Topic: The Nintendo Switch Rumor and Speculation Thread

@gcunit Ooh, I thought we weren't supposed to accuse developers of being lazy any more ?!
https://www.nintendolife.com/features/soapbox-can-we-please-r...

Anyway, I'm not disagreeing that good programming can help. I'd probably add that there's more to hardware's influence on FPS than just memory bandwidth as well (so yeah, I'm kinda weakening my own earlier point).

Man, if their aspiration is to match the Xbox One, a console with notoriously poor performance then… yikes.

@Pizzamorg I think you're being overly pessimistic. Firstly Nintendo's next console is likely to be a hybrid again, so you're looking at something a lot smaller and portable than an Xbox. Secondly if they do use something like DLSS (and Nintendo have their own equivalent technology now), then the ability to let the Tensor cores take the upscaling load could make TFLOPS yesterdays metric

Thanks for clearing that up! From your other post you said that the tensor cores and TOPs could be next gen’s wild card. So it is really up in the air. I’m having a hard time letting go of TFLOPs though. 😭 I just think Nintendo hit it out of the park with Switch. It was able to run PS4/XB1 games, albeit with less performance/resolution. So for the first time in a long time, Nintendo was getting decent 3rd party support. With this speculation of 1.3 TFLOPs on an Orin NX based Switch2, I’m pretty worried. That’s about a tenth of the power of PS5/XSX. XSS sets the standard for minimum specs for this gen, but even that is 4 TFLOPs. I’d just hate for the Switch2 to be another Wii in that it couldn’t even run downgraded versions of games from other platforms. I wouldn’t mind playing downgraded PS5/XSX ports on Switch 2, as long as it could at least run it without catching fire. Here’s hoping DLSS can pull some miracles.

Adding some personal perspective on this. I wouldn't say developers are lazy more that developers will have a queue of work to get through and will tick off issues/features as they come up. Developers are not the reason for low quality software. Low quality software is usually because of poor testing/QA, which I would say is most likely to happen when there's some kind of deadline for release. You only need to look at the GTA Trilogy just released, don't blame the developers for that. Blame the higher ups who set a release date. I can pretty much guarantee that trilogy would have been of a much more acceptable quality if they had pushed it out to March/April next year

With that said, in terms of performance? Better hardware does allow you to get away with more. Again look at the performance benchmarks of the GTA Trilogy on Digital Foundry. Which was the only version that maintained a solid 60fps? The PS4 version running on a PS5. Which version performed the worst? The Switch release.

So does more horsepower mean better performance? Again, not always. Optimisation matters. But more horsepower DOES mean you can get to an acceptable level of performance with less optimisation. Which means companies who rush to a deadline may still release something passable. But without punishing companies who allow QA/Testing to do what it should be doing

Is the digital market really there?
Don't those digital only consoles sell less than 10% of the full-featured versions?
Or was there a big change recently?

Digital-only is definately not for me. I can sell 5 of my rarest N64 games for 1000 bucks. And I can get another 2000 for selling my 5 rarest Gamecube and 5 rarest Wii games. And you know, I have hundreds of games for those systems and they're all worth something.

Unfortunately I went all digital on Wii U, so no growing money in it there. A waste. I regret.

I came back to my senses (or rather I learned from my mistake) with Switch and buy mostly physical again.
I'm also re-buying my favourite Wii U games physically now (or get them on Switch if there's a port).

It would be great if the next Nintendo Switch had an SSD instead of an eMMC

For the future Nintendo console, whatever it may be and whenever it will release, I think what will make or break the 3rd party support from larger developers will be support for UE5's newest features. Developers will be using them extensively and things like nanite and lumen are not exactly things you can "turn off". As long as Nintendo pulls off a good enough console to support those features within their downscaled limits, I think we can expect decent 3rd party support.

What do NL people think of this recent rumour drop ...

@TSR3
That guy is a fraud. Don't listen to anything they say. They don't have any inside info, and have a history of making things up out of thin air. They also said a new Switch was coming in 2019, and again in 2020, and now, lo and behold, they're saying it again in 2021.

I'm all for leaks and rumors, and am usually the first to post about exciting info. But sources like this guy are why ppl lose trust in leaks and stop paying attention.

That said, Switch will likely stick around until at least 2024. Not because they say so, but because it's too soon to abruptly jump ship when Switch is at the peak of its heyday. Not to mention, the chip shortage means the longer they can hold off, the better.

@JaxonH
They did manage to get many things right though. They did say Advance Wars was being remade and for a obscure title to be predicted to have a new release it points to some insider information. It could be coincidence but when you have several “coincidences” all come to pass you have to put some merit to it.

@GameOtaku
While I agree, the history of consistently wrong info and repeated attempts, for years, to throw anything at the wall and see what sticks, leads me to believe the broken clock theory more than evidence of validation.

@GameOtaku My understanding is that markomaro's 2020 predictions were mostly spot on, especially Famicom Detective Club, which was otherwise unexpected. I'd initially quoted their hardware predictions, but they also had game predictions ...

@JaxonH
It would seem there’s been more hits than misses in the last predictions/leaks than previous years. Or possibly due to the leaks companies have to switch up their schedules to invalidate these claims.

@JaxonH Yeah, I agree, big bags of salt at the ready! But I thought it was worth sharing here as this is a dedicated rumour and speculation thread

I have a question for the tech experts here:

I know TFLOPs and TOPs are different, but are they a combined measure of power, or mutually exclusive? Like the AGX Orin for example. I know it won’t be in Switch 2, but just for an example since the spec page for it is out. The spec page for its GPU says it has 4 FP32 TFLOPs from Cuda cores, and 131 Sparse Int8 Tops from Tensor cores. So in theory, this means it could output graphics equivalent to a 4 TFLOP console (Series S), PLUS whatever upgrades DLSS could provide with 131 TOPs?

@Cuzizkool I'm not really an GPU expert, but I can give you an answer. TFLOPS refer to floating point operations which can be used as an approximation for graphics performance. TOPS refer to Tensor operations and would be a measure of ray tracing or DLSS performance in gaming graphics cards. Nvidia really market the TOPS performance of the AGX and NX Orin's, far more than their TFLOPS performance, as that is what their customers will want to ran AI and machine learning jobs. However the rumours are that Nintendo will have a custom SoC (codename Dane), so they will have as many Tensor cores as needed to upscale to 4K. They probably need to use up some of the silicon budget to fit in a Maxwell GPU core as well for backwards compatibility, so I'd expect fewer CPUs and/or Tensor cores compared to the NX Orin as a trade-off.

However if you want a game world comparison then the RTX 3060 has 112 Tensor cores has about 51 TOPS. And Digital Foundry have a video where they try to simulate what DLSS could be like on an upgraded Switch ...

@TSR3 So Cuda cores can function independently of tensor cores, in theory. In the case of the next gen Switch, the tensor cores (however many there are, at what power) will serve to use DLSS to enhance the performance/resolution of whatever the Cuda cores can put out.

That video taught me some things! How ever many watts Switch 2 can do while docked definitely plays a bigger part than I thought. Thanks!

@TSR3 The list of games is very plausible. The majority of them we know of already or have been rumoured before. From Monolith I would expect another Xenoblade title, either a new one or a XCX port.

In terms of the new console release date, I think the chip shortage leaves Nintendo with little choice, they will definitely want to avoid ending up in the situation MS and Sony are currently in. I used to expect it around March 2023, but since BotW2 was announced for 2022, I think it is unlikely for a "Switch 2" to be released that early in the year. They would have definitely pushed BotW2 in 2023 to launch with it, so they would have not announced it for 2022. November is quite a standard month for console releases, so maybe missing their successful March window leaves them with November as the only choice, as the rumour basically suggests.

@TSR3 No way that’s a real leak. This guy just makes stuff up and gets lucky once an a while.