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

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ILikeFeet said:
it depends on the output resolution. it is a fixed cost based on your input and output ratio
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So it always costs the same to upscale to, say, 200% of the original rendered resolution? Doesn't matter if that's 540->1080 or 1080->2160? Is that right?
 
alfiehicks said:
So which is it, then? Does the time cost depend on the output resolution or the input resolution? Because I've now received two conflicting answers. Or is DLSS just not a fixed-cost at all? But I could have sworn that NVIDIA said that it is.

In any case, it should still be faster than native rendering, so my point still stands about it generally being preferable to save compute time by lowering the input resolution versus lowering the DLSS output resolution.
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The time taken to run DLSS is definitely proportional to the output resolution. Nvidia's DLSS Programming Guide shows DLSS times for a variety of cards and output resolutions (all with 4x resolution scaling), and you can see that performance scales pretty much directly with the number of pixels being output.

I had previously done some (admittedly crude) testing myself, which indicated the input resolution also has an impact. Specifically, that lower input resolutions (ie higher scaling factors) would take longer. The effect was small, though, and it may simply be a mistake in my testing. If it is the case, though, it's a much smaller effect than output resolution has.

If Nvidia ever said that DLSS is fixed-cost, my guess is they were referring to it being fixed-cost regardless of what's actually in the image being scaled. If you are, say rendering internally at 1080p and using DLSS to scale to 4K, then it should take exactly the same amount of time every single frame, which is quite important.
 
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Goodtwin said:
Since we are entertaining the 4Chan "leak", I find it hard to gloss over the whole "PS4 Performance" claim. If this leak were to end up being true and Drake is closer in performance to the PS4 than the Xbox Series S, then this would put 8nm back on the table, would it not? Seems like clock speeds of of the original Switch would be line up here. It would still be better than PS4, but just like Switch is a lot closer to PS3 than PS4, Switch Redacted would sit in a similar spot.
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This must have been a rough estimation based solely on numbers. I have confidence that it'll be pushing beyond PS4-level visuals in reality.

If the Switch is slightly above seventh generation but with an eighth-gen featureset, then it follows that Switch 2 would be slightly above eighth generation but with a ninth-gen featureset. If I had to say anything, then I reckon it should sit just a bit above the Steam Deck. And I think this'll be the first Nintendo console to be sold at a slight loss. If it goes above the $400 mark, then they'll be pricing out kids and families that just want to play Mario Kart.
 
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toki98 said:
i've followed silently this thread for the last 300-350 pages, maybe more. First of all i want to thanks all of you, the thread sometimes goes nuts but it is fun and informative most of the times.
i have found this post on 4chan that went mostly ignored:



i know that 4chan leaks are unreliable and most of these infos can be derived by what we already knew and some patents but maybe there is something interesting?

p.s. My english is bad. Someone can explain to me what those ccd in the leaks are meant to be?
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Definitely a higher effort 4chan rumor. They've at least done their homework.

The "CCD" they're describing appears to be a VMU style device to enable a new version of StreetPass, though I'm not sure such a thing really conceptually makes sense with a device already designed to be portable. Seems a bit redundant to me.
Gerald said:
I have a bit of an offtopic question, if theoretically PlayStation or Xbox would switch to ARM, would backward compatibility still be?
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The issue is surmountable (Microsoft in particular has probably already done much of the necessary work for Windows), but it would be much more challenging.
 
alfiehicks said:
So it always costs the same to upscale to, say, 200% of the original rendered resolution? Doesn't matter if that's 540->1080 or 1080->2160? Is that right?
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no, it's fixed in that 540>1080 is always the same regardless of what you're rendering. if it's just a rectangle of solid color or a noise where no adjacent pixel has the same color.

1080>2160 will always take longer than 540>1080 because there are just more pixels to work
 
Brofield said:
Oh, well that's good then. How come the Switch currently uses SBC codec then? Does it not have BT5.0+?
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Nope, it’s BT4.x

BT5+ came out years after the switch released.
Gerald said:
I have a bit of an offtopic question, if theoretically PlayStation or Xbox would switch to ARM, would backward compatibility still be?
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No, different ISA. Same as how if Sony moved away from AMD to say, Intel for their GPUs, it would break compatibility due to different GPU ISA.
 
Dekuman said:
I am really considering an OLED but would hate to buy one only to have REDRAKED announced... 🫥
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Pretty sure the whole thread would appreciate your sacrifice if that happens.

And if not, you got yourself a nice (Zelda?) OLED with a good resell value!
 
Pokemaniac said:
The issue is surmountable (Microsoft in particular has probably already done much of the necessary work for Windows), but it would be much more challenging.
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Isn't the Xbox OS just a collection of hypervisors and modified flavors of Windows? (IIRC the Xbox One OS is a modified windows 8)

In that case they could probably do it pretty easily, at least compared to Sony. Windows on ARM already has an x86 compatibility layer that apparently works really well
 
Zaimokuza said:
Isn't the Xbox OS just a collection of hypervisors and modified flavors of Windows? (IIRC the Xbox One OS is a modified windows 8)

In that case they could probably do it pretty easily, at least compared to Sony. Windows on ARM already has an x86 compatibility layer that apparently works really well
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It's definitely pretty, Windows-based, though the specific VM that games run under might be a bit more customized.

Regardless, Microsoft seems well positioned to move to ARM while retaining BC. Sony is definitely less so, though perhaps one of the off the shelf open source emulators would be sufficient.
 
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Thraktor said:
If Nvidia ever said that DLSS is fixed-cost, my guess is they were referring to it being fixed-cost regardless of what's actually in the image being scaled. If you are, say rendering internally at 1080p and using DLSS to scale to 4K, then it should take exactly he same amount of time every single frame, which is quite important.
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Ahh, that's probably what it was. Yeah, that all makes sense now.

Maybe I'm just backseating here, but it actually seems quite inefficient to have DLSS take the same amount of time regardless of image detail. I wonder if Nintendo could have their own version of DLSS that only identifies specific areas of the image where upscaling would be most noticeable? Like only applying the upscaling to distant scenery or areas of high-frequency detail - something like Variable Rate Shading but for DLSS?
 
ILikeFeet said:
no, it's fixed in that 540>1080 is always the same regardless of what you're rendering. if it's just a rectangle of solid color or a noise where no adjacent pixel has the same color.

1080>2160 will always take longer than 540>1080 because there are just more pixels to work
Click to expand...

There is good reason to believe that even on the lower end expectations for Drake, it would be capable of rendering many of Nintendo's first party games at 1440p before applying DLSS. Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros already render at 1080p with less than 400Gflops of performance. At minimum, we are looking at more than 5x the performance of the current Switch. The frame time to take 1440p to 2160p should be manageable. Nintendo likes to fake higher end rendering techniques rather than trying to implement real time resource heavy equivalents.

alfiehicks said:
This must have been a rough estimation based solely on numbers. I have confidence that it'll be pushing beyond PS4-level visuals in reality.

If the Switch is slightly above seventh generation but with an eighth-gen featureset, then it follows that Switch 2 would be slightly above eigth generation but with a ninth-gen featureset. If I had to say anything, then I reckon it should sit just a bit above the Steam Deck. And I think this'll be the first Nintendo console to be sold at a slight loss. If it goes above the $400 mark, then they'll be pricing out kids and families that just want to play Mario Kart.
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$399 is the number. I do not see Nintendo going beyond that price. People can talk about inflation all they want, but consumers are already starting to change spending habits because of increased cost on everyday consumer goods. Plus, Nintendo is selling a lot more game digitally than in the past, so profits per game sold have gone up thanks to eliminating the retailer cut.

Dekuman said:
I am really considering an OLED but would hate to buy one only to have REDRAKED announced... 🫥
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I cant blame you, but you would get good resale value on your OLED. Hell, if you were to preorder your Switch Redacted through GameStop, you could probably trade in your OLED when you pick up your Redacted model and get 75% of your money back. The OLED is a very nice luxury item. In my opinion its not a must have item by no means, but if you play a considerable amount of time in portable mode, the screen quality and increase in size is very nice. The screen is only able 3/4 inch bigger than the standard Switch, but when playing it seems even more substantial than that. A 7" screen size seems optimal, even Valve opted for a 7" screen with Steam Deck.
 
Goodtwin said:
$399 is the number. I do not see Nintendo going beyond that price.
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Although, I wonder if they might do a repeat of the Wii U, where they have a $350-$400 'basic bundle' that they sell at a loss, and then a $425-$450 'premium bundle' that includes a game and maybe some other little trinkets so they can break even. Then they can advertise it at $350, when in reality most people will get FOMO once they're at the checkout and drop the full amount for the premium bundle. That's exactly what happened with the Steam Deck - the most expensive model was the best selling one, despite the lack of value for money.
 
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alfiehicks said:
Although, I wonder if they might do a repeat of the Wii U, where they have a $350-$400 'basic bundle' that they sell at a loss, and then a $425-$450 'premium bundle' that includes a game and maybe some other little trinkets so they can break even. Then they can advertise it at $350, when in reality most people will get FOMO once they're at the checkout and drop the full amount for the premium bundle. That's exactly what happened with the Steam Deck - the most expensive model was the best selling one, despite the lack of value for money.
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Do you have a citation about the most expensive one being the best selling one?
 
Goodtwin said:
There is good reason to believe that even on the lower end expectations for Drake, it would be capable of rendering many of Nintendo's first party games at 1440p before applying DLSS. Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros already render at 1080p with less than 400Gflops of performance. At minimum, we are looking at more than 5x the performance of the current Switch. The frame time to take 1440p to 2160p should be manageable. Nintendo likes to fake higher end rendering techniques rather than trying to implement real time resource heavy equivalents.
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hell, MK8 and Smash can probably do 2160p native.

and I wouldn't say Nintendo likes to fake high end techniques. they simply don't have room to do a lot of them given the switch. I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo moved to a ray traced GI solution for the Drake-oriented Zelda simply because they already have a probe-based GI system for BotW/TotK and they now have the horse power for higher fidelity
 
ILikeFeet said:
hell, MK8 and Smash can probably do 2160p native.

and I wouldn't say Nintendo likes to fake high end techniques. they simply don't have room to do a lot of them given the switch. I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo moved to a ray traced GI solution for the Drake-oriented Zelda simply because they already have a probe-based GI system for BotW/TotK and they now have the horse power for higher fidelity
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How many PS5 games use RTGI.
 
alfiehicks said:
Although, I wonder if they might do a repeat of the Wii U, where they have a $350-$400 'basic bundle' that they sell at a loss, and then a $425-$450 'premium bundle' that includes a game and maybe some other little trinkets so they can break even. Then they can advertise it at $350, when in reality most people will get FOMO once they're at the checkout and drop the full amount for the premium bundle. That's exactly what happened with the Steam Deck - the most expensive model was the best selling one, despite the lack of value for money.
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The Steam Deck is aimed at a specific audience that has the ability and desire to pay more than the average household that wants to play the new Mario.

Personally I think they won't sell their next hardware at a loss for exactly the same reason they won't go over $400: the bad economy. Households are going to be careful and so is Nintendo.

The whole question is what you can put in a $400 machine without losing money. And I love the contributions in this thread in part because they try to answer this question, among other things.
 
ILikeFeet said:
hell, MK8 and Smash can probably do 2160p native.
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I'd say there's absolutely no need to use DLSS for Switch backwards-compatibility. [READACTED] will be powerful enough to run Switch games at its native resolution, no sweat. Unless they achieve BC through software emulation (which is not outside the realm of possibility - the PS3 and Xbox 360 did it, and the Switch is super easy to emulate), in which case, they would probably need to employ DLSS to get beyond 1080p.
 
alfiehicks said:
I'd say there's absolutely no need to use DLSS for Switch backwards-compatibility. [READACTED] will be powerful enough to run Switch games at its native resolution, no sweat. Unless they achieve BC through software emulation (which is not outside the realm of possibility - the PS3 and Xbox 360 did it, and the Switch is super easy to emulate), in which case, they would probably need to employ DLSS to get beyond 1080p.
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DLSS slots into the middle of the rendering pipeline, so it cannot be employed for post-rendering upscaling.
 
boodream said:
The Steam Deck is aimed at a specific audience that has the ability and desire to pay more than the average household that wants to play the new Mario.

Personally I think they won't sell their next hardware at a loss for exactly the same reason they won't go over $400: the bad economy. Households are going to be careful and so is Nintendo.

The whole question is what you can put in a $400 machine without losing money. And I love the contributions in this thread in part because they try to answer this question, among other things.
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You seem to have seriously misunderstood my point. I'm saying that, for those households that don't want to pay out the nose for the new system, they could offer a basic set that costs $400 max, to lure them into the idea of buying one. Then, a lot of people who only initially planned to get the cheap set will inevitably end up getting the more expensive set anyway, because that's just how most people think.

Hell, Nintendo already uses that pricing structure for games: people are spending >$100 on TotK to get all of the (largely unnecessary) bonus items that come with those higher-priced editions. Once someone is interested in something, they're more likely to spend more money on it, whereas if the collector's edition was the only version available for purchase, I guarantee that most of those same people who have bought the collector's edition would have been turned-off by the high price tag. It's a simple psychological marketing tactic.
 
toki98 said:
i've followed silently this thread for the last 300-350 pages, maybe more. First of all i want to thanks all of you, the thread sometimes goes nuts but it is fun and informative most of the times.
i have found this post on 4chan that went mostly ignored:



i know that 4chan leaks are unreliable and most of these infos can be derived by what we already knew and some patents but maybe there is something interesting?

p.s. My english is bad. Someone can explain to me what those ccd in the leaks are meant to be?
Click to expand...

16GB of RAM with only 10 GB for games and 2GB for OS. Yeah, the math doesn't add up there lol.


Concernt said:
Stationary sensor bar or lighthouse? No. God no. Please, anything but that. Improve gyro, don't regress.
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Woman, have you ever played a fsper on Wii and Wii U like the call of dooty series? Nothing feels more satisfying than 720 no scoping OSOK someone with a Dragunov from the other side of the map.

Or Metroid Orime series with pointer controls or RE4 with pointer controls.

But in all seriousness, pointer IR controls+gyro work well with each other.
 
Zedark said:
DLSS slots into the middle of the rendering pipeline, so it cannot be employed for post-rendering upscaling.
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I didn't say it would be done in post. They could easily update the games to add a DLSS pass into the rendering pipeline only when running on the new system.
 
FernandoRocker said:
  • How about Bluetooth version? Maybe something similar to aptX Low Latency for headphones?
  • How about WiFi version? Are we expecting WiFi 6/6E?
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This is almost definitely what we're getting. The BCM4356 in the current Switch is retired. Broadcom kept it around for a long time only because it happened to be significantly lower power draw than their other chips, but they've finally moved over to this Ultra Lower Power device.

No Wifi6, as that isn't supported. BT 5, but aptX Low Latency isn't hardware, it's software, a codec from Qualcomm. What Nintendo chooses to license for it's BT audio codec is up in the air.
 
Dekuman said:
I am really considering an OLED but would hate to buy one only to have REDRAKED announced... 🫥
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Think of it this way, the Nintendo switch is six years old and is in its seventh year on the market. You can buy an OLED switch right now, and you can remain with that even after the successor is announced and released, but unless Nintendo is literally doing something that no one else is doing, which is having 8 to 9 year cycles on the market before successors announced, you would basically just be buying something that will be short-lived, depending on how are you utilize it.

ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
Feeling pretty doubtful that Open Air Zelda 3 will (on a platform massively weaker than the PS5) utilize an extremely demanding feature used in fewer than 5 PS5 games released or announced.
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RTXGI runs on a potato. It’ll be fine.
 
Goodtwin said:
The only part of the tablet part of the Switch OLED TotK Edition that is different than the standard edition would be the back panel. Nintendo would easily be sitting on stock pile of Switch OLED tablets that either haven't had the back plates on them yet, or are easily swapped out when they decide to do a special edition. With that said, I would be curious to know what firmware is one Switch units being sold today? It seems that the Zelda TotK delay was indeed needed for game development and not to coincide with new hardware like I originally expected, so it is very well possible that they started to manufacture these special editions far ahead of time and seeing as how this firmware dates back to June of 2022, maybe Nintendo didn't expect the delay to be quite so hefty. A March 2023 release date could have been the original intent when they first announced the delay.

Since we are entertaining the 4Chan "leak", I find it hard to gloss over the whole "PS4 Performance" claim. If this leak were to end up being true and Drake is closer in performance to the PS4 than the Xbox Series S, then this would put 8nm back on the table, would it not? Seems like clock speeds of of the original Switch would be line up here. It would still be better than PS4, but just like Switch is a lot closer to PS3 than PS4, Switch Redacted would sit in a similar spot.
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If TotK was delayed from March to May (just 2 months!), is it possible it’s due to financial report reasons?
Nintendo’s FY ends on Mar 31st. And if they know they will have a weak FY24, they may move TotK to make FY24 results look better.
(I'm not doom saying Drake Switch won’t be available next FY. But a 2-month delay looks strange)

And, I have been lurking here for several hundred pages.. hope we can start the “switch 2” thread within another 1000 pages.

Edit: typo
 
Gerald said:
I have a bit of an offtopic question, if theoretically PlayStation or Xbox would switch to ARM, would backward compatibility still be?
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That's up to them. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be possible. Emulating x86 on ARM is notoriously easier than emulating ARM on x86, and MS has at least heavily invested in things like AOT recompilation for backwards compatibility.

It's all about how much money they're willing to invest, how powerful the new hardware is, and how easy other companies are to work with.
 
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alfiehicks said:
I know, but... 40GB? Nearly three times that of the retail system? That's insane.
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It's kinda small, honestly. A medium tier workstation at a AAA developer is going to have something like 128GB, and I've seen high end graphics workstations with a terrabyte.

Remember, it's gotta have enough memory to run a version of the game that hasn't been optimized, as well as run a bunch of extra tools and debug services. The more RAM on the devkit, the most stuff you can do on the devkit, which makes development faster and thus cheaper. If the devkit only had a couple extra gigs, you'd have to develop a change on a workstation, make a build, push it over, see if it works, collect a little data, and go back to your workstation to figure out the problem when it doesn't, and hope that the workstation behavior and the console behavior match.

If you've got a problem that only occurs on console, that's maddening. But with an extra 20-30GB you can run a whole mini dev environment on the kit. You can replicate the problem, run a bunch of tests while the game is running, delete and asset from the game world live, see if it fixes the problem, and then do a giant dump of memory and scan through it, all on the devkit, and since there is only one devkit at your whole company, you don't have to schedule a bunch of 1 hour long sessions (half of which will be spent getting your build of the game on the box) to get the job done.
 
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alfiehicks said:
I didn't say it would be done in post. They could easily update the games to add a DLSS pass into the rendering pipeline only when running on the new system.
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It's an interesting proposition, though I don't know how easy it would be to get that to work in practice. One of the properties of emulation is that the software does not know it is actually being run on a different device, but of course that doesn't prelude the possibility that you could have nascent features in there that Activate based on an OS check of some kind. It does mean you have to have a complete and separate rendering pipeline bolted onto the game, so it would require per-game manipulation, which kind of hampers the use case of software emulation versus porting.
 
alfiehicks said:
You seem to have misunderstood my point. I'm saying that for households that don't want to pay the nose for the new system, they could offer a basic package that costs $400 maximum, to lure them into buying one. Then a lot of people who initially only planned on the cheap set will inevitably end up getting the more expensive set anyway, because that's exactly what most people are thinking.

Hell, Nintendo already uses this pricing structure for games: people spend over $100 on TotK to get all the (largely useless) bonus items that come with these more expensive editions. Once someone is interested in something, they are more likely to spend more money, whereas if the collector's edition was the only version available for purchase, I guarantee that most of those same people who bought the collector's edition would have been turned -off by the high price. It's a simple psychological marketing tactic.
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The entry price we are talking about, $400, is already high. A Nintendo console that costs $400 would not be something that will be perceived by the very general audience (i.e. not a forum of enthusiasts like us) as a "cheap" product.

I just don't imagine Nintendo being ok with losing money on a basic model that would not even be seen as "cheap". It's just not in their interest, especially in a bad economy. And it's not like it's impossible to come up with a product that's both satisfying to the target audience and economically viable for $400, is it?
 
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boodream said:
Let's not react like Nintendo fanboys and accept the truth: when it was released, the Nintendo Switch was indeed already technologically outdated compared to other HD hybrid game consoles available on the market. The very relevant Forbes journalist is also right to mention the games from 10 years ago. Everyone knows that the HD hybrid consoles available in 2013 were already at least as technically good.
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I don't see how this correlates to TotK looking bad. Yes, the hardware is outdated, but that doesn't mean games can't be optimized on said hardware (not to mention YouTube compression can be horrendous). That article just seems moot and incendiary.

IGNORE THIS REPLY, OP WAS BEING SARCASTIC AND I BARELY READ THROUGH WHOLE POST AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
 
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alfiehicks said:
In any case, it should still be faster than native rendering, so my point still stands about it generally being preferable to save compute time by lowering the input resolution versus lowering the DLSS output resolution.
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Generally yes. There would be certain points of ridiculousness (like scaling 360->2160), but I'd usually pick 720->2160 over 1080->1440 if they were both similarly viable.
 
boodream said:
Let's not react like Nintendo fanboys and accept the truth: when it was released, the Nintendo Switch was indeed already technologically outdated compared to other HD hybrid game consoles available on the market. The very relevant Forbes journalist is also right to mention the games from 10 years ago. Everyone knows that the HD hybrid consoles available in 2013 were already at least as technically good.
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How much did they cost ?

Edit : I'm dumb lol
 
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Concernt said:
It really doesn't...

Sensor bar based tracking is a no-go for so many reasons. The dock can be placed sideways, behind TVs, in cabinets, etc., and a LOT of people, including some of Nintendo's devs, use it like that. Adding a sensor bar to it (or the console bezel) would be absurd. It isn't 2006 anymore; there are better ways to achieve decent tracking.
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The problem is that the gyro+accelerometer method leads to too much pointer drift. And yeah having the sensor bar attached to the current dock form wouldn't work but having a small USB-C rechargable bar would work much better especially since emitting two IR lights requires very little power anyway.
 
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