Revenue also went up in FY20/21, which is why the percentage is so low. You switched from using a dollar figure increase to a percentage of revenue. Compare dollar figures to dollar figures. Here, let me help:
FY20/21 R&D spend was $880 million,
the largest single year amount Nintendo has ever spent in the company’s history, apparently.
From the article:
And this is after R&D expenses were already the largest they had ever been the prior fiscal year.
That’s…literally the graph i referred to in my post.
And it crystallizes my point…the R&D spent during Drake creation isn’t as big of a deal as the poster I was responding to was suggesting.
The size of R&D budget doesn’t suggest something HAS to be treated as a true successor hardware, any more than spec differentials do.
The % of revenue stat should be obvious, which that graph also uses it to point at…while R&D costs and earned revenue both go up…Nintendo is actually using less % of their revenue on R&D
This is important.
Especially if the argument you are making is that Nintendo is spending so much money on R&D for Drake, Drake has to be positioned as a next gen console! They wouldn’t spend all that money if it wasn’t!
They are pulling more in than they are spending compared to when they were making Lite and TX1+ revision hardware. They can easily treat Drake as a mid gen revision model and not sweat about the R&D any more than they usually do.
You talk about how you don’t like the bad rap Nintendo gets about the perception of cheaping out on hardware, but you’re more than happy to perpetuate the similar myth that 3rd-parties care about what hardware enhancements can do for their software far more than Nintendo does. How incongruous of you.
When it comes to hardware capability changes of this magnitude, using it as just 4K uprezzing is like hammering a carpenter nail with a sledgehammer. What utterly wasteful spending that would be. If that was all they wanted to achieve to follow it up with a proper successor in 2026 as you suggested, even Xavier SoCs would be far more available, far cheaper and (by now) already engineered to reach a hybrid console’s desired power envelope. But that’s not what we’re getting, we’re getting the cutting-edge SoC tech from Nvidia currently available. And there’s no compelling reason for why they would do that If all they wanted was 4K uprezzing until a true successor in another 3-4 years. Might as well flush the excess money spent on engineering and manufacturing down the toilet.
They care very much about their games running at native resolutions to the screen/tv and at the same refresh rate as the screen/tv.
This Drake will certainly alleviate that and give them headroom to play with other graphics design they do care a lot about like lighting.
You are asking me to believe Nintendo went to Nvidia and told them they need to have Orin/Ampere and tensor and RT cores! What? 6SM’s?? No way, we want 12SM’s! What? 8nm? No way, give us the good stuff, let’s go 5nm! We need all that juicy power because we need it to make BotW3 and Prime 4 better! We have so many ideas beyond just playing Switch games at steady resolutions and framerates!
Hyperbole aside, i think these choices came more as happenstances during design mode and I firmly believe Nvidia incentivized them.
I think Nvidia told them how DLSS was the future of gaming where you never have to render at native resolutions ever again…that you can have lower variable resolutions and gain performance…it’s almost as if this was designed with Nintendo in mind. Nintendo immediately hired people and delved into it. I’m sure they wanted to start the process cause they see that as the future of their Switch design as well.
If Nintendo are going to start doing this (as I’ve mentioned, they lament they should have moved over to HD development sooner during the Wii years), don’t they kind of have to use ampere? Wouldn’t Nvidia say hey, we have new ampere mobile SoC with enough tensor cores to actually make this work!
So they kind of have to use a variation of Orin when discussing this in 2019 or so, no?
And then they try to figure out what’s the minimum they can do and still get a reasonable function of DLSS with 4K/60fps output for…say…the BotW2 game they are building or the new Monolith/Platinum game.
But it has so be able to clock extremely low while doing. Like, appealing to Nintendo’s standards of really low heat and power draws.
Doesn’t going wide make sense to this? Couldn’t the design process and prototypes have had trouble, maybe running too hot? (Wasn’t there suggestions by insiders that there were issues like this?)
So maybe, in the end, 12SM’s and moving to 5nm (if true) was a necessity in the end, rather than an ask.
As far as money, again as I stated above, Nintendo is in a place of clear success now and eyeing for even more growth and investment in this ecosystem. Paying for these changes is easier now than it would have been in…say…2016.
So, when people tell me this is wayyyy too powerful to be just used like it’s just an RTX 2070 for Nintendo games…offering to game with better resolution and performance than you were getting with some headroom for higher graphics sliders and some light ray tracing…I kind of shrug about it because I don’t think it’s extravagantly too powerful to be used as just that in a Switch form factor.
Look, I get why people don’t like me saying Nintendo is going to be conservative on how they use this right now…but people wanted “a catch” to these leaks seeming too good to be true? Here it is. It’s not going to be used and positioned by Nintendo how you think this hardware should be.
I do believe Nintendo is interested in trying some offshoot games utilizing the tensor cores for some unique gameplay, don’t get me wrong.