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

[LuckyLuke]

The way "boost mode" works on other consoles is pretty straightforward. A game that is not enhanced to take specific advantage of the new hardware is run in backwards compatibility mode, but with higher clock speeds. The idea is that any place a game struggles on the old hardware will be improved on the new hardware without any extra patches.

Games with capped frame rate will max out that frame rate consistently, and games with unlocked frame rates will see higher frame rates over all.

Games with dynamic resolution will see the max resolution achieved more often.

Games with loading screens will see those get shorter.

Exactly. I don't think old titles like Odyssey or Breath of the Wild will get a patch, but if there is boost mode they would improve.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Odyssey would be nice to get a higher IQ patch because it's still selling and has no sequel.

 

[Eclissi]

hey @Z0m3le thanks for all the infos

Thanks from me too!
...

But what infos are these?

 

[Goodtwin]

Why I am so confident here, is that there is no known games after Pikmin 4, except MP4 which we have yet to see... The next direct will be brand new announcements and never seen before games, more over, Nintendo has a solid holiday, or they wouldn't have dropped MP1 in February for $39.99, the anniversary month which Nintendo has celebrated in the past is August, and if they had announced MP1 for August 2023 at $49.99, it would make a lot more sense than shadow dropping it at the end of a direct, digital only, for $39.99...

The lack of announced titles for second half of 2023 is suspicious, and on its own it might not be all that compelling, but when you factor in that Switch is six years old and is now in its seventh year on the market, it looks beyond a little suspicious. In this uncharted territory, if Nintendo was trying to convince gamers and investors alike that Switch is still their focus for extended future, having no first party titles dated beyond Pikmin 4 in July doesn't instill a lot of confidence. On top of that, the first half lineup has been pretty stacked. It was strange that Prime Remastered was stealth dropped with no mention of Prime 4. I would have expected a short Prime 4 trailer to be shown off and then drop Prime Remastered to hold over players until Prime 4 releases. Why no mention of Prime 4 at all? Seems plausible they are waiting to show it off for Switch Redacted.

The Pokemon Leaker might not be 100% credible, but they did have all the Pokemon info correct, and for me that puts it in the more likely true than not. Certainly not one hundred percent fact, but its a piece of the puzzle that seems to fit. The first Wave of DLC will be released prior to Redacted coming out and Wave 2 will release either when Redacted releases or shortly after. This will help bolster demand for Redacted gamers to buy Pokemon S/V and/or the DLC. Again, this this leak by itself wouldn't be be as convincing if Nintendo had announced a few high profile games for the second half with no mention of new hardware at the February Direct.

It really is a culmination of the Drake being finalized last year, Switch entering its seventh year on the market, the Pokemon Leak, a very strong lineup of first party games for the first seven months of 2023 with nothing dated beyond that, and Switch OLED TotK units being manufactured far in advance of release. Any one thing on its own doesn't tell much of a story, but when you look at all this information together, it starts to look very plausible that Switch Redacted will release later this year.

 

[Tentacle-tropes]

If that were true, the Wii U wouldn´t have tanked as hard as it did. Even the PS5 went out of its way to change the aesthetic of the brand, going with a white and black motif for all its PS5 products to reinforce the idea ¨This isn´t just another PlayStation¨. A lot of people could easily see the next product as ¨just another Switch¨ and say they are fine with the one they have. Because in reality, people could have said the same thing to the PS5 and just held onto there PS4 for some more years.

Every console maker wants fast adaption and at a rate higher than the one before, setting new records for the company. And its the prelaunch months that are absolutely formative to long lasting demand

The WiiU was a complete disaster of a device that needed a rethink from conception. Using it as an example of anything other then how not to design & market a device is foolhardy. They even did what you said, Nintendo should do, in showing it off which did jack-all. If your at the point where you need to show off the minute details to stop people thinking it’s “not another model” then you’ve lost them already.

In this very post your actively agreeing with me with your example of PS5 since no one was gonna mistake that as just another model. If it wasn’t for supply then the numbers we are seeing now would have been happening earlier.

The pre-launch is important but not as important as your claiming it to be. You can get around a bad pre-launch.

 

[Guaraná]

Thanks from me too!
...

But what infos are these?

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

My guess at this point is that Nintendo is waiting to see how the Mario movie does because the more they can rely on non-video-game revenue (movies, tv shows, super nintendo world, etc) the more freedom they will have to do things like sell their hardware at less of a profit or even an outright...

famiboards.com

 

[MusicProposition]

It really is a culmination of the Drake being finalized last year, Switch entering its seventh year on the market, the Pokemon Leak, a very strong lineup of first party games for the first seven months of 2023 with nothing dated beyond that, and Switch OLED TotK units being manufactured far in advance of release.

Plus a never before seen marketing push for the Nintendo brand thanks to the Mario Movie and theme park endeavors, and yet no single Mario release on the horizon.

 

[kvetcha]

I missed the N64 here, but I meant a non-inclusive between. Obviously many systems have launched in September and March, but April, May, June, July, and August are very uncommon original release dates for systems. (Europe got a few console releases in that period, but only well after the system had launched in Japan. America got a couple as well, but generally a few months after the JPN release). An April or May release date just doesn't seem like something Nintendo would aim for based on history and just seems like a "we're waiting for our big launch game to finish development" date instead.

It's only basically since the Wii era that worldwide console releases were reliably within a few weeks of one another. Wii and Wii U in November/December, 3DS in Feb/March, Switch with a single release date worldwide.

 

[Pokemaniac]

I still don't understand Nintendo's strategy. If the new console is pretty much ready, why not launch it with Zelda? There is some element that escapes us and that we will know a posteriori.

At this point it's fairly clear that TotK was never planned to launch as a cross gen game, and it's known that the game was significantly delayed. It's potential proximity to hardware does not seem intentional.

 

[Hush]

The WiiU was a complete disaster of a device that needed a rethink from conception. Using it as an example of anything other then how not to design & market a device is foolhardy. They even did what you said Nintendo should do in showing it off which did jack-all. If your at the point where you need to show off the minute details to stop people thinking it’s “not another model” then you’ve lost them already.

In this very post your actively agreeing with me with your example of PS5 since no one was gonna mistake that as just another model. If it wasn’t for supply then the numbers we are seeing now would have been happening earlier.

The pre-launch is important but not as important as your claiming it to be. You can get around a bad pre-launch.

Nintendo confused people from day one with still having people wondering if it was a controller or a console. MS made a similar mistake with blocking used games and then reversing course, making the problem of there still being consumers who thought the Xbox One couldnt play used games years later. You understand my point? Consumers need time, especially the ones who are only there to be sold on the immediate impression or are a lost sale if the pitch is botched.

And you are ignoring the lengths that Sony went through to cement how the PS5 was a new product and not just a more powerful PlayStation, with trailers dedicate to highlighting the new triggers on the DualSense, the new sound tech, and SSD speeds. All well after those were detailed in the reveal showcase. That along with completely refreshing the image of the PlayStation line with all the products being white and black. And this is after the PS4 was a huge success might I add and people were excited for a new PS.

You can´t assume your next device is going to rocket to the moon with success, primarily because consumers are fickle and especially dense in an age where new tech is incremental and many are fine with sitting new products to stick with the one they have. And Nintendo struggles with this a LOT when it comes to successful transitions to new platforms.

 

[Goodtwin]

At this point it's fairly clear that TotK was never planned to launch as a cross gen game, and it's known that the game was significantly delayed. It's potential proximity to hardware does not seem intentional.

That does seem clear at this point. The delay was a legitimate software related delay and not moved to line up with new hardware. The original release date was absolutely targeting 2022. The fact that the Switch and its evergreen titles have continued to sell so well year after year certainly opened up the ability for Nintendo to be more flexible with its release schedule. If Switch were seeing a hard decline going into 2022, there most likely would have been pressure on the Zelda team to wrap up development for TotK, but things were still going along just fine and even BotW continues to sell, so giving the team extra time to finish was very feasible.

I do not think most first party games will get enhancement patches for Redacted. I think the BC mode will likely have a boost mode enabled allowing Switch games to run at their highest intended resolution and framerate, but only a select few games will get enhancement patches. Zelda TotK will be the big Zelda release for the next five years or so, they will want that game to continue to sell for years so an enhancement patch makes sense. Mario Kart 8 I'm not convinced. I believe the DLC was intended to carry Mario Kart 8 through the life of the Switch and Redacted will get the sequel within its first year on the market.

 

[Pokemaniac]

You Can Use Vulkan Without Pipelines Today

Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing

www.khronos.org

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/proposals/VK_EXT_shader_object.adoc

New Vulkan extension just dropped. The interesting bit here is that Nintendo appears to be a significant contributor.

It's not immediately clear to me that this would be directly related to new hardware, but that said, I'm certainly not an expert on graphics APIs. It seems like this could potentially have some uses in emulation (something we know Nintendo uses Vulkan for in their N64 emulator), as well as generally increasing flexibility and reducing CPU overhead. Also if I'm reading this right, it might reduce storage costs of shipping precompiled shaders for Vulkan games.

 

[Ojoloco]

You Can Use Vulkan Without Pipelines Today

Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing

www.khronos.org

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/proposals/VK_EXT_shader_object.adoc

New Vulkan extension just dropped. The interesting bit here is that Nintendo appears to be a significant contributor.

It's not immediately clear to me that this would be directly related to new hardware, but that said, I'm certainly not an expert on graphics APIs. It seems like this could potentially have some uses in emulation (something we know Nintendo uses Vulkan for in their N64 emulator), as well as generally increasing flexibility and reducing CPU overhead. Also if I'm reading this right, it might reduce storage costs of shipping precompiled shaders for Vulkan games.

This is interesting

 

[Hosermess]

You Can Use Vulkan Without Pipelines Today

Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing

www.khronos.org

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/proposals/VK_EXT_shader_object.adoc

New Vulkan extension just dropped. The interesting bit here is that Nintendo appears to be a significant contributor.

It's not immediately clear to me that this would be directly related to new hardware, but that said, I'm certainly not an expert on graphics APIs. It seems like this could potentially have some uses in emulation (something we know Nintendo uses Vulkan for in their N64 emulator), as well as generally increasing flexibility and reducing CPU overhead. Also if I'm reading this right, it might reduce storage costs of shipping precompiled shaders for Vulkan games.

I will take your word for it

 

[Concernt]

They don't need to differentiate the dock as a new product if you only see it after you bought it.

The actual Switch device is what needs to look different.

My sincere hope is two-toned brushed aluminium. Since this wouldn't significantly (if at all) increase costs from the existing OLED Model, which is mostly metal anyway.

Maybe light grey plastic along the top for RF reasons (and also metal buttons and a metal Game Card cover would be overkill and possibly uncomfortable), brushed metal rear, shiny metal kickstand. They're no stranger to it, from the brushed metal plates on GameBoy Micro, and the 75% metal and glass construction of OLED Model.

 

[TurtleRock]

The lack of announced titles for second half of 2023 is suspicious, and on its own it might not be all that compelling, but when you factor in that Switch is six years old and is now in its seventh year on the market, it looks beyond a little suspicious. In this uncharted territory, if Nintendo was trying to convince gamers and investors alike that Switch is still their focus for extended future, having no first party titles dated beyond Pikmin 4 in July doesn't instill a lot of confidence. On top of that, the first half lineup has been pretty stacked. It was strange that Prime Remastered was stealth dropped with no mention of Prime 4. I would have expected a short Prime 4 trailer to be shown off and then drop Prime Remastered to hold over players until Prime 4 releases. Why no mention of Prime 4 at all? Seems plausible they are waiting to show it off for Switch Redacted.

The Pokemon Leaker might not be 100% credible, but they did have all the Pokemon info correct, and for me that puts it in the more likely true than not. Certainly not one hundred percent fact, but its a piece of the puzzle that seems to fit. The first Wave of DLC will be released prior to Redacted coming out and Wave 2 will release either when Redacted releases or shortly after. This will help bolster demand for Redacted gamers to buy Pokemon S/V and/or the DLC. Again, this this leak by itself wouldn't be be as convincing if Nintendo had announced a few high profile games for the second half with no mention of new hardware at the February Direct.

It really is a culmination of the Drake being finalized last year, Switch entering its seventh year on the market, the Pokemon Leak, a very strong lineup of first party games for the first seven months of 2023 with nothing dated beyond that, and Switch OLED TotK units being manufactured far in advance of release. Any one thing on its own doesn't tell much of a story, but when you look at all this information together, it starts to look very plausible that Switch Redacted will release later this year.

Even the most lukewarm directs are good for announcing a title a good 9+ months out. That’s generally been the trend with Nintendo these past few years. So I was pretty surprised we didn’t see a big new announcement in the last direct for a title a little while away. Big smoke there.

 

[Tentacle-tropes]

Nintendo confused people from day one with still having people wondering if it was a controller or a console. MS made a similar mistake with blocking used games and then reversing course, making the problem of there still being consumers who thought the Xbox One couldnt play used games years later. You understand my point? Consumers need time, especially the ones who are only there to be sold on the immediate impression or are a lost sale if the pitch is botched.

And you are ignoring the lengths that Sony went through to cement how the PS5 was a new product and not just a more powerful PlayStation, with trailers dedicate to highlighting the new triggers on the DualSense, the new sound tech, and SSD speeds. All well after those were detailed in the reveal showcase. That along with completely refreshing the image of the PlayStation line with all the products being white and black. And this is after the PS4 was a huge success might I add and people were excited for a new PS.

You can´t assume your next device is going to rocket to the moon with success, primarily because consumers are fickle and especially dense in an age where new tech is incremental and many are fine with sitting new products to stick with the one they have. And Nintendo struggles with this a LOT when it comes to successful transitions to new platforms.

This entire post essentially is agreeing with me but your your putting way too much emphasis on pre-launch. The devices you mentioned both are conceptually flawed devices & it wouldn’t matter if they had better pre-launches. The reason Nintendo struggles is because of that, putting out conceptually flawed devices such as: N64, GC, & WiiU. As we see with their handheld line they are mostly fine when not doing that.

I’m not ignoring what Sony did but claiming that people could have seen the PS5 as “just another model” of PS4 was frankly never gonna happen from even just a bird’s eye view. Your listing things Nintendo has done with their various models already. It stands to reason that with a Switch 2 they would do the same. All that wouldn’t matter if the device itself is conceptually flawed.

Like I’m not seeing how this would add an extra month to their pre-launch. They could do 2-3 months and be fine with the way information spreads now & how fast they can get information out.

 

[MP!]

They changed the design due to the new circuitry, but that redesign included 4K output, freeing up USB 3.0 lanes on the USB-C/DP connector, and includes two models already. It was also only 2 years ago, not even that at present. Nintendo designs peripherals to last, literally. Nintendo Wi-Fi Adaptor AC Adaptor spanned three families of devices and two generations, Wii AV cables spanned two generations, NES AV and AC Adaptors spanned two generations, DMG 4 Player Multitap survived three redesigns and a new generation where it remained relevant to play BC games in 4 player mode.

If the shoe fits, the shoe gets worn. The GBA AC adaptor worked on DS, and so, it was used on DS, and so on, and so forth.

The dock is just that, it's a DMG 4 Player Adaptor, it's an AC Adaptor, it's AV equipment, it's all of this in one unit, and the Nintendo Switch Dock with LAN Port (which, somewhat oddly, doesn't use the term "Nintendo Switch Dock (OLED Model)") has more than enough technical specifications to handle the next generation of Nintendo devices, at least for now. From its increased ventilation to enhanced output abilities, and let's not forget much more forgiving tolerances, to the point even a thicker device could fit, nothing indicates that it was just the 2 year gap filler one might think it would be. Pennies. Matter. In quantities of a million. And in quantities of a hundred million, even more. Simplifying production going into a new generation by going from two docks and two sets of HDMI cables to just one that works across the entire range means huge savings, and all that wasted plastic making the ins and outs of the ventilation system on the Dock with LAN Port were hardly made for no reason; no existing Switch can come close to overheating in the Dock with LAN Port. Why is the best ventilated dock the one that comes with the most power efficient model?

Well, probably because it's also going to come with the most power hungry model.

Also, they have been VERY particular with the marketing, only ever marketing the White Nintendo Switch OLED Model and its White Dock with LAN Port. Nintendo Switch Dock with LAN Port (Black) has been broadly absent from advertisements, so the visual identity going into the next generation would be very very clear; white Joy-Con, white Dock, rounded design is the old Switch. Black dock, black/dark grey Joy-Con and a redesigned body is the new Switch. Nothing stops them from reusing it in advertising because it already has the capability to provide a unique identity in marketing. Did Sony really stress out that say, PS4 Slim and Pro shared so many design elements? Same idea.

Unless they want to push this thing to HDMI 2.1, which I see few benefits and a few caveats in even trying to do so, 2.0b will be fine, it even allows games to target 1440p120 if they want, because as impressive as this device is, 4K120 it is not.

Not to rehash myself too much, but there's also just plain consumer goodwill to keep in mind! Even Microsoft knows that, and kept controllers, cables, even power cables and HDMI cables, game drives and so forth, cross compatible across five models and two generations of Xbox and everyone loves them for it. When Nintendo is making a new console that must by means of its market position as a hybrid, observe the same formfactor as its forefather, it is such an easy win to ensure devices are compatible so we don't have to go out and buy all new Pro-Controllers and Joy-Con. Optional improved controllers? Sure, I'm game, that's what Xbox did and nobody complained, the Xbox Wireless Controller (2020) (Yes that's its official name.) is excellent, my favourite controller ever excluding those with gyro.

Yeah I don’t disagree with any of that I literally mean I think it will be a different shape …

They don't need to differentiate the dock as a new product if you only see it after you bought it.

The actual Switch device is what needs to look different.

They’ve never advertised the switch without it flying into a dock. It is part of the message.

 

[LiC]

You Can Use Vulkan Without Pipelines Today

Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing

www.khronos.org

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/proposals/VK_EXT_shader_object.adoc

New Vulkan extension just dropped. The interesting bit here is that Nintendo appears to be a significant contributor.

It's not immediately clear to me that this would be directly related to new hardware, but that said, I'm certainly not an expert on graphics APIs. It seems like this could potentially have some uses in emulation (something we know Nintendo uses Vulkan for in their N64 emulator), as well as generally increasing flexibility and reducing CPU overhead. Also if I'm reading this right, it might reduce storage costs of shipping precompiled shaders for Vulkan games.

I think it's fair to say that, more than Nintendo being a significant contributor, they wholly developed the feature. The principal contact for the extension is an NTD employee, and there's another one in the contributor list, plus two Nvidia employees. Nvidia is already releasing beta driver support for it alongside this announcement, too. And one of the other listed contributors, a Valve employee, states that it was developed by Nintendo.

My takeaway is that is that the feature is primarily about flexibility and dynamism in (re)creating different parts of a shader pipeline on the fly, with minimal or amortized performance costs. The announcement says that on "some implementations" (eyes emoji) there are no performance costs at all, and it mentions that the extension works even without having original shader source, and the linked blog post by the Valve developer specifically states that it will help eliminate shader compilation stutter. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems like something that could be part of a BC solution. If you have a BC layer which is capable of ingesting shaders from an original Switch game and transpiling them or whatever, they still need to be structured and submitted as part of a pipeline that the new hardware accepts, and that process needs to be very fast with smart and efficient caching, and this feature sounds like it delivers that.

Although the feature surely has a lot of upside and applications for games that are actually using Vulkan, we already know that Nintendo is continuing their investment in the near bare-metal approach with NVN2, which (a) isn't Vulkan, and (b) doesn't need or want the flexibility and dynamism of this feature. So why invest "years of work" into a dynamic Vulkan pipeline if your new games don't need it at their core? Well, probably similar to the way the NSO emulators use Vulkan, I think there's a good chance the flexibility is to adapt old games to new hardware.

 

[Concernt]

Yeah I don’t disagree with any of that I literally mean I think it will be a different shape …



They’ve never advertised the switch without it flying into a dock. It is part of the message.

Why change the shape?

Why not reuse the moulds when you already have a visually distinct but technically identical product in production?

Mould dies cost a LOT to change, there's a reason the V2 only changed the processor rather than case elements, even though they could have saved money with more simplification.

 

[Deleted member 2]

Yeah I don’t disagree with any of that I literally mean I think it will be a different shape …



They’ve never advertised the switch without it flying into a dock. It is part of the message.

The dock being the same is not going to confuse anyone when said commercial is showing you a new Switch, saying it's a new Switch, and telling how how it's new.

 

[Concernt]

The dock being the same is not going to confuse anyone when said commercial is showing you a new Switch, saying it's a new Switch, and telling how how it's new.

And the "Old Switch" always being shown with a White dock...

To clarify, I fully expect them to axe the V2 model before the Drake is out, not only to simplify production by having Drake and OLED share more parts, and simplify marketing, but also to IMPROVE marketing.

 

[MP!]

To clarify, I fully expect them to axe the V2 model before the Drake is out…

Same

Edit: I’m a bit surprised it’s still around to be honest… shocked… but not that shocked

 

[Instro]

Not really hardware related, but the info about Engage being originally planned for 2020 before COVID really makes you reconsider Nintendo's hardware/software pipeline over the past few years. I mean I think most already assumed that many things were delayed due to COVID, and there were certainly early reports of them being badly affected by COVID, but obviously this is more concrete with Engage.

 

[ShadowFox08]

I still don't understand Nintendo's strategy. If the new console is pretty much ready, why not launch it with Zelda? There is some element that escapes us and that we will know a posteriori.

Besides what everyone else said... I also think they want to sell as many Switch units as possible, while it's still this well (despite slowing down in sale this years). As soon as Switch 2 gets released, switch 1 sales will drop quite a bit. They really wanna milk it.

 

[Pokemaniac]

I think it's fair to say that, more than Nintendo being a significant contributor, they wholly developed the feature. The principal contact for the extension is an NTD employee, and there's another one in the contributor list, plus two Nvidia employees. Nvidia is already releasing beta driver support for it alongside this announcement, too. And one of the other listed contributors, a Valve employee, states that it was developed by Nintendo.

My takeaway is that is that the feature is primarily about flexibility and dynamism in (re)creating different parts of a shader pipeline on the fly, with minimal or amortized performance costs. The announcement says that on "some implementations" (eyes emoji) there are no performance costs at all, and it mentions that the extension works even without having original shader source, and the linked blog post by the Valve developer specifically states that it will help eliminate shader compilation stutter. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems like something that could be part of a BC solution. If you have a BC layer which is capable of ingesting shaders from an original Switch game and transpiling them or whatever, they still need to be structured and submitted as part of a pipeline that the new hardware accepts, and that process needs to be very fast with smart and efficient caching, and this feature sounds like it delivers that.

Although the feature surely has a lot of upside and applications for games that are actually using Vulkan, we already know that Nintendo is continuing their investment in the near bare-metal approach with NVN2, which (a) isn't Vulkan, and (b) doesn't need or want the flexibility and dynamism of this feature. So why invest "years of work" into a dynamic Vulkan pipeline if your new games don't need it at their core? Well, probably similar to the way the NSO emulators use Vulkan, I think there's a good chance the flexibility is to adapt old games to new hardware.

I considered the possibility that it could be for BC, but I wasn't sure how it would be directly connected, since that would be happening at a lower level than Vulkan would typically operate. It seems you're proposing a Vulkan-based compatibility layer that sits between the game's usermode driver and the system-level driver? I could see that.

The extension does seem fairly broadly applicable, so I think that improving the state of Vulkan on their platforms for both 3rd party developers and their own internal emulators (both present and future) probably weighed in to their motivation at least somewhat, but the level of investment does perhaps seem a bit high if there wasn't a specific major problem they were intending to solve, given their limited internal usage of Vulkan. Previously I thought it might be related to a more demanding emulator they're internally working on (perhaps GCN/Wii or 3DS) or possibly solving some performance roadblocks with the N64 emulator, but being part of their BC solution is a more compelling explanation if there's a way to connect it to that.

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

Will the people who buy the system at this point in time actually wait to get the Switch 2 instead, though? They seem like completely different types of consumers compared to the people who would go out to buy a new system in the first few months of a systems launch.

I think that was much easier to say in the days when people buying hardware late were getting a huge discount. Is the person who only considered a GameCube when it was $100 with a pack-in game likely to be an early adopter? Probably not. But for sure there are people now asking themselves and others "I'm late but I want to get the Switch. Do I get the OLED now, or if I wait a few months will there be something significantly better that costs 30% more or less?"

IDK, it's been so long that I don't think a GB to GBC like transition is reasonable.

The GBC also lasted... Three years before being replaced.

Based on initial Japanese dates, actually 2.5 years on the dot.

If we get to mid May with no announcement and Nintendo is releasing this November 2023, then Nintendo must view a short pre-release cycle as obscenely beneficial and I would not understand that at all.

If they were to release November 17 of this year and follow the Switch pre-release timeline exactly, we wouldn't see anything solid until July 6, and the big presentation would be September 29.

(And Pikmin 4 could be more overshadowed by a Switch 2 announcement than TotK as well)

Totally. But it's also a release that's probably not 10% as important as TOTK.

 

[Instro]

I think that was much easier to say in the days when people buying hardware late were getting a huge discount. Is the person who only considered a GameCube when it was $100 with a pack-in game likely to be an early adopter? Probably not. But for sure there are people now asking themselves and others "I'm late but I want to get the Switch. Do I get the OLED now, or if I wait a few months will there be something significantly better that costs 30% more or less?"

Based on initial Japanese dates, actually 2.5 years on the dot.

If they were to release November 17 of this year and follow the Switch pre-release timeline exactly, we wouldn't see anything solid until July 6, and the big presentation would be September 29.

Totally. But it's also a release that's probably not 10% as important as TOTK.

If they are following the Switch timeline, then the release window will be confirmed at the FY briefing.

 

[ReddDreadtheLead]

If they are following the Switch timeline, then the release window will be confirmed at the FY briefing.

It will not.

 

[ReddDreadtheLead]

Bots can forget?

They runs their posts through like several Machine Translations so, I wouldn’t jump to being a bot just yet lol

 

[LiC]

I considered the possibility that it could be for BC, but I wasn't sure how it would be directly connected, since that would be happening at a lower level than Vulkan would typically operate. It seems you're proposing a Vulkan-based compatibility layer that sits between the game's usermode driver and the system-level driver? I could see that.

The extension does seem fairly broadly applicable, so I think that improving the state of Vulkan on their platforms for both 3rd party developers and their own internal emulators (both present and future) probably weighed in to their motivation at least somewhat, but the level of investment does perhaps seem a bit high if there wasn't a specific major problem they were intending to solve, given their limited internal usage of Vulkan. Previously I thought it might be related to a more demanding emulator they're internally working on (perhaps GCN/Wii or 3DS) or possibly solving some performance roadblocks with the N64 emulator, but being part of their BC solution is a more compelling explanation if there's a way to connect it to that.

Yeah, it's my feeling that emulators aren't a big enough area of concern for Nintendo to put "years of work" into developing this Vulkan feature. Specifically NTD, too, who work a lot on the graphical side of hardware and its integration with Nvidia's tech, whereas emulation is typically handled by NERD or outside developers. But the needs of BC games are somewhat similar to emulated games, where I think Vulkan's use in the recent emulators speaks to flexibility being the name of the game. New native games will still use NVN2 where everything is pre-built for the best possible performance. BC games, like emulated games, don't need that, but they do need a solution focused on efficient submission of flexible data, eliminating shader compilation stutter, etc.

I also think there's a good chance that the feature is for future-proofing beyond just the next hardware transition, which is probably part of why this extension was developed primarily by Nintendo with Nvidia assisting, rather than the other way around. While ingesting the pipeline or shaders from an original Switch game requires platform-specific knowledge (something where I can't speak confidently about how it will actually work, beyond the fact that it's a solvable challenge), the process of then creating output consumable by new hardware can be platform agnostic by using this new feature, while remaining performant, as long as future platforms continue to support Vulkan -- hence Nintendo's investment in it.

 

[Ojoloco]

Yeah, it's my feeling that emulators aren't a big enough area of concern for Nintendo to put "years of work" into developing this Vulkan feature. Specifically NTD, too, who work a lot on the graphical side of hardware and its integration with Nvidia's tech, whereas emulation is typically handled by NERD or outside developers. But the needs of BC games are somewhat similar to emulated games, where I think Vulkan's use in the recent emulators speaks to flexibility being the name of the game. New native games will still use NVN2 where everything is pre-built for the best possible performance. BC games, like emulated games, don't need that, but they do need a solution focused on efficient submission of flexible data, eliminating shader compilation stutter, etc.

I also think there's a good chance that the feature is for future-proofing beyond just the next hardware transition, which is probably part of why this extension was developed primarily by Nintendo with Nvidia assisting, rather than the other way around. While ingesting the pipeline or shaders from an original Switch game requires platform-specific knowledge (something where I can't speak confidently about how it will actually work, beyond the fact that it's a solvable challenge), the process of then creating output consumable by new hardware can be platform agnostic by using this new feature, while remaining performant, as long as future platforms continue to support Vulkan -- hence Nintendo's investment in it.

Improving vulkan can make more third party partners support the console. Switch's current support for Vulkan is quite poor and only works well in certain emulated games. For the only known port of a current game using Vulkan on Switch, it's the Ark disaster.

 

[Instro]

It will not.

 

[LiC]

Improving vulkan can make more third party partners support the console. Switch's current support for Vulkan is quite poor and only works well in certain emulated games. For the only known port of a current game using Vulkan on Switch, it's the Ark disaster.

Do you have a source for the support being poor? Ark being a bad port didn't likely have anything to do with Vulkan. I think the reason not a lot of games would use Vulkan is because, well, there's no point. It is indeed less performant than NVN, just because NVN is optimized for the hardware, and it's not that hard to switch from Vulkan to NVN. Even with this new feature, I think most developers would prefer to use NVN for Switch games, not to mention that Vulkan isn't necessarily the most common starting point for ported games that might have used DirectX, Sony's architecture, or (less likely) OpenGL. Third party engines like Unity and Unreal already have NVN backends, so there's no porting issue there either.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

The Switch 2 will not be confirmed by the FY meeting (because it's coming Fall 2024 most likely)

(I'm at 20% fiscal year ending March 31st 2024, 75% fiscal year ending March 31st 2025, and 5% other)

 

[Pokemaniac]

Improving vulkan can make more third party partners support the console. Switch's current support for Vulkan is quite poor and only works well in certain emulated games. For the only known port of a current game using Vulkan on Switch, it's the Ark disaster.

I haven't done any deep checking, but my perusal of game license pages suggest that the Switch's Vulkan support is used more widely than that, albeit still in a somewhat niche capacity.

I can't speak to the relative performance (though this extension could help with that if the specific issues it addresses impact the game in question), but as @LiC said, it probably largely comes down to most bigger developers having the resources to go for the more native NVN, and many of the smaller ones using engines like Unreal or Unity which did that work for them.

 

[Deleted member 887]

You Can Use Vulkan Without Pipelines Today

Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing

www.khronos.org

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/proposals/VK_EXT_shader_object.adoc

New Vulkan extension just dropped. The interesting bit here is that Nintendo appears to be a significant contributor.

Just to close a loop - this was driven by the graphics internship we saw posted a year ago and had Big Questions about, where it was believed either the Intern was being brought on to word on Drake, or that an intern would touch Nothing Important

It's not immediately clear to me that this would be directly related to new hardware, but that said, I'm certainly not an expert on graphics APIs. It seems like this could potentially have some uses in emulation (something we know Nintendo uses Vulkan for in their N64 emulator), as well as generally increasing flexibility and reducing CPU overhead. Also if I'm reading this right, it might reduce storage costs of shipping precompiled shaders for Vulkan games.

Yeah. This is a radical change to how Vulkan works, and a huge improvement across the board, but there are especial wins on consoles. It won't benefit Nintendo directly, but it is a huge win for 3rd parties on Nintendo hardware. Vulkan being easier to develop for means more games supporting a modern graphics API that runs on Nintendo hardware directly, and Vulkan being faster on consoles helps developers target Nintendo's lower powered hardware without having to rewrite their renderer on NVN.

Due to the way this is written, in theory, games can use it now, using the Vulkan provided software layer, and considering that Nvidia already has a driver that supports it I imagine low level support could come to the original Switch, at least, quite fast.

 

[Boxle]

That's if we want to take the Pokémon "leak" seriously. In my opinion it's not totally convincing. Anyone who had access to the Pokémon Presents localization process could have made up the same leaks in theory.

I can see why you would think this, and it's not out of the question that the Switch update was just a throwaway prediction by them. But the leaker also shared a couple other DLC details in the leak that were nowhere in the Pokemon Presents, but were later confirmed to be true by a "Riddler" who has been leaking S/V information since at least the middle of last year.

It's not completely convincing, I never take something at 100% until it happens. However I do think we should seriously consider the information since it's rare that someone not only leaks a presentation very correctly, but that their smaller currently unknown details are also corroborated by someone with a notable leak history.

 

[Deleted member 887]

Improving vulkan can make more third party partners support the console. Switch's current support for Vulkan is quite poor and only works well in certain emulated games. For the only known port of a current game using Vulkan on Switch, it's the Ark disaster.

Do you have a source for the support being poor?

I am 90% certain that the Switch's Vulkan support is identical to all Nvidia drivers, and is the same code base.

 

[Ojoloco]

Do you have a source for the support being poor? Ark being a bad port didn't likely have anything to do with Vulkan. I think the reason not a lot of games would use Vulkan is because, well, there's no point. It is indeed less performant than NVN, just because NVN is optimized for the hardware, and it's not that hard to switch from Vulkan to NVN. Even with this new feature, I think most developers would prefer to use NVN for Switch games, not to mention that Vulkan isn't necessarily the most common starting point for ported games that might have used DirectX, Sony's architecture, or (less likely) OpenGL. Third party engines like Unity and Unreal already have NVN backends, so there's no porting issue there either.

Well, because very few games use it, most of them emulated games

I didn't mean poor performance. forgive me if I've caused any confusion

 

[Eclissi]

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

My guess at this point is that Nintendo is waiting to see how the Mario movie does because the more they can rely on non-video-game revenue (movies, tv shows, super nintendo world, etc) the more freedom they will have to do things like sell their hardware at less of a profit or even an outright...

famiboards.com

Aren't these just speculations?

 

[pelusilla6]

What a casual way to drop those new tid bits lol
Today the youtubers dine

 

[LiC]

Just to close a loop - this was driven by the graphics internship we saw posted a year ago and had Big Questions about, where it was believed either the Intern was being brought on to word on Drake, or that an intern would touch Nothing Important

Yeah. This is a radical change to how Vulkan works, and a huge improvement across the board, but there are especial wins on consoles. It won't benefit Nintendo directly, but it is a huge win for 3rd parties on Nintendo hardware. Vulkan being easier to develop for means more games supporting a modern graphics API that runs on Nintendo hardware directly, and Vulkan being faster on consoles helps developers target Nintendo's lower powered hardware without having to rewrite their renderer on NVN.

Due to the way this is written, in theory, games can use it now, using the Vulkan provided software layer, and considering that Nvidia already has a driver that supports it I imagine low level support could come to the original Switch, at least, quite fast.

I'm not sure it does make Vulkan faster. As described, the best case scenario is basically "dynamic approach with no additional performance penalty over the static approach." On Nintendo hardware, I think would have been very rare for anyone to use the dynamic approach before; they would have just used the static approach for performance and accepted the increased complexity, shader size, etc. Now they can use a dynamic approach which eliminates enough overheads to be worth it.

I could be persuaded that the main goal of this effort was supporting third-party ports using Vulkan, but I'd need to see some evidence that any devs out there are champing at the bit to use Vulkan on Nintendo hardware but being held back by its implementation (and particularly the static pipeline approach). I haven't seen that, although I'm not claiming to be so plugged into Switch development circles that I could necessarily expect to. It just seems that there's a much more major need of Nintendo's that would warrant the -- again -- "years of work" that went into a feature that can recreate shaders for "any compatible physical device without the need to provide the original SPIR-V" and "solve [...] issues with shader compilation and stuttering."

 

[SiG]

Improving vulkan can make more third party partners support the console. Switch's current support for Vulkan is quite poor and only works well in certain emulated games. For the only known port of a current game using Vulkan on Switch, it's the Ark disaster.

Question: Which port? If I'm not mistaken, Ark was ported again...this time by a different developer (the ones who did GTA Trilogy, of all thing), and...well...

The results are night and day:


So yeah, I don't think Vulkan was the issue here...

 

[roccerfeller]

Drake will out perform Ayeneo 2's GPU (680M) in Ray Tracing easily, it can also target lower resolutions and use DLSS and hide the results behind a 7inch screen, and when docked it will be the same. RT performance will be around current gen consoles on Drake thanks to Ampere being vastly superior to RDNA in RT.

Why final hardware is in quotes, is important to note. It's not that the design is perfected, but that the chip is done and has been put into devkits. We don't know exactly when this happened, and Nintendo gets devkits first, 3rd parties probably started getting them at the beginning of the year. The only thing I know for certain is that physical devkits have existed for over a year, seemingly using Orin at one point, and now use Drake, which has only been possible since last fall. We know mass production didn't start last year, but could be starting right around now. SDK (software development kits) were in peoples hands in 2021, some internal testing likely existed even in 2020.

I mostly am looking at the software release schedule to determine that it will be this calendar year, but it could be within 12 months. Nintendo has always targeted holidays for their releases, and only released in Spring via delays, I do not believe they suddenly changed their minds and decided spring makes more sense, which is another reason this holiday makes sense.

The Pokemon leaker did say that their patch would be out early next year, in winter. That is Jan/Feb... Maybe March, the patch has to come out at or after the launch of Drake, but Drake could come out months before it, and it will certainly launch with software, if Switch has a strong enough 2nd half in software, why do we not have any known titles for the last 5 months of this calendar year? We don't even know of any titles that could exist, unless people think they will drop prime 4 this holiday on Switch as a holiday game, then release "Switch 2" just a few months later.

Since you want more, it's unlikely that Zelda doesn't get patched, that MK8D doesn't get patched, DLC for those games are almost certainly this calendar year, releasing a patch just for Drake after that, doesn't make as much sense as releasing those patches inside existing DLC for those games that they have scheduled already.

Correct me if I’m mistaken but didn’t @10k say switch 2 is 2024 hardware?

 

[LukasManak22]

The assumptions that NIntendo has not announced anything after Pikmin because Drake is coming this year is one of the least reasons why would I expect it to release this year.

 

[Goodtwin]

It just seems that there's a much more major need of Nintendo's that would warrant the -- again -- "years of work" that went into a feature that can recreate shaders for "any compatible physical device without the need to provide the original SPIR-V" and "solve [...] issues with shader compilation and stuttering."

Maybe I am misreading this article, but it seems the goal is to take shaders compiled for different hardware and then recompile them on the fly for new hardware, regardless of what that new hardware is. I could be off track, but it seems like this could be a solution to handling the shader compilation problem for Switch games on Drake. If it can be implemented in Vulcan, then it can be implemented in NVN.

 

[Concernt]

I think that was much easier to say in the days when people buying hardware late were getting a huge discount. Is the person who only considered a GameCube when it was $100 with a pack-in game likely to be an early adopter? Probably not. But for sure there are people now asking themselves and others "I'm late but I want to get the Switch. Do I get the OLED now, or if I wait a few months will there be something significantly better that costs 30% more or less?"

Based on initial Japanese dates, actually 2.5 years on the dot.

If they were to release November 17 of this year and follow the Switch pre-release timeline exactly, we wouldn't see anything solid until July 6, and the big presentation would be September 29.

Totally. But it's also a release that's probably not 10% as important as TOTK.

If anything I think "And Pikmin 4 will be available in 4K on launch day, just download the latest update." would ENHANCE Pikmin 4 sales rather than dampen them.

Miyamoto has gone on before about how Pikmin benefits from higher resolutions, Pikmin 4"K" is such an easy win.

Or, this could all be one big wind up and on June 2nd they announce "Super Nintendo Switch launches worldwide July 21st 2023 with Pikmin 4 as a cross-gen launch title."

 

[Ojoloco]

Question: Which port? If I'm not mistaken, Ark was ported again...this time by a different developer (the ones who did GTA Trilogy, of all thing), and...well...

The results are night and day:


So yeah, I don't think Vulkan was the issue here...

Well, because very few games use it, most of them emulated games

I didn't mean poor performance. forgive me if I've caused any confusion

I repeat, I expressed myself badly (english isnt my first language), I meant that Vulkan is rarely used in switch games.

I have not said nor do I think that the Ark case is Vulkan's fault, although it doesn't do the Api any favors that this is one of the few known games that uses it.

 

[Dakhil]

Correct me if I’m mistaken but didn’t @10k say switch 2 is 2024 hardware?

I think z0m3le's joking there.