Topic: The Nintendo Switch Rumor and Speculation Thread

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.

Half the games in the 'leak' were already announced anyway.

They'll presumably be referred to later as predictions so as to improved the perceived hit rate over what could merely be achieved by guesswork alone.

Ya, one of the biggest dead giveaways to the fake leakers (besides being wrong 95% of the time and only occasionally guessing something right, like when Grumble “predicted” Advance Wars would be delayed despite historical data suggesting less than 2% chance, point being it happens sometimes when you take 100 guesses, 2 end up right), but the biggest dead giveaway is the fact they always seem to know everything. They’ve got entire lists of lineups for years before the year even starts, and it’s always games previously leaked or rumored from another source first, and anything beyond that is a vague reference (like “casual IP”, oh bravo there Nostradamus, well done) or educated guesses like “Fire Emblem Echoes” (because 3DS got 3 FE games, we’ve only had 1 and it’ll be 3 years since the last, seems like an easy educated guess to pass off as “knowledge”), but of course no specifics like which game is being remade or the actual title. Of course not. Because that would blow their cover.

The real leakers never bust out entire year lineups like that. They drop one or two key pieces of information about one or two particular games, and it’s very specific, and it’s something nobody else would have guessed beforehand. And in the rare event they do make a list, it’s only to contextualize the new information they’re bringing. Even the most knowledgeable leakers don’t know entire year lineups. They hear about a game here or there. The frauds always seem to know everything. Anytime some legit leak comes out, the frauds are there to chime in with their 2 cents to make it seem as if, “oh, of course I knew about this” because it’s all about ego for them.

This person has been putting crap predictions out almost daily for years. Anyone making that many predictions for that long, if they were truly legit, everyone would know it by now and there would be no doubt.

Basically, RGT says it best

I think while a lot of the list seems believable given past timings and already announced stuff, I think ultimately what makes it fake is the absence of a Nintendo made Mario game. I think it's very unlikely given what has happened over the past 1.5 years that the only game from Nintendo's flagship franchise in 2022 is an Ubisoft game.

As for Pokemon, what's interesting is that the remake strategy seems to be following the original release strategy:

• Gen 1
• Gen 2
• Gen 3
• Gen 1 Remakes
• Gen 4
• Gen 2 Remakes
• Gen 5
• Gen 6
• Gen 3 Remakes
• Gen 7
• Gen 1 Re-remakes
• Gen 8
• Gen 4 Remakes

For remakes you have:

• Gen 1 Remakes
• Gen 2 Remakes
• Gen 3 Remakes
• Gen 1 Re-remakes
• Gen 4 Remakes

So judging by the pattern, Gen 2 Re-remakes are next which would be Let's Go.

@Cuzizkool You're completely right to pick up on wattage! Hitting thermal and battery life targets will be very important to Nintendo for any new silicon. I'm guessing that Nintendo will drop their clock settings below Orin's maximums, like they did with the Tegra X1. That being said, the Orin AGX technical guide you picked up on before does hint at what the native (non DLSS) graphical performance could be like. On page 4 it shows a nearly 3x performance gain compared to Xavier. Assuming that scaling holds for lower watts (and I know that's a big assumption) we can can estimate the TFLOPS for Orin NX at slow clock speeds ...

15W Xavier NX 0.8 TFLOPS => Orin NX 2.4 TFLOPS
10W Xavier NX 0.6 TFLOPS => Orin NX 1.8 TFLOPS

... so guessing Nintendo will run Dane slower in their next model, similarly to how they did with the original Switch still leaves the native GPU performance on a par with the PS4 (not Pro) in docked mode. And the next model undocked should match the current docked Switch as a minimum.

Of course anyone with better GPU knowledge than me is welcome to tear my speculations and finger-in-air maths apart

REFS:
https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/gtcf21/jet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra

Oh, the next Switch undocked will certainly match the current Switch docked.

I'd estimate upper end of PS4 level docked, and a little below base Xbox One in handheld. That's a realistic expectation for Switch 2. Though if it utilizes DLSS, it could punch far beyond its weight, with 4k being standard when docked for any game which supports it (which, if integrated in a closed ecosystem I imagine every game would, since it would just be part of the normal Switch 2 development process).

@TSR3 Yep, DLSS is the way for Nintendo to join the high res party. It can make non 4k monitors show 4k looking video brilliantly.

@JaxonH Yeah, if you take 30% off both you'll get 1.3 TFLOPS for the 10W figure. But the Switch's GPU can run even slower in handheld, so I followed that precedent. I'm trying to hype responsibly

To be honest, I've been waiting for analysis of the potential graphical power of Orin for the past couple of months, but I've not seen anything yet. So markomaro's claims prompted me to go back to Nvidia'd docs in more detail. Earlier this year I'd made my own guesstimates and landed just short of 1.3 TFLOPS docked. So, finding there's substance to PS4 matching performance was a nice surprise. At least "impossible" ports will now become very possible ports.

@Madao a couple of weeks ago you mentioned about UE5. All I know about UE5 is from watching DF's videos about The Matrix Awakens last week. Despite the C XseriesS putting in a good show, it looked like UE5 is just for 9th gen consoles (and high end PCs). Do you think a new Switch model with PS4 performance, plus DLSS, could be up for running UE5 as well?