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

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To be honest, I don't think it has evolved at all from BotW in terms of graphics.
But partially because of the precedent of Pokémon SV, which deteriorated from SwSh and had the worst performance, it is a very wise choice.
 
majimazio said:
To be honest, I don't think it has evolved at all from BotW in terms of graphics.
But partially because of the precedent of Pokémon SV, which deteriorated from SwSh and had the worst performance, it is a very wise choice.
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Ehhhhhhhhhhhh? It definitely has. Texture work, especially on rocks, is noticeably better. Water shader looks better, too. It's definitely a step up graphically. Time will tell if actual image quality is equivalent or better. Again, I think it's YouTube compression making things look worse than they are.
 
Look over there said:
Hmm, speaking of on package memory, recently I'm seeing a bit of speculation of Intel doing that for Lunar Lake. It kind of goes hand in hand with Lunar Lake re-using Arrow Lake's CPU architectures, so something's presumably happening with packaging to squeeze out perf/watt. And based off a twitter photo that I actually can't see for myself.
(why yes, I do still believe in Intel as a potential wild card for consoles in the future)

Hmm, since that particular range of laptops would be expected to be paired with discrete GPUs... that probably brings the total power draw up to potentially the 3 digit range. So at that point, the difference between monolithic and current version of IFOP (Infinity Fabric On-Package) probably isn't relatively significant, so sure, why not. But sticking with monolithic for the lower ranges suggests to me that it's still not quite there yet. Probably another iteration or two to go?

A little recap for the readers:
Zen 2/3 era: checking with this page, the IFOP's energy efficiency was under 2 pJ/bit. The IO die itself was also on Global Foundries 14/12nm. And the IF links themselves were only either on at 100% power or off. As far as I'm aware, all Zen 2/3 era laptops are monolithic, so I'd conclude that this version of IFOP was a no go.

Zen 4 era: I don't think that AMD has disclosed their estimate for the efficiency of this recent version of the IFOP. Still, the IO die has been moved down to TSMC N6 (ought to be a pretty nice upgrade). And checking with this page, seems like moving down node(s) allowed AMD to go narrow/faster with the IF links to achieve the same bandwidth for lower voltage/less power. And there's that addition of intermediate power states (ie, can turned on without going at 100%, full blast). Seems to be enough improvement to try with the Dragon Range laptops at least? But I don't get the impression of the IFOP being quite at the point for the lower brackets.

Intel's aim of 0.2-0.3 pJ/bit for their interconnect would be interesting to see. And more or less necessary to pull off, considering that all of their consumer stuff is moving to tiles, IIRC?
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Yeah, looking at Meteor Lake it does seem like their consumer stuff is moving to tiles, although it's possible this is just for the laptop segment, and they stick with monolithic dies in the desktop space. It's interesting that their approach seems to be almost the opposite of AMD's, moving to chiplets in laptops first, whereas AMD has left that till last.

Stinky Horse said:
This had precedence in the Gamecube and Wii, both having a MCM GPU containing distinct SRAM and EEPROM chips, although a later revision of Wii's merged the SRAM with the main GPU chip.
index.php
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Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Nintendo doing on-package RAM before it was cool.
 
lattjeful said:
Again, I think it's YouTube compression making things look worse than they are.
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There were points in the video where the x,y,z coordinates on the minimap were blurring out and almost completely disappearing so.. yeah, the compression on that video was gross. We can't use it as an indication of TotK's image quality.
 
chocolate_supra said:
There were points in the video where the x,y,z coordinates on the minimap were blurring out and almost completely disappearing so.. yeah, the compression on that video was gross. We can't use it as an indication of TotK's image quality.
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Yeah. The moment Link walked into the foresty part of the sky islands, the UI also got incredibly blurry. I think people are just overreacting. The foliage on the sky islands has a bit of red and green in it, the islands themselves are yellow, and there's all the shadows and stuff everywhere. Sounds like a mess for YouTube's poor encoding to handle.
 
It is a waste of time trying to analyze image quality with the YouTube compression in place. Framerate looked fine to me, maybe a few hitches here and there, but never really thought it was chugging. The blemish that still stands out like a sore thumb is the shadows. They draw in higher resolution shadows really close to the player. I will be interested to see if Nintendo uploads this video directly to their Switch news page. The quality of the videos on there is often far superior to the YouTube quality.

With all that said, this is exactly why so many of us itching for new hardware, TotK is going to be a fantastic game but in the year 2023, many of the visual shortcomings are starting to hold it back from true greatness. There will be tons of demand for a Drake powered Switch to deliver the premium experience. The sense of enjoyment with this game will be held back a bit knowing this could have been a killer launch title for Switch Redacted. Oh well, hopefully they do a proper patch for the game when Redacted releases.
 
Meh, when I'm shooting a Spicy Pepper arrow into a Hynox's eye or whatever, I'm not going to enjoy it any less cause the foliage could be better etc.
 
So.... I did take a peak at the Zelda thing, since IQ got brought up a lot, and I'll just say this footage is a worst case scenario for video compression.



This image is muddy as hell, but it's clearly a compression artifact. Foliage is very noisy, and bad for video compression, but the grass here also shares color with both Link and the ground underneath - you can see how the muddiness is just blocks of color overlapping across all the objects where YouTube smashed a whole block down to one blotch of sampled color, dropping the detail.

Everywhere I scrubbed to was the same. When the camera shifts to include more sky, then suddenly the image gained some clarity, but overall, this thing is so riddled with compression artifacts, I suspect double compression along the way. At one point, cel shading, and the "above the clouds" lighting quality melded together to completely remove Link's face. Again, compression artifacts.

I'm replaying Breath of the Wild now, and I see some signs of higher resolution and/or AA here in places where edges don't alias like I would expect in the current game. Texture work frankly looks about the same - Breath of the Wild's rock textures especially look decently good from a moderate distance and break down quickly, so it's possible these are better, but I suspect I'm mostly just enjoying seeing different textures. But again, it's hard to tell with compression artifacts, which can both introduce and smooth over some of these things.

In general, I see an extension of what I saw in the previous trailers, which is that overall, the "mainland" is using the same rendering techniques as before, but the skylands are using different tricks for water and fog, and are using an expanded set of "materials" for the game's unusual shader system, which enhanced the effect of the unusual light. If you've been on a very high mountain in bright sunlight, you lose some atmospheric diffusion, and they've clearly gone for a stylized version of that here.
 
ILikeFeet said:
We've seen restir running on all manner of hardware at this point. Back at the qualcomm event, Oppo shown off restir as a part of their mobile rt sdk. They never went into detail on it, but I assume it was for direct illumination and shadows
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Sorry, forgot to get back to you on this. Do you have a source on them using ReSTIR? I've had a look at their demonstration video, and I only see a small number of light sources, maxing out at three in the last scene. They also all seem to be point light sources with hard shadows. For example, if you look at the pool 22 seconds in, you can see hard shadows of the roof on the bottom of the pool, which we would expect to be diffuse. While technically there's nothing stopping you from using a small number of light sources, or treating the sun as a point light source with ReSTIR, it would be a bit of a waste of the technique.

In any case, while I'm sure ReSTIR is technically possible on T239, I'm still not sure if RTXDI itself, or an implementation of equivalent quality to it, is viable in games with modern geometric complexity without ghosting, noise, or other visible artefacts. I'm hoping it is, and the wider availability of RTXDI might give us the tools to find out, but I'm staying cautious for the moment.
 
oldpuck said:
So.... I did take a peak at the Zelda thing, since IQ got brought up a lot, and I'll just say this footage is a worst case scenario for video compression.



This image is muddy as hell, but it's clearly a compression artifact. Foliage is very noisy, and bad for video compression, but the grass here also shares color with both Link and the ground underneath - you can see how the muddiness is just blocks of color overlapping across all the objects where YouTube smashed a whole block down to one blotch of sampled color, dropping the detail.

Everywhere I scrubbed to was the same. When the camera shifts to include more sky, then suddenly the image gained some clarity, but overall, this thing is so riddled with compression artifacts, I suspect double compression along the way. At one point, cel shading, and the "above the clouds" lighting quality melded together to completely remove Link's face. Again, compression artifacts.

I'm replaying Breath of the Wild now, and I see some signs of higher resolution and/or AA here in places where edges don't alias like I would expect in the current game. Texture work frankly looks about the same - Breath of the Wild's rock textures especially look decently good from a moderate distance and break down quickly, so it's possible these are better, but I suspect I'm mostly just enjoying seeing different textures. But again, it's hard to tell with compression artifacts, which can both introduce and smooth over some of these things.

In general, I see an extension of what I saw in the previous trailers, which is that overall, the "mainland" is using the same rendering techniques as before, but the skylands are using different tricks for water and fog, and are using an expanded set of "materials" for the game's unusual shader system, which enhanced the effect of the unusual light. If you've been on a very high mountain in bright sunlight, you lose some atmospheric diffusion, and they've clearly gone for a stylized version of that here.
Click to expand...


Welcome to Nintendo captured gameplay. Dunno what the issue is, not that they couldn't afford better equipment. ;D
 
oldpuck said:
So.... I did take a peak at the Zelda thing, since IQ got brought up a lot, and I'll just say this footage is a worst case scenario for video compression.



This image is muddy as hell, but it's clearly a compression artifact. Foliage is very noisy, and bad for video compression, but the grass here also shares color with both Link and the ground underneath - you can see how the muddiness is just blocks of color overlapping across all the objects where YouTube smashed a whole block down to one blotch of sampled color, dropping the detail.

Everywhere I scrubbed to was the same. When the camera shifts to include more sky, then suddenly the image gained some clarity, but overall, this thing is so riddled with compression artifacts, I suspect double compression along the way. At one point, cel shading, and the "above the clouds" lighting quality melded together to completely remove Link's face. Again, compression artifacts.

I'm replaying Breath of the Wild now, and I see some signs of higher resolution and/or AA here in places where edges don't alias like I would expect in the current game. Texture work frankly looks about the same - Breath of the Wild's rock textures especially look decently good from a moderate distance and break down quickly, so it's possible these are better, but I suspect I'm mostly just enjoying seeing different textures. But again, it's hard to tell with compression artifacts, which can both introduce and smooth over some of these things.

In general, I see an extension of what I saw in the previous trailers, which is that overall, the "mainland" is using the same rendering techniques as before, but the skylands are using different tricks for water and fog, and are using an expanded set of "materials" for the game's unusual shader system, which enhanced the effect of the unusual light. If you've been on a very high mountain in bright sunlight, you lose some atmospheric diffusion, and they've clearly gone for a stylized version of that here.
Click to expand...

I'll be looking forward to seeing the footage on the Switch news section. For whatever reason, footage tends to look quite a bit better on there VS. YouTube.
 
Thraktor said:
Sorry, forgot to get back to you on this. Do you have a source on them using ReSTIR? I've had a look at their demonstration video, and I only see a small number of light sources, maxing out at three in the last scene. They also all seem to be point light sources with hard shadows. For example, if you look at the pool 22 seconds in, you can see hard shadows of the roof on the bottom of the pool, which we would expect to be diffuse. While technically there's nothing stopping you from using a small number of light sources, or treating the sun as a point light source with ReSTIR, it would be a bit of a waste of the technique.

In any case, while I'm sure ReSTIR is technically possible on T239, I'm still not sure if RTXDI itself, or an implementation of equivalent quality to it, is viable in games with modern geometric complexity without ghosting, noise, or other visible artefacts. I'm hoping it is, and the wider availability of RTXDI might give us the tools to find out, but I'm staying cautious for the moment.
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prRtR0B.png



unfortunately, they haven't gone beyond this since. I don't think the SDK is publicly available yet
 
YT is annoying, I wish there was better image quality, I have "premium" and there is nothing premium about it.
I'm not watching the clips, want to be fresh but sure It'll look great and better than BOTW.
Having said that, despite BOTW being my GOAT, I'm holding off in the hope of a Switch 2 patched TOTK.
Playing plenty on the other consoles these days and Switch is showing it's age.
 
ILikeFeet said:
prRtR0B.png



unfortunately, they haven't gone beyond this since. I don't think the SDK is publicly available yet
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Thanks, hadn't seen the slide there. I'm still curious how they're using ReSTIR, as the footage they show doesn't highlight any of the benefits of it, and the reference to "Hybrid Shadow", which I take to mean combining traditional shadow maps with RT shadows, doesn't really make sense in the context of ReSTIR.

I wonder if they're using ReSTIR only for direct lighting, and not shadows. If you remove the step where you trace the shadow ray, ReSTIR becomes a direct lighting technique with no shadows and no RT requirements. It would be viable to combine that with more traditional shadow techniques on hardware with less RT performance, as you're still getting the capability to do direct lighting with a large number of light sources, you're just limited to (hard) shadows from a small number of them.
 
to be clear, I'm not shitting on our friend paul for being sick of nintendo's shitty graphics. it's his inane insights and terrible writing that baffle me
 
SirArthur said:
Do people think that by writting articles like this, Nintendo will be forced to launch a new console?
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if we clap our hands and believe hard enough, we can will drake into existence

Thraktor said:
Thanks, hadn't seen the slide there. I'm still curious how they're using ReSTIR, as the footage they show doesn't highlight any of the benefits of it, and the reference to "Hybrid Shadow", which I take to mean combining traditional shadow maps with RT shadows, doesn't really make sense in the context of ReSTIR.

I wonder if they're using ReSTIR only for direct lighting, and not shadows. If you remove the step where you trace the shadow ray, ReSTIR becomes a direct lighting technique with no shadows and no RT requirements. It would be viable to combine that with more traditional shadow techniques on hardware with less RT performance, as you're still getting the capability to do direct lighting with a large number of light sources, you're just limited to (hard) shadows from a small number of them.
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that sounds like a good option. this is the video I keep going back to because it's the only instance of non-RT hardware implementation that I found. it also has soft-shadows and indirect diffuse lighting, so it's doing a lot more than a power constrained mobile device would. but still has no RT acceleration, which is interesting from a performance standpoint. 1536 RDNA1 cores and a much higher clock and power budget

 
Raccoon said:
as always, my reaction to a piece like this is bewilderment that someone got paid to write it
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Armoured_Bear said:
An embarrassment of an article, "Switch’s ancient hardware, which was already dated when it debuted," and the utter lack of awareness of YT compression.
How can someone get paid for 10 years to write about video games and be so clueless?
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Wait, Forbes contributors are getting paid?? I thought this was just someone using it as a blog host like Medium or some shit

Like, this weird take would make sense if this was just an elaborate forum post, because without being linked to Forbes it holds abolutely no weight or merit whatsoever
 
Brofield said:
Wait, Forbes contributors are getting paid?? I thought this was just someone using it as a blog host like Medium or some shit

Like, this weird take would make sense if this was just an elaborate forum post, because without being linked to Forbes it holds abolutely no weight or merit whatsoever
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if I remember correctly, the contributors column are paid columns

D36 said:
Shitty graphics?
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I mean, there's no ray tracing, it's clearly trash!

the lack of temporal stability in the shadows are pretty dang rough though
 
Armoured_Bear said:
I'm sure Raccoon could have chosen better wording but we are all desperate for new hardware for a reason.
Click to expand...

Zelda TotK will be one of those games that really shines on future hardware with very little extra work put in. Very similar to how Zelda Wind Waker looks great with nothing more than an increase in resolution. Whenever they do announce Switch Redacted, having a 4K patch for Zelda TotK announced is going to send demand for Redacted through the roof. They honestly wont need a big launch lineup to sell hardware because a ton of people are going to want it for TotK. The rumored Pokemon patch for late this year/early next year points towards the idea that Nintendo intends to use some of their existing games to push the new hardware.
 
ILikeFeet said:
Tears of the Kingdom DLC to coincide with Drake? 🤔 that would give some good incentive for people to upgrade
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That's the most obvious take I've seen in days, but I can't say it isn't cromulent!

Absolutely, next gen patch, Drake, and DLC all launching in the same window makes complete sense. No reason NOT to.
 
Concernt said:
That's the most obvious take I've seen in days, but I can't say it isn't cromulent!

Absolutely, next gen patch, Drake, and DLC all launching in the same window makes complete sense. No reason NOT to.
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Not that I disagree, but weren't we saying this about the base game months ago 😛
 
ILikeFeet said:
Tears of the Kingdom DLC to coincide with Drake? 🤔 that would give some good incentive for people to upgrade
Click to expand...
It really could be that. Zelda TotK will be the big Zelda game for the next 4-5 years. There is already the rumor of the Pokemon Wave 2 DLC launching alongside an upgrade patch for Switch Redacted. We have seen Nintendo add a ton of content to Mario Kart 8 to keep the demand high for years. Zelda TotK could see support with new content for years to come. You can outright buy the DLC if you like, or get it through the NSO service similar to what they did with the Booster Pass for MK8.
 
I was reading/lurking this thread for a while and figured I should ask this here:

Is the assumption/most-likely-scenario at this point that nintendo will stick with the exact same controllers/devices as before (excluding the non-4k capable Switch dock) and won't add any controller/device features to their official hardware (e.g. camera, microphone, improved bluetooth/wifi, underside buttons, analog triggers, improved analog sticks, etc.)?
 
They obviously have their reasons, the main one being it’s not ready. Not releasing this with Zelda is a miss. You launch new hardware with Mario or Zelda. So, that means that a new Mario is coming by Q1 24.
 
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