I don't get the claim that "it won't go for high end graphics" when the leaked GPU at its core is better than the XSS's, it will have DLSS on a neural unit to allow the GPU more room for manoeuvre. It will share many 3rdP titles with all those platforms, and when it will have the better ray tracing feature set. I suspect it WILL become the lead platform among some developers in their domestic markets, notably some of the lower-budget JRPG stables, and for many Indie developers, who have been banqueting on the Switch VS other platforms. Saying it's a portable hasn't stopped the existence of Steam Deck or Apple's M-Series SoCs, or phones adopting 16GB, or Nintendo apparently going harder than what "the consensus" told us to expect - Please, don't assume that I haven't considered a host of factors, too. If I hadn't, I wouldn't even post here.
just because it has more shaders than the Xbox series S does not inherently mean it will be doing more than what the Xbox series S does. DLSS helps alleviate some of the issues of this portable system in having to display visual fidelity, however a gaming system is not simply its GPU.
This will still have lower memory bandwidth than the Xbox series S, who already struggles with Xbox series X and PS5 titles because it is displaying higher fidelity at lower resolutions and memory bandwidth is one of the issues. For this to work fine for a switch Drake with it’s very low memory bandwidth compared to the other systems, it would have to be very low to start with and this still has to be a portable gaming device that will downclock further. The thread focused on the maximum but forget that this device will have a very clear minimum.
Games will be downgraded to suit the needs of the system in a much organic fashion, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The only issue comes to play is if a developer is unable to mask the downgrades in a proper manner and make us so obvious that people choose other versions because the switch Drake version is so ugly. these are intelligent cuts, and for a device that still has to be clocked for a portable life, intelligent cuts are necessary especially to suit the 720P display
If the switch to has 8 physical CPU cores, then this makes the process much easier of bringing a game over and shooting for what the systems needs.
I’m going to have to question if you even consider what the fact is because clearly by this post it does not illustrate that you have, you are quite literally comparing a closed platform that developers come to and choose to develop games on two platforms that quite literally has no developer requirement whatsoever or isn’t meant for gaming at all. The steam deck for all intents and purposes is just a PC, the 16GB is for longevity reasons and is shooting for the same ideology as a laptop, are you going to really say that the switch Drake is comparable to a laptop that you can just buy and load a game on? There is no low level optimization there, it just runs. The user chooses to adjust the settings as they so please. Devs don’t have to worry about this at all.
The group of phones that have a ton of memory to them are very niche type of phone aiming to appeal to a very niche type of consumer, on top of that android is incredibly heavy as an operating system and going with low amounts of RAM makes absolutely no sense for a system like that.
Apple has a platform that barely gets any video games whatsoever, and the platform is not meant for gaming, it is meant for constant creation, so again please do take into mind what it is that you’re going to include as a point. It makes no sense for you to compare a closed platform that’s dedicated to gaming to an open platform that has no low level of optimization done to it by developers or a platform whose main focus is not video games for gamers. Apple literally has to fund these projects to come over, the Steam deck doesn’t need this as it is an extension of an existing platform and has to deal with several layers for compatibility and is hardly low level.
It uses Vulkan of all APIs which is more higher level than something like DX12U.
And finally, I don’t understand how we go from me mentioning high end games and then you focus on the low budget and the JRPGs as the ones targeting the switch Drake. These are not the games I’m referring to. I mentioned high end games for a reason. And my point still stands, high end games will not target in Nintendo Switch a Drake and I’m not sure why that is considered controversial. Low end Indie and Japanese games will target to switch because it will be the only platform that they can target that offers them a possibility of showing their games to the audience at large via media channels like Directs and such.
But as I wrote, ambitions don't stand still. There is a strong case for the 16, and if it's true that 16GB is in the devkits, I struggle to understand how, in a speculation thread, we can not begin to consider this possibility, and straight-up gloss over it. I don't apologise for being on the more optimistic side of this discussion, and I hold nothing against those who disagree. There's no hostility intended on my part. Perhaps a little frustration at the reverting to type with the disbelief in light of what is known, and at some of the persistent ignorance... but I'm not saying anything over the top here, only that better is possible, and the confidence is there, as the Switch has been a clear success.
There’s nothing wrong with the optimism, but at times I feel like we have to come into terms of realism. Whenever I discuss the system I don’t look at it as the window or the lens of “oh it’s because Nintendo” what is likely to view them from, I look at it from the perspective of “oh this is a system with these capabilities what does it actually need in order to function properly in this environment?” Nintendo then becomes a secondary perspective that I take to look into as in “what would they actually do though in this context based on previous circumstances that have occurred? They are very efficient and can do a lot with a little so it isn’t as though they
need a ton, and have been a cornerstone of ‘less is more’ approach that others need to adopt”
In essence well the system can have 16 GB of memory, I question if it has enough in every other department to actually facilitate the need for 16 GB of memory. On top of that I also start to look at it as, the other systems that games targets have at most 13.5 GB of available memory to developers, why or what does Nintendo need a whole extra gigabyte or two of memory for their games for a system that will target a lower profile Than those systems?
At that point if you have more memory that’s just having more memory to have it. And you have to balance this out, if it has a very fast drive such as ultra flash storage, they can get away with less memory but if it has a very slow storage then this is where more memory may be required. It’s always a balancing act.
More is preferred if the other circumstances are pushing you to go for more, however more is not necessary if the rest of the system is giving you enough to work with that it is perfectly acceptable to have say 12 GB over 16 or 24 GB of memory.
And finally, developer kits tend to have more memory than the system for debugging reasons, usually they have twice or more memory than the actual retail product. If this product has 12 GB of memory, then the developer tools/kits should have 24 GB of memory at minimum. But it can be done with 16GB, so long as it has more.
More is preferred there for those environments.
And this should be more apparent, but Nintendo does have foresight into seeing whether it is a good idea to have so much memory that they have to have another bigger increase with their following device, memory is not cheap at all. Price really matters here.
Sony is leaning towards PC like MS so this isn’t so much of a concern for them.
Furthermore, I don't think it's just a case of "same product, better internals" - That, too, would be complacent. PS5's OS is very different to PS4's. I'm not as well-versed on XBox's, but they have Quick Resume and playing multiple games at a time. XBox Game Pass is also available on Samsung's flagship phones.
That is via a cloud service actually.
If we look at phones again, Android and iOS have new versions, with updates, as well as events to show people what they mean. Why, then, are we just assuming that the OS will be the same for Nintendo? Who's to say they won't try to reform Miiverse and bring it back, for example? Or other multimedia apps won't be possible this time? Expansion strategies exist, and I don't believe they're bound by the same conditions which existed in 2017. One recent move was Nintendo Pictures - It's possible that future Switch owners will be able to watch their output on their devices. We don't have Art Academy on Switch yet - It's possible that they could have art studio apps. There are so many reasons why more RAM might be needed, and all I've done here is present that case. That isn't the same thing as saying these things will happen, but we can, at least, consider it.
I would agree, however, Nintendo does not seem to be the type to make very bloated operating systems that take up more than what I would say is “necessary“, they tend to be very small and very well-kept.
Unlike Sony and Microsoft who do not mind putting a ton of resources into their operating systems and taking a couple gigabytes of memory, Nintendo aims to keep it very light and very low profile and not to take up a ton of storage or a ton of system memory when in operation. Even with the Wii U, it was feature rich but only took 1GB unlike the other systems that took like 3GB and were also feature rich.
On top of that, one of Nintendo’s Goals was to make the system very snappy and quick as a direct response to the Nintendo Wii U who used up half of its total memory for the operating system.
I forgot where I read it but apparently they had people try out the switch and basically tell them how it was in snappiness and how their goal was basically to have a very snappy and fast operating system for the Nintendo switch.
it was something like this, but from a tweet I saw:
https://nintendowire.com/news/2018/...t-the-design-of-the-switchs-os-at-cedec-2018/
And just like how the Nintendo switch OS is based off of the 3DS OS, a.k.a. it is a forked version of the original Horizon OS, it is safe to assume that Nintendo will fork it again and it’ll be a pretty low profile operating system.
It's my view that Nintendo already produces the best graphics, anyway, but I will say that on the graphics front, the perception that they don't go high-end exists for dishonest reasons. Screenshots and stills don't tell the whole story; Sony 1stP has long notoriously sacrificed 60FPS for perceived "high-end visual spectacle" - If they prioritised 60FPS, as Nintendo had in the Wii U era, I don't think anybody could say with a straight face that their graphical output was orders of magnitude more than anything Nintendo put out in the same time, and the receipts are out there.
The reason that Sony 1st party sacrificed 60 frames per second was due to a hardware limitation of the previous generation and the one before that, namely the complex CPU or the terrible one. So far with the new system, a.k.a. the PlayStation 5, they have can do 60 framed per second and
above.
Nintendo uses modern rendering techniques in their titles but they most certainly do not target a higher visual fidelity than or equal to Sony first party software, and I don’t need a still to see that.
Nintendo‘s first party has very visually appealing art direction though, but they are not at the same level of visual fidelity as Sony first party studios and I don’t think we need to have a more in-depth discussion as to why because this is pretty obvious to almost everybody else.
60 frames per second is a developer choice in the end, if they aim for 30 frames per second instead they will gain a lot of performance back which they can use for visuals and fidelity instead.
Nintendo did not aim to have such high visual fidelity, they aimed to have high performance. There is always a trade-off, if you have high frame rate you will have to sacrifice a level of visual fidelity for a closed platform, and vice versa. It’s hard to have both unless you’re on PC and have monstrous setup that can do both without breaking a sweat.
I will try my best to break my longer posts down into smaller paragraphs. I have a learning disability, which I have spoken more openly about in many places for almost 7 years, and understand how difficult it can be to process. This also means I can find it difficult to express my thoughts, and all the more so because I'll write on these topics in bursts, saying my bit and disappearing. It can mean that the content, although coherent, can be lengthy... But I hope I can say I bring some thoughtful and considered responses to the table.
You do! I do like your posts I only get lost in reading them on my phone. Most of the text I do here is speech-to-text which greatly reduces any time I have to type personally. I just say and it types, and then quickly skim and fix any typos.
If you see any typos or words that don’t make sense in my post, it’s the AI that didn’t pick up what I actually said and inserted a word there.
Has happened numerous times unfortunately for me….