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

Reader mode
Serif said:
Everyone needs a phone.

If the argument is that 'a ton of people have an iPhone, therefore porting these games threatens the Switch cause it reaches a wider audience', phones have become an essential tool and battery life is too precious to expend on AAA gaming for most people.

The most appealing phone game I've ever played is Vampire Survivors 'cause I can waste time when I'm bored playing one-handed and I don't need to worry about battery consumption.

Even at home when my phone's battery is less of a concern, I prefer to use it in small tasks and even during gaming off to the side.


Emulating a system usually requires more power than that system itself and grows more complex depending on the system's architecture and features, and I can't imagine how emulating a feature like DLSS would work. The Switch 2 is estimated to be PS4+ power. I am skeptical the iPhone 15 Pro has the necessary specs to emulate it or that developers will even sweat the effort to code an emulator. At best maybe some 2D games, which is the current status of PS4 emulation.
Click to expand...
Yes, I agree that the battery will be the biggest problem.
But in fact, it's a problem that already exists, smartphone games already use a lot of battery, and that doesn't stop CoD and PUBG from having millions of players every day.
I wouldn't sacrifice my smartphone's battery for this either, but many already do.
Not counting fastcharge for example, now with USB-C technologies like this will be common on iPhones.
 
You know the biggest reason why Apple isn’t a threat to Nintendo?

Nintendo’s IPs.

Excluding any Nintendo mobile games, you won’t be playing any console-exclusive major releases on the iPhone. Not legally, at least.
 
I'd have an Apple TV if the content was compelling enough, NGL. The wife is invested in that ecosystem, so Apple Arcade is in reach. Up until now though, nothing of note has appeared on there to tickle my pickle enough. Maybe that exclusive Ghouls & Ghosts a while back.

But Apple aren't Nintendo, and they don't have the content that compels me.
 
Lugia667 said:
I remember when stadia was gonna kill the switch cause you can play it anywhere
Click to expand...
Was hilarious when I thought there was an unathorized charge to my cc some months ago.

Turns out it was a credit from Google. The text in the credit transaction mentioned Stadia.

Totally forgot about my Stadia, and I guess the fact that I got that credit tells me Google has decided to kill Stadia off.
 
LinkURL said:
Just a reminder, but PCs have been through this. For decades it was a separate market, extremely marked by piracy, and with niche games that took advantage of the exclusive control forms of PCs (mouse and keyboard).
Until it became common for console games to be released on PC, and today millions of players have put their consoles aside and play exclusively on PC.
Click to expand...
Yes, PC took a chunk of console gamers away.

Yet, console gaming is bigger than it was before that happened, and it's still growing. However large that effect was, it's not particularly relevant.

This will be no different. Some people will only play games on their iPhone at some point in the future, yes. For some people, Nintendo won't be able to compete. But for many more, the game selection matters a lot, and there's more to it than getting AAAs; if it doesn't have the AAA you want, it's all moot. There's also the arguments skittzo's put forth, where using your phone like that is potentially detrimental to the utility of your phone. Or the fact that iOS is only a little over half the market share of smartphones in the US (and nowhere near that globally), and Android is too much of a hot mess on the GPU driver side of things to get anything resembling this kind of game support anytime soon.

Speaking of Android, you can buy a Switch and a current Galaxy A series or Pixel A series phone for less than the cost of a current iPhone - not to mention a Pro model, which is what these games are locked to for this year. It's going to take years before a substantial number of consumers just already have a good enough iPhone to make it actually a more cost-effective solution than buying a Switch 2, and even then a subset of that consumer base will just prefer owning a Switch 2 anyway (which should have substantial momentum by then).

TL;DR sure, it'll cause some people not to buy Nintendo hardware that otherwise would've. But that number will be rather inconsequential to Nintendo; they can and absolutely will compete.
 
I know I've asked if frame gen was possible but can one of our residential tech heads guide me through the forest and explain why it's not? Just curious since I've been seeing people reel off DLSS 3 features as if they'll all be on REDACTED.
 
Again the biggest issues isn’t related to tech at all

It’s if Apple can train its audience to pay premium for games. So far they have failed to do so multiple times. It will take more than one event a year to do this
 
eye0h said:
I know I've asked if frame gen was possible but can one of our residential tech heads guide me through the forest and explain why it's not? Just curious since I've been seeing people reel off DLSS 3 features as if they'll all be on REDACTED.
Click to expand...
Frame Generation is the only DLSS 3.x feature that requires dedicated hardware other than the Tensor Cores, specifically an updated Lovelace OFA (Optical Flow Accelerator). There is no documented evidence that T239 has this updated OFA.
 
Skittzo said:
Sorry, I was more using your post as a jumping off point. You seemed to indicate that iPhones getting these games should be worrying to MS/Sony, not a theoretical Apple TV getting them.

I don't think the phones having these games has any bearing on any console makers.
Click to expand...

No worries! I guess my overall point is that mobile hardware advancing so much comparative to desktop hardware is actually a benefit for Nintendo and if anything a threat to Sony / MS. Not just because it means the switch 2 is going to be closer to a PS5 than the Switch 1 is to a PS4 etc etc but you could, in maybe a year or two have a console like form from Apple that would be very competitive on price and performance with stationary consoles of today.

As this gap continues to close (between mobile and desktop hardware) it's going to be Sony / MS who are facing a new competitor not the other way around. Nintendo has been competing with mobile forever at this point and the market has proven itself almost completely insulated from it (for many of the reasons you listed). Stationary consoles have not been presented with the same kind of test
 
LiC said:
Let's be real, announcing RE8 for phones is literally just for marketing. Nobody is actually going to buy it. Apple knows that, and Capcom probably knows it too, so I wouldn't be surprised if Apple funded the port as an advertising expenditure.
Click to expand...
Yeah, Apple absolute moneyhatted these ports, just like they moneyhatted every single game in Apple Arcade. The mobile gaming market is only sustainable for freemium games. (Google also moneyhatted all their Stadia games, and we know how that turned out.)

People who want to play on mobiles are not looking for “console like” experiences. It’s an oxymoron.
 
eye0h said:
I know I've asked if frame gen was possible but can one of our residential tech heads guide me through the forest and explain why it's not? Just curious since I've been seeing people reel off DLSS 3 features as if they'll all be on REDACTED.
Click to expand...
We don't know if it's possible, but it seems like it may not be all that useful anyway.

It requires Ada Lovelace architecture, but what specifically about Lovelace we aren't sure (I think). It needs an Optical Flow Accelerator which I believe was introduced (?) with Lovelace but T239 does supposedly have an OFA... it just may not be capable enough?

Also there's the fact that it's only really useful at higher framerates, like going from 60 to 120fps. It isn't great for boosting lower framerates up to 30 or 60 because it will wind up introducing lots of input lag.

I'm not an expert or anything but this is what I've gathered.
 
Lugia667 said:
Again the biggest issues isn’t related to tech at all

It’s if Apple can train its audience to pay premium for games. So far they have failed to do so multiple times. It will take more than one event a year to do this
Click to expand...
I can't really recall them trying with modern major releases either, tbf.

But still - it's typically hard to get people to pay full price for late ports. The Switch managed to pull it off frequently due to the convenience of the form factor; we have yet to see whether the same will be true of the iPhone. It's more convenient than the Switch in some ways, but less in others. We'll have to see what the masses think.

If Apple starts pulling off day and date ports, that's when it gets a little more interesting.
 
0
Skittzo said:
We don't know if it's possible, but it seems like it may not be all that useful anyway.

It requires Ada Lovelace architecture, but what specifically about Lovelace we aren't sure (I think). It needs an Optical Flow Accelerator which I believe was introduced (?) with Lovelace but T239 does supposedly have an OFA... it just may not be capable enough?

Also there's the fact that it's only really useful at higher framerates, like going from 60 to 120fps. It isn't great for boosting lower framerates up to 30 or 60 because it will wind up introducing lots of input lag.

I'm not an expert or anything but this is what I've gathered.
Click to expand...
I think Ampere's got an OFA but it's questionable whether it's performant enough to allow for frame generation.
 
Hajeman said:
Is iphone 14 pro can emulated PS4 ? Switch 2 is more powerful than PS4 in docked + it's have heavy customised SOC with DLSS that can be more harder to emulate than current non customised Switch SOC
Click to expand...
I know. I was just wondering because when the Switch 2 releases, you're gonna have some folks who think that their new iphone can run (emulate) Switch 2 games at the same performance as the original hardware.
 
Leviraps said:
Tech wizards of Fami: can someone ELI5 how Botw is supposedly running at 4k60fps with no/reduced load times? Knowing what we know is this technically possible?
Click to expand...
I won't say "easily" but I'll say "that's about what I would expect." Thraktor did a deep dive on loading times, but let me give you an ELI5 on it all.

When a 4k60fps game starts from a menu it needs to :
  1. Load the data off of storage
  2. Convert it into something it can use
  3. Start up the game's simulations
    • These first 3 steps take about 30 seconds, currently.
    • The first menu screen takes ~1.4 seconds to fade out, before the loading screen.
    • "Instant" needs to be about 1.5 seconds, then.
  4. Draw 8.3 million pixels to the screen
    • On Switch, Zelda is 900p, so that's only 1.4 million pixels
  5. Draw 8.3 million pixels again, 16.6 milliseconds later.
    • On Switch, Zelda is 30fps, so that's 33.3ms
Let's go step by step, and talk about how the "expected" Next Gen Switch changes these steps, to make this no-loading, 4k60 Zelda happen.

1. Load: Storage go brrrr​

This is by far the slowest part of this process, and the Switch has three places it might load the data. From internal storage, from a cartridge, or from the SD card. Switch NG updates at least two of these

The same kind of storage that is in a phone
Switch's internal storage is eMMC - which is basically dead. It is sticking around in budget phones, but modern phone chips don't even have the option to use it.

Just about every Android phone has moved to UFS. At the low end, you can expect something like 5x improvement over the Switch.

A new cartridge format to match
There are solid rumors that Nintendo has updated their cartridge format to something much faster. That's not just for Moar Power, but large carts with the old tech were getting expensive to make, and games are only getting larger.

What about expansion storage?
There isn't any clarity here yet, so this is kind of an asterisk

2. Convert: Zip Zap Zop​

The second step is mostly decompression - turning compressed assets on disk to uncompressed formats that the game can consume. Switch NG adds two new tools

Dedicated decompression hardware
Switch NG is pretty much confirmed to have dedicated decompression hardware. In days of slower storage, compression actually sped things up too, because storage was so slow. Reading smaller amounts of data that you then had to decompress was faster than reading giant gobs of uncompressed data to memory.

Modern systems have the opposite problem. Storage is fast, but CPUs are busier than ever. But games are also big so compression is still necessary. Decompression hardware takes the CPU out of the equation entirely, decompressing faster than the CPU could, but without any CPU load.

New formats
It's not just the hardware that is evolving but the software. Nvidia has been developing new compression formats designed to work with faster storage. This demo likely wasn't just "Breath of the Wild on new hardware" but "Breath of the Wild ported to our new set of tools" including new formats.

3. Simulate: Strong ARM​

For game startup this is might take longer, but in normal game play you have to do this every frame. The thing to keep in mind is that this mostly have nothing to do with resolution. Breath of the Wild physics is the same a 4k as it is at 540p, same for Bokoblin AI. So it's all about frame rate. 30fps->60fps is twice as fast.

Just plain faster CPUs
Pretty much what it says on the tin. The Switch CPU was designed in 2012. The Switch NG CPU was designed in 2020, by the fabled ARM Austin team, and is still in many ways the peak of their work, with new ARM cores only now getting back to where this one was.

Here is an overclocked Switch up against the Orin NX (which is basically Switch NG's cousin, with nearly identical CPUs). Way more than a 2x leap

Just plain more of them.
Switch has 4 cores. Switch NG has 8 of them. Not all tasks can be split up to run twice as fast on twice as many cores, but one of the better contenders is, in fact, loading where lots of different setup tasks happen independently of each other.

4. Draw: Fastest in the West​

1.4 million pixels to 8.3 million pixels. That's a 6x leap. How?

A big ass GPU
The Switch has a 256 core GPU. Switch NG has 1536 cores. That's your 6x leap, done. GPUs are very good at scaling with more cores, unlike CPUs, and this kinda of "just throw more cores at it" really does work exactly how you'd naively assume it would.

That's all assuming that the cores run at the same speed as the Switch. Generally, the advances that let you stick more cores into a similar sized chip also bring along with it a little extra power efficiency, letting you push clocks higher. So 6x represents the floor here, with additional clocks getting anywhere from 7-8x.

5. Repeat: A Super Sampler
But we're still only 30fps. It's pretty clear how we get the game logic to 60fps - we have twice as much power in the CPU, we just go faster. But we have just enough GPU power to get to 4k, much less do it twice as many times per second, right?

DLSS 2
The answer is Deep Learning Super Sampling. DLSS is an Nvidia technology that lets you get (most of) the detail of a high resolution game with (most of) the frame rate of a lower resolution game.

There are a lot of deep dives on how DLSS works in thread, but I'll give you the short-ish version. Temporal reconstruction is a group of techniques that remember details from older frames, and combines them smartly into a new frame, at a higher resolution.

DLSS is Nvidia's version of that technology that uses AI to do that combining. That AI is possible on a home computer because of special AI accelerators that Nvidia has built, called tensor cores. It is widely considered the highest quality upscaling technique, producing the best looking results, in the fastest time.

Here is a video comparing Starfield using "real" 4k on the left, AMD's temporal reconstruction (called FSR) in the middle, and DLSS on the right. I wouldn't even call it "good" - the DLSS version just plain looks better than native, to me. But that's not the real point, look at the frame rate graph at the middle. Notice how DLSS is nearly double the frame rate of native?

That's because the GPU is only drawing half the pixels each frame, with DLSS preserving that detail across frames. And that's the ticket here. Switch NG's big as GPU "only" has to draw 1440p images each frame, with DLSS making a gorgeous 4k image out of it, and with DLSS, anti-aliasing is effectively free on top.

TL;DR. SWITCH TOO GOOD​

Breath of the Wild's assets are converted to a new format designed for modern hardware. They gets blitzed into memory by an ungodly fast storage solution, decompressed in real time by special hardware. Meanwhile a cluster of 8 CPUs working at quadruple speed setup the initial game data in milliseconds. A new, more powerful GPU draws 3 times as many pixels as before. AI transforms those pixels into 4k, while the CPU and the GPU run ahead to render at 60fps.
 
Apple is a threat; all they have to do is make serious pivot. Remember when Sony and Microsoft did it? With that said, I think Switch 2 will be fine because of Nintendo unifying everything. I think Nintendo mentioned them having to be up to date in order to keep competition from steam rollling them.
 
eye0h said:
I know I've asked if frame gen was possible but can one of our residential tech heads guide me through the forest and explain why it's not? Just curious since I've been seeing people reel off DLSS 3 features as if they'll all be on REDACTED.
Click to expand...
The frame generation feature found in DLSS 3 was designed only to work on the Ada Lovelace architecture found in Nvidia's 40 series GPUs (and newer architectures Nvidia will eventually develop). The T239 SOC rumored to be used in NG is supposedly using the Ampere architecture found in Nvidia's 30 series GPUs. Since frame generation does not work on cards older than the 40 series it would be natural to assume it won't work on NG running Ampere.

I would also add that frame generation is almost always advertised to double your FPS when it is already hitting 60 FPS without frame generation on. I don't think many games will be targeting 120 FPS to begin with.
 
0
LinkURL said:
Yes, I agree that the battery will be the biggest problem.
But in fact, it's a problem that already exists, smartphone games already use a lot of battery, and that doesn't stop CoD and PUBG from having millions of players every day.
I wouldn't sacrifice my smartphone's battery for this either, but many already do.
Click to expand...
I've seen people playing Genshin Impact on the train too. From my understanding these titles are suitable for short bursts specifically optimized for mobile. You can even download the 'mobile' versions of some games to play on a low-end PC.

I'm not saying gaming on phones is completely unviable. Just that phone gaming doesn't accommodate the same range of gaming experiences that gaming consoles can. Long single player games with lengthy campaigns and demanding worlds would be even more of a battery hog, especially when they're being ported from home consoles. Then add raytracing on top.
 
Jersh said:
Yet, console gaming is bigger than it was before that happened, and it's still growing. However large that effect was, it's not particularly relevant.
Click to expand...
Well, in fact, if you also add PS3 + X360, you will see that the market for high-performance consoles has actually stagnated, as PS4 + XOne achieved basically the same total sales and still had refresh versions in the middle of the generation. If you count the sixth generation then it's even worse since PS2 + XBOX already beat the total sales without even counting GC and DC.
So in fact the PC market has made the high-performance console market stagnate in sales, and we can argue that it has actually decreased.
 
All this talk about iPhone this, Nintendoom that... All it has really convinced me of is that a "Nah!" button would be really funny.
 
LinkURL said:
Well, to be honest, the main reason 3DS + Vita don't sell half as much as DS + PSP is precisely because of the advent of mobile gaming, so yes, the iPhone was a problem for them.
Click to expand...
The 3DS and PS Vita had their own issues that caused them to not sell as well (The Vita especially) so I wouldn’t point to the phone as the only cause for it. The Switch selling more than both of them is evident of that.
 
GPKs3 said:
You know the biggest reason why Apple isn’t a threat to Nintendo?

Nintendo’s IPs.

Excluding any Nintendo mobile games, you won’t be playing any console-exclusive major releases on the iPhone. Not legally, at least.
Click to expand...
Have heard it said - in here even - that emulation won't even be possible going forward because of the DLSS and RT on top of Nintendo's new security measures that have made it impossible to crack the V2 which is why all games need to be jacked through the V1, so NG Switch is probably locked down to the point it'll only be able to run on itself
 
Mr.Gamerson said:
Apple is a threat; all they have to do is make serious pivot. Remember when Sony and Microsoft did it? With that said, I think Switch 2 will be fine because of Nintendo unifying everything. I think Nintendo mentioned them having to be up to date in order to keep competition from steam rollling them.
Click to expand...
Even if Apple were to truly enter the gaming space with lets say, a portable system, Nintendo would still be a real competitor thanks to their IPs and their partnership with Nvidia.
 
PokéPersona said:
The 3DS and PS Vita had their own issues that caused them to not sell as well (The Vita especially) so I wouldn’t point to the phone as the only cause for it. The Switch selling more than both of them is evident of that.
Click to expand...
Switch actually proves that the 3DS and Vita market were no longer viable. Portable video games with simpler games no longer made sense in a world with smartphones. So now the idea should be to make portables that can bring the same experience as a desktop console (PSP and Vita even had this idea, but the Switch tripled the bet).
 
GigaUltraMoon said:
Have heard it said - in here even - that emulation won't even be possible going forward because of the DLSS and RT on top of Nintendo's new security measures that have made it impossible to crack the V2 which is why all games need to be jacked through the V1, so NG Switch is probably locked down to the point it'll only be able to run on itself
Click to expand...
If that is true then that will leave Nintendo in an incredibly strong position in the future, i mean the Steam deck fans have long gloated that they can play Nintendo games much better than the Switch itself. That will soon no longer be possible. Will leave the Steam deck even further behind Switch 2, not to mention the Switch 2 upgrades already making the steam deck obsolete in other ways as well.

Nintendo have for decades wanted to eliminate emulation, which i assure you they have always seen as a bigger threat to them than everything else. Because Nintendo knows that their strong IPs leave them secure if their platforms are the only way to play their IPs, that is why they fear emulation because that is the only thing that in any way can threaten their otherwise totally safe business.
 
Mr.Gamerson said:
Apple is a threat; all they have to do is make serious pivot. Remember when Sony and Microsoft did it? With that said, I think Switch 2 will be fine because of Nintendo unifying everything. I think Nintendo mentioned them having to be up to date in order to keep competition from steam rollling them.
Click to expand...
a pivot would be more than paying for a few games at an event each year
 
LinkURL said:
I think you guys are REALLY underestimating Apple this time. Just rebutting some points I read on this page.

1- "Price". Yes, the iPhone 15 Pro will be at least 2x more expensive than the Switch 2, but that never stopped Apple from selling more iPhones in 1 YEAR than Nintendo has produced Switches since 2017. These phones are already ultra-popular playing mobile games, Having console-level games will only increase its appeal. It's 1200 dollars to take a portable video game + all the functions that iPhones already do today.
2- Smartphones have always been more powerful than the Switch. This is partly true, but until then this power had never been used to its full extent, now we are seeing games that are at console level running on these machines, at least 6 months before Nintendo launches its console that has the biggest selling point (outside the exclusives) would be exactly that.
3- "Controls": iPhone controls better than Joy-con are nothing new.
4- "Battery": perhaps the most dubious factor so far, however the A17 Pro will be produced on a node that we wouldn't even dream of having in Drake, that is, it will be more energy efficient, and with access to fast charging and perhaps even a bigger battery than the one present in the Switch 2.
5- "Temperature": this first interaction will certainly be the A17 Pro's Achilles heel, but what about in 2 or 3 years? We will have an even more powerful and efficient chip.

This will be just the first iteration of an iPhone with access to AAA games, and they still managed to deliver before the launch of the Switch 2. We will see more and more games and with each generation the distance to Nintendo's hardware will increase.
Great masterstroke by Apple that only continues to enrich its ecosystem. Mac, iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro all sharing the same software and same hardware, unfortunately this is not something Nintendo can compete with.
Click to expand...
I'm not underestimating them, I'm telling you plain and bare that as trendy as they are, they're niche for gaming in both computer and device form. Hardware is impressive and they've shown they were capable of XB1 GPU performance years ago. I just think they're a non-factor because not many buy those things to play games with but rather because the name carries social credit and copping to it, they do have some of the best (not only best, but by consensus it's agreed) cameras a device could have.

They're not gonna eat Nintendo's lunch though, or Sony's or Microsoft's or even the Steam Deck's for that matter. It's just MORE of an option than before to game on the device like any other mobile device out there, bluetooth gamepad or not.
 
GigaUltraMoon said:
Have heard it said - in here even - that emulation won't even be possible going forward because of the DLSS and RT on top of Nintendo's new security measures that have made it impossible to crack the V2 which is why all games need to be jacked through the V1, so NG Switch is probably locked down to the point it'll only be able to run on itself
Click to expand...
I don't think either of those things are impediments. It's more the fact Switch 2 is legitimately powerful and the required hardware for that probably isn't even available. Ryzen 7 7800x3Ds would be my bet, and even that may not have enough single core performance.
 
Danny said:
If that is true then that will leave Nintendo in an incredibly strong position in the future, i mean the Steam deck fans have long gloated that they can play Nintendo games much better than the Switch itself. That will soon no longer be possible. Will leave the Steam deck even further behind Switch 2, not to mention the Switch 2 upgrades already making the steam deck obsolete in other ways as well.

Nintendo have for decades wanted to eliminate emulation, which i assure you they have always seen as a bigger threat to them than everything else. Because Nintendo knows that their strong IPs leave them secure if their platforms are the only way to play their IPs, that is why they fear emulation because that is the only thing that in any way can threaten their otherwise totally safe business.
Click to expand...
Would need one of the tech people in the know to weigh in on it and clarify if they so choose, but yes on top of that, there's also an additional software security measure put in place very recently - Denuvo?
 
GigaUltraMoon said:
Would need one of the tech people in the know to weigh in on it and clarify if they so choose, but yes on top of that, there's also an additional software security measure put in place very recently - Denuvo?
Click to expand...
This is only meant to "protect" the desperate publishers against Ryujinx and Yuzu. It won't do the job well as the dataminers said.

It absolutely won't be needed for Switch 2.
 
oldpuck said:
I won't say "easily" but I'll say "that's about what I would expect." Thraktor did a deep dive on loading times, but let me give you an ELI5 on it all.

When a 4k60fps game starts from a menu it needs to :
  1. Load the data off of storage
  2. Convert it into something it can use
  3. Start up the game's simulations
    • These first 3 steps take about 30 seconds, currently.
    • The first menu screen takes ~1.4 seconds to fade out, before the loading screen.
    • "Instant" needs to be about 1.5 seconds, then.
  4. Draw 8.3 million pixels to the screen
    • On Switch, Zelda is 900p, so that's only 1.4 million pixels
  5. Draw 8.3 million pixels again, 16.6 milliseconds later.
    • On Switch, Zelda is 30fps, so that's 33.3ms
Let's go step by step, and talk about how the "expected" Next Gen Switch changes these steps, to make this no-loading, 4k60 Zelda happen.

1. Load: Storage go brrrr​

This is by far the slowest part of this process, and the Switch has three places it might load the data. From internal storage, from a cartridge, or from the SD card. Switch NG updates at least two of these

The same kind of storage that is in a phone
Switch's internal storage is eMMC - which is basically dead. It is sticking around in budget phones, but modern phone chips don't even have the option to use it.

Just about every Android phone has moved to UFS. At the low end, you can expect something like 5x improvement over the Switch.

A new cartridge format to match
There are solid rumors that Nintendo has updated their cartridge format to something much faster. That's not just for Moar Power, but large carts with the old tech were getting expensive to make, and games are only getting larger.

What about expansion storage?
There isn't any clarity here yet, so this is kind of an asterisk
Click to expand...
Wow! Is this anything at all like how you get a PS5 game on disc but you have to partially install it first and copy it to the console directly before it's playable?
 
oldpuck said:
I won't say "easily" but I'll say "that's about what I would expect." Thraktor did a deep dive on loading times, but let me give you an ELI5 on it all.

When a 4k60fps game starts from a menu it needs to :
  1. Load the data off of storage
  2. Convert it into something it can use
  3. Start up the game's simulations
    • These first 3 steps take about 30 seconds, currently.
    • The first menu screen takes ~1.4 seconds to fade out, before the loading screen.
    • "Instant" needs to be about 1.5 seconds, then.
  4. Draw 8.3 million pixels to the screen
    • On Switch, Zelda is 900p, so that's only 1.4 million pixels
  5. Draw 8.3 million pixels again, 16.6 milliseconds later.
    • On Switch, Zelda is 30fps, so that's 33.3ms
Let's go step by step, and talk about how the "expected" Next Gen Switch changes these steps, to make this no-loading, 4k60 Zelda happen.

1. Load: Storage go brrrr​

This is by far the slowest part of this process, and the Switch has three places it might load the data. From internal storage, from a cartridge, or from the SD card. Switch NG updates at least two of these

The same kind of storage that is in a phone
Switch's internal storage is eMMC - which is basically dead. It is sticking around in budget phones, but modern phone chips don't even have the option to use it.

Just about every Android phone has moved to UFS. At the low end, you can expect something like 5x improvement over the Switch.

A new cartridge format to match
There are solid rumors that Nintendo has updated their cartridge format to something much faster. That's not just for Moar Power, but large carts with the old tech were getting expensive to make, and games are only getting larger.

What about expansion storage?
There isn't any clarity here yet, so this is kind of an asterisk

2. Convert: Zip Zap Zop​

The second step is mostly decompression - turning compressed assets on disk to uncompressed formats that the game can consume. Switch NG adds two new tools

Dedicated decompression hardware
Switch NG is pretty much confirmed to have dedicated decompression hardware. In days of slower storage, compression actually sped things up too, because storage was so slow. Reading smaller amounts of data that you then had to decompress was faster than reading giant gobs of uncompressed data to memory.

Modern systems have the opposite problem. Storage is fast, but CPUs are busier than ever. But games are also big so compression is still necessary. Decompression hardware takes the CPU out of the equation entirely, decompressing faster than the CPU could, but without any CPU load.

New formats
It's not just the hardware that is evolving but the software. Nvidia has been developing new compression formats designed to work with faster storage. This demo likely wasn't just "Breath of the Wild on new hardware" but "Breath of the Wild ported to our new set of tools" including new formats.

3. Simulate: Strong ARM​

For game startup this is might take longer, but in normal game play you have to do this every frame. The thing to keep in mind is that this mostly have nothing to do with resolution. Breath of the Wild physics is the same a 4k as it is at 540p, same for Bokoblin AI. So it's all about frame rate. 30fps->60fps is twice as fast.

Just plain faster CPUs
Pretty much what it says on the tin. The Switch CPU was designed in 2012. The Switch NG CPU was designed in 2020, by the fabled ARM Austin team, and is still in many ways the peak of their work, with new ARM cores only now getting back to where this one was.

Here is an overclocked Switch up against the Orin NX (which is basically Switch NG's cousin, with nearly identical CPUs). Way more than a 2x leap

Just plain more of them.
Switch has 4 cores. Switch NG has 8 of them. Not all tasks can be split up to run twice as fast on twice as many cores, but one of the better contenders is, in fact, loading where lots of different setup tasks happen independently of each other.

4. Draw: Fastest in the West​

1.4 million pixels to 8.3 million pixels. That's a 6x leap. How?

A big ass GPU
The Switch has a 256 core GPU. Switch NG has 1536 cores. That's your 6x leap, done. GPUs are very good at scaling with more cores, unlike CPUs, and this kinda of "just throw more cores at it" really does work exactly how you'd naively assume it would.

That's all assuming that the cores run at the same speed as the Switch. Generally, the advances that let you stick more cores into a similar sized chip also bring along with it a little extra power efficiency, letting you push clocks higher. So 6x represents the floor here, with additional clocks getting anywhere from 7-8x.

5. Repeat: A Super Sampler
But we're still only 30fps. It's pretty clear how we get the game logic to 60fps - we have twice as much power in the CPU, we just go faster. But we have just enough GPU power to get to 4k, much less do it twice as many times per second, right?

DLSS 2
The answer is Deep Learning Super Sampling. DLSS is an Nvidia technology that lets you get (most of) the detail of a high resolution game with (most of) the frame rate of a lower resolution game.

There are a lot of deep dives on how DLSS works in thread, but I'll give you the short-ish version. Temporal reconstruction is a group of techniques that remember details from older frames, and combines them smartly into a new frame, at a higher resolution.

DLSS is Nvidia's version of that technology that uses AI to do that combining. That AI is possible on a home computer because of special AI accelerators that Nvidia has built, called tensor cores. It is widely considered the highest quality upscaling technique, producing the best looking results, in the fastest time.

Here is a video comparing Starfield using "real" 4k on the left, AMD's temporal reconstruction (called FSR) in the middle, and DLSS on the right. I wouldn't even call it "good" - the DLSS version just plain looks better than native, to me. But that's not the real point, look at the frame rate graph at the middle. Notice how DLSS is nearly double the frame rate of native?

That's because the GPU is only drawing half the pixels each frame, with DLSS preserving that detail across frames. And that's the ticket here. Switch NG's big as GPU "only" has to draw 1440p images each frame, with DLSS making a gorgeous 4k image out of it, and with DLSS, anti-aliasing is effectively free on top.

TL;DR. SWITCH TOO GOOD​

Breath of the Wild's assets are converted to a new format designed for modern hardware. They gets blitzed into memory by an ungodly fast storage solution, decompressed in real time by special hardware. Meanwhile a cluster of 8 CPUs working at quadruple speed setup the initial game data in milliseconds. A new, more powerful GPU draws 3 times as many pixels as before. AI transforms those pixels into 4k, while the CPU and the GPU run ahead to render at 60fps.
Click to expand...
This is quality post explaining step-by-step how nearly-zero loading time and 4k/60fps was possible/plausible with BOTW, thank you!
 
GigaUltraMoon said:
Would need one of the tech people in the know to weigh in on it and clarify if they so choose, but yes on top of that, there's also an additional software security measure put in place very recently - Denuvo?
Click to expand...
Some developers can choose to apply Denuvo to their Switch games to block emulation of it. It is not universally applied.

To me one of the biggest hurdles is simply demand. There is demand for Switch emulation because current Switch performance is not considered 'acceptable' to a number of people. Some are willing to accept the inconvenience of dealing with emulators just to get locked 1080p in certain games.

Meanwhile the Switch 2 is promising much better performance and image quality on average. The desire to emulate these games will diminish. It won't go away completely, there will be some locked 30 FPS game out there that some will want to emulate to force 60 FPS (I'm pretty sure this is an underlying motivation for PS4 emulation - Bloodborne @ 60 FPS) - but more people will be satisfied by what the console delivers, and not waste time dealing with ripping/pirating ROMs, dumping keys, fixing shader compilation stutters, etc.
 
IamPeacock said:
I've been hearing and reading for more than 10 years that Apple is going to overtake gaming.

Yet dedicated gaming devices keep selling like hotcakes.
Click to expand...
Well it's not like people don't use their phones for gaming but the type of games played on the phone are like 5-10 minute wonders. It was never about the hardware to them, even if they had a piece of kit that could render holograms at 40 decillion polys per second in trillions of pixels in resolution on a 0.144 femtometer graphene CPU, the average user would still pick something like Candy Crush or Not Not over something like FF16 or Spider-Man 2 since they usually play on the train or the can.

So the user potential is there, but user habits are hard to break.
 
so i took a look at the attendees present at gamescom, obviously not the full list & excluding nintendo ofc but for some of you guys, do you think most of these companies are possibly invested in Switch 2 thanks to the tech demos? (as well as specs)
attendant.PNG
 
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