a launch window (At least for Nintendo, I can't make this argument for 3rd parties)

If it is software. How is 2-3 years of active development not enough to put together a launch window? Its not like they are preparing a new Zelda game which actively takes 5+ years lol



Obviously but...points at topic title
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I think some of their development teams are being inefficient nowadays. Not sure if it's staff bloat or what.
 
darthdiablo said:
Switch mass production began in October 2016, around same time they made the reveal.

SWOLED mass production also began around the same time they announced, July 2021.

I would tend to think they'd want to reveal around the time they begin mass production, to get ahead of leaks about the Switch 2 unit itself (mass production is a big logistical thing). If we think they'll begin mass production before October 2024, then I think it's also reasonable to think they'll reveal Switch 2 before October 2024 too.
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Switch came after a unsuccessful hardware and was a bet in a new business model. They start produce it 5 months before the release with a small amount of units.

Switch 2 will be a sucessor of the big success of this company. They will try to put more units in market than they have for Switch 1. So, i believe they will need more months to produce, and a reveal can occurs a lot early than October because of that.
 
toki98 said:
so the switch began 5 months before release and the swoled 3 months.
For a release this calendar year should they start now?
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Correct. Orig Switch got like 4.5 worth of mass production, SWOLED 3 months.

I don't know whether or not they should start now, it depends on what they think a good number of launch day units should be available for launch day.
 
toki98 said:
so the switch began 5 months before release and the swoled 3 months.
For a release this calendar year should they start now?
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They would likely have to start this month or next for a release in 2024. You'd expect holiday sales demand to be higher than March demand, so I think the situation would be tougher than with the Switch's 4-5 months.
 
darthdiablo said:
I'm skeptical MP4 would be showcased without mentioning it's a cross-gen title. And Furukawa explicitly stated there'll be no Switch 2 mention during June direct.

So where does that put me? I don't think MP4 will be announced in the June direct.
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Yup, that's the point. June is when we know what happens with Metroid Prime 4.
As for where I stand. I am 80% sure that Metroid Prime 4 is crossgen title. But @Goodtwin has a point, we dont know what's the holiday title for this year. I do think that it could be an ocarina of time remake that everyone is talking about, but I can't be certain.
 
I know I've said this before, but when people say "MP4 will be/won't be cross gen" I don't know that anyone is actually talking about the same thing when they mean cross-gen. I'm certainly never sure that I know what they're talking about.

The successor has been announced, MP4 still isn't dated. By the definition of something like Ghost of Tsushima, it already is cross-gen. If by "cross-gen" we mean released after the Switch 2, but supporting Switch 1, I'd say that there is every indication that Nintendo has adjusted its release schedule fairly recently. Nintendo needs to both have a stacked launch, but also maintain Switch momentum over a longer than anticipated period. There is no "clear from the outside" answer.

If by "cross-gen" we mean "enhanced on the future console when it arrives" this can be a decision Nintendo makes after launch. Again, looking at Ghosts of Tsushima, it didn't get the Director's Cut which included the PS5 enhancements until over a year after launch. The business case for an "enhanced" title will depend on what other games are in the launch window, and whether or not it makes sense to have Retro continue to work on Prime 4 instead of having an extra 6 months to a year headstart on their "true" next gen exclusive.

Nintendo can do anything with Metroid. What Nintendo will do with Metroid mostly depends on 18 months worth of games they haven't revealed yet, for hardware they've not stated the pitch for, in the middle of what appears to be a software vacuum created by a last minute hardware delay. Anyone confident in their assessment of how the Prime 4 release will go is out on a limb, no matter what they're confident about.
 
darthdiablo said:
I don't think it's limited to those decision points when it comes to making MP4 cross-gen.

MP4 is a graphics-heavy game. It would be silly if Nintendo decides to give MP4 Switch 1-only treatment, with nothing enhanced on Switch 2 to show off the graphical capabilities.
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That's my question though: is it? We haven't seen the game yet, do we know for sure it's a graphical showpiece and not, say, a 30fps open world game? Until they open the mystery box a bit it's hard to make predictions.
ILikeFeet said:
or it could be a core-oriented game. Metroid Prime can still hit 3M as it is and Nintendo might be fine with that.
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Sure? I'm not really sure what you mean to be honest. The point I was trying to make is that Nintendo will have decided if Prime 4 should be cross gen or not based on what sort of project it is, and we don't know enough yet to make predictions. I wasn't really talking about sales.
 
Bonejack said:
Personal opinion and all, but a mere port of TP and WW HD would be more exciting, and i played those games three times already.
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I definitely think the holiday title is a zelda something. Wasn't there a plan to have zelda come out every single year? Regardless if it is original or a remake/re something?
 
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VegiHam said:
That's my question though: is it?
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Is it what? A graphical showpiece? I have trouble picturing Nintendo/Retro Studios not putting in any effort to make it a graphical showpiece.

Metroid Prime was a graphical marvel when it was released the first time.

VegiHam said:
We haven't seen the game yet, do we know for sure it's a graphical showpiece and not, say, a 30fps open world game? Until they open the mystery box a bit it's hard to make predictions.
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I don't think the game can be both Metroidvania and open world game at the same time. MP4 will remain a Metroidvania at core, I'm sure of it. Which means closed, claustrophic spaces where you get overwhelmed with alien life.

VegiHam said:
Sure? I'm not really sure what you mean to be honest. The point I was trying to make is that Nintendo will have decided if Prime 4 should be cross gen or not based on what sort of project it is, and we don't know enough yet to make predictions. I wasn't really talking about sales.
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MP4 to date haven't been released. Switch 2 is coming out. I see no reason why MP4won't get a Switch 2 treatment - it's near certain the game will be pushing graphical capabilities, on either Switch 1 or Switch 2.
 
Tentacle-tropes said:
Prime4 has to pass the litmus test of being appealing for audiences outside its own. If it isn’t then being a launch title does little in the long run; and if it is then it won’t matter much where it releases in the first place.
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Imo Prime 1 already passed this test and proved the Prime subseries can do it. It was one of the best selling GameCube games and sold way more than any other Metroid up to that point (excluding Metroid 1). In other words, the formula has killer-app potential.

I think Prime 2 and 3 didn't sell as well because of external factors. Both came out in an era were iterative sequels were made at a faster rate and taken for granted. Prime 2 launched the same week Halo 2. Prime 3 got zero marketing support from Nintendo and the initial Wii hype was mainly driven by casuals.

The Nintendo consumer base on Switch is a lot stronger now and is buying more firsty party games, even from more niche IPs, than ever before. This audience is significantly more receptive to core titles like Metroid, it's why Dread sold so well. That audience is going to carry over to the Switch 2.

I think in today's gaming landscape where there's a vacuum of gritty AAA singleplayer shooters (shocking to say), Meteoidvanias are more popular than ever, and similar games like Doom 2016/Doom Eternal sell very well, I think Prime 4 is ready for a breakout here if it launches with the Switch 2.
 
oldpuck said:
I know I've said this before, but when people say "MP4 will be/won't be cross gen" I don't know that anyone is actually talking about the same thing when they mean cross-gen. I'm certainly never sure that I know what they're talking about.
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I assume it would be where the Switch 2 version would have higher texture, HDR, and some form of Ray traced applied.. of course a higher resolution as well.

I am hoping it would be ray trace reflection
 
darthdiablo said:
I don't think it's limited to those decision points when it comes to making MP4 cross-gen.

MP4 is a graphics-heavy game. It would be silly if Nintendo decides to give MP4 Switch 1-only treatment, with nothing enhanced on Switch 2 to show off the graphical capabilities.
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After Prime Remastered came out, it was reported it used a lot of baked in lighting to give it that look, plus whatever else they created to make it look as good as it did. Prime 4 could be a similar situation for Switch 1, while Switch 2 could utilize the power of Drake with real-time dynamic lighting/shadows, plus perhaps some form of Ray-Tracing, and DLSS up to 4k.

It becomes a win-win situation for both sides. Folks who don't want to jump on the Switch 2 bandwagon right away can still play Prime 4, while the early adopters can still have their experience on the new hardware.

I maintain there will be overlap in terms of Software coming out for both Switch 1, and Switch 2 for at least a year, maybe 2 years after Switch 2 launched.
 
Random sample of March vietnamese custom data. Digging through still.

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ERezaSwitch said:
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In retrospect, it sounded like I was subtweeting @darthdiablo, which I wasn't. I just see the regular MP4 discussion and think the situation has enough unknown variables that we could get something wildly different than what seems reasonable from the outside.
 
oldpuck said:
You've already gotten some good answers, but just to add on top (and assuming you did mean RT, not DLSS)

Let's start with how ray tracing works:

Light has color - we all know this from every neon sign you've ever seen. When light hits an object, it bounces, but it also changes color, mixing the original color of the light with the color of the object.

If white light from the sun comes in through my office window and hits my grey Ikea dresser, the light becomes grey. When that light reaches my eye I see the "grey". Places where more light hits are brighter than others. When the sun starts to set, the light from the sun turns from white, to something closer to orange, and all of the objects I see - even the grey dresser - have an orange tint.

Ray tracing is a computer simulation of light bouncing and changing color. It makes the lighting in a game very accurate to real life. Ray tracing could be used to draw every part of a screen - that's how movie CGI works - but it's too expensive to do that in real time in most games.
Instead, game engines use traditional rendering for parts of the game, and ray tracing for other parts, where traditional rendering struggles to get good results. Things like reflections, or shadows.

How ray tracing cores work

RT cores don't draw anything. The regular shader cores of the GPU that draw everything else also draw the tray traced bits.This is important, because those shaders are how artists control what a scene looks like. For example, cel-shading, like Breath of the Wild - the artist wants to take an accurate version of the light in the scene, but render it in that cel-shaded cartoon look.

RT cores accelerate the math used to compute the light bounces, and the color changes. The RT core will take a ray of light, and check if it hits a certain part of an object. If it hits, it will calculate how the light color changes, and the angle at which the light bounces. AMD and Nvidia's RT cores both do these things.

But there are so many lights, and so many objects in even a simple scene, the question "does this ray of light hit this corner of this particular object" is almost always no. Ray tracing can spend a lot of time chasing paths of light that can either never happen, or would never be visible, even if they did. Ray tracing is expensive, this is a huge waste.

The trick is to use a special description of the objects in your scene (called a BVH tree) that allows you to very quickly eliminate big chunks of the scene where a certain path of light will never get to. So instead of checking every ray of light against every triangle in every object, you can use this quick scan to cut it down to only (for example) 20% of the objects in the scene, and then do the individual tests on those.

Both AMD and Nvidia use BVH trees - but AMD's RT cores don't accelerate that. AMD's solution uses the CPU to do this culling. Not only is this slower, but it creates a back-and-forth conversation between the CPU and the GPU.

Game engine: cast a ray, please
CPU: Let me run a BVH search... okay, I've whittled it down.
RT cores: Okay, let me run all the bounces on this small section... Here you go!
CPU: Great, shaders, can you draw some reflections with this?
Shader cores: On it!

Nvidia cores do accelerate the BVH searches. It also places the RT cores and the shader cores together in such a way that they can communicate back and forth, instead of just one way. So the conversation looks like this:

Game engine: cast a ray, please
RT cores: Let me run a BVH search... great, I can check the bounces in this section... here you go shaders
Shaders: Drawing reflections now

You can see from just this how much faster the Nvidia solution should be. But it's not just that the conversation is shorter and more efficient, but Nvidia's RT cores can do the BVH search faster than AMD's drivers can do it on the CPU. This leads to a huge increase in performance.

So RT on Drake is as good as PS5???
Well, no. But also yes. But not really, though. Let's zoom out, some.

If you looked at just the ray casting part of the pipeline - from when the game engine starts casting a ray to when the shader gets the result - Drake will probably perform about twice as fast as the Series S. Not quite PS5 good, but pretty damned good. But that's just one part of the pipeline.

Light needs objects to bounce off of. Objects in a video game are made of geometry - the number of polygons in model. We've seen downports to Switch use lower quality models, we should expect the same in the future. How good an effect looks to your eye will be impacted by that geometry.

Shaders still need to actually perform the drawing operations. Just because the RT cores can handle all the rays of light in the scene doesn't mean the shaders can draw every RT effect in the same amount of time. Nvidia's efficiency won't overcome just how big the GPUs are in the other consoles.

And GPUs still need to draw the the non-RT parts of a scene. Even if somehow, Nvidia's RT hardware in Drake could do every RT effect, beginning to end, at the same speed as the PS5, developers would still likely need to pull the effects back to make room for the rest of the rendering.

What do we expect then?
Well, I will only speak for me. And I will say that I don't have a sense of what Nintendo will do for first party games. There has never been a game engine that only ever had to support Nvidia's hardware before, so I don't have a sense of how far they could push it. Nintendo might choose to go all in, or to be more subtle, not for performance reasons, but artistic ones.

But when it comes to ports, a rule of thumb that I think will hold up - Nintendo's console can keep ray tracing on where Series S ports need to turn them off. I realize I wrote a lot of words here for a pretty short conclusion, but I think that's the most succinct answer I can give.

That doesn't mean that every port will have RT, or that it will look as good. Some games have RT as an afterthought, and it's not transformative. Discarding it will give a performance boost for a low visual cost. And just because the RT effects are identical, doesn't mean they'll look as good, when there are other cutbacks to geometry and resolution.

But where RT is transformative, I think Drake's RT performance will be high enough that keeping them on - along with the cutbacks elsewhere - will be worth it, and technically possible, in a way it's not on Series S.

Can you give me an example, so it's something I can see?
Actually, I kinda can! Control is a game that 1) has RT, 2) has versions on lots of hardware, and 3) was tested by Digital Foundry in their T239 video.

Here is a comparison of the Series S version with the Series X RT mode. On the left you see the Series S running at 60fps. On the right, you see the Series X running at half that with the RT reflections on. You can see that the differences are night and day. Series X can do the higher frame rate by turning the RT off, and still at higher resolution.

Series S just has the high frame rate, low res, no RT mode. Implying that even at 30fps, the Series S couldn't enable RT, without dropping to a resolution so low it was unplayable.

Here is Control tested on an ultra low spec Nvidia GPU. You'll see a upscaled-to-1080p version of the game, just like Series S, but with those high quality, RT reflections enabled, at the same frame rate as the PS5. The PS5 version still looks better, because it's running at higher resolution. But the resolution cutback that wasn't enough to get RT on Series S is absolutely enough on this low spec hardware, that is in the same performance bracket as Drake.

Does this make sense? You still need all the resolution cutbacks, the frame rate tweaks, because fundamentally, it's still a much smaller piece of kit. But where RT falls away on the AMD hardware, it stays on here, because of the superior design.
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Yes, so the question comes to whether drake's 1536cuda core count is a significant disadvantage compared to xss's shader count?
 
You have to play mixing the words to avoid the 10 row limit, there are a lot of new shippments this month
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oldpuck said:
Yes
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Got it, which means that the number of cuda cores limits the upper limit of the actual polygon count of switch2, which may have an effect on the RT rendering, but even so, switch2 has a remarkable number of shaders for a portable, quite a bit more than a steam deck.
 
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