Yeah, this is kind of my thinking now. Even at the lower end of possible clock speeds, this should be powerful enough to run almost any Switch game at close to 4K natively, which makes the tensor cores basically redundant if it's primarily designed as a "play Switch games at 4K" machine. If they wanted to design a chip around playing Switch games at higher resolutions, we would have ended up with one of two designs:
1. A straight upgrade of the TX1, with a much bigger Maxwell/Pascal GPU (ie 8 SMs+). This is the simplest way to get maximal compatibility.
2. A smaller Ampere-based GPU (4-6 SMs) with Orin's double-rate tensor cores to get sufficient DLSS performance. This is a more efficient approach, but requires more work on the software side to leverage.
Instead we're getting a GPU that's bigger than it needs to be to brute-force 4K resolutions, but also uses the latest Ampere architecture and includes both tensor cores and RT cores. It strikes me as massive overkill for a machine designed primarily as a "Switch games but in 4K" console, and Nintendo definitely don't have a history of that kind of overkill.
Of course that doesn't necessarily mean they'll call it the Switch 2 and make a big deal of dropping support for the original models out of the gate, but it looks to me like this is (in function if not in name) the successor to the Switch. They'll likely have around 2 years of cross-gen support, which is the norm now in any case, and I'd expect them to still sell the Switch Lite at the very least for some time, so there's probably going to be a more gradual transition between generations than we've seen before from Nintendo, but to me at least this looks like a new generation.
I really think it comes down mostly to what Nvidia is offering at the time and incentivizing.
In 2019, it makes sense to work with something Orin based. It’s where Nvidia was.
You talk about just doing Ampere with 8SM or whatever…when we had pages earlier in this thread discussing how 12 SM at the most conservative clocks by Nintendo would
barely allow 4K/60fps gaming. Talking about how the portable mode threshold might be too low to properly use tensor/rt cores.
The argument that this hardware is “overkill” to play Swirch games at 4K/60fps when docked…I don’t think that’s necessarily definitive yet.
I think they made a choice for 12SM’s so they can do the base minimum for clocks on this portable system and have enough power to render Switch games at native resolutions and 60fps. And maybe some left over to utilize the tensor/rt cores for some extra stuff.
That’s it.
They aren’t going to be shooting for the moon with this model. It will end up efficiently doing what it is designed to do…play the Switch library with better graphics/performance.
It won’t be overkill. It is promising something to Switch gaming that will make your average Lite gamer really not care that much about what it does.
The next hardware upgrade AFTER this Drake model…that’s when Nintendo will start to shift its development focus away from the Mariko models.
Yeah I will say Nintendo's first-party stuff will likely be "Built for Base Switch, then enhanced for Drake"
This actually gives them a ton of upwards room to enhance things as they want really due to how Drake would run most OG Switch games at 4k 60fps docked natively because of how big the CPU boost is and the 12SM GPU,
Yep, this is how I imaging Nintendo using this new model for.
I could see them making 4K Switch exclusives that utilize the tensor cores for AI or AR or something that people have theorized earlier. That’s absolutely possible
But they aren’t going to focus on exclusives for the new model cause they think their games can ONLY be played 4K/60 fps now…lol
What does this mean? BotW 2 and Prime 4 are being developed for the current Switch. If they're released on the next model it will be as ports with merely the same kinds of enhancement as BotW saw on Switch (resolution bump, higher draw distance, etc.).
Right. I’m simply saying this is how Nintendo will approach most of its games in the next 4-5 years. Because they will treat the new model more as a mid-gen revision than a successor.