Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@BLPs It's also worth noting that the Wii U initially sold at £300 (which I paid for on day one), and you were paying that sum of money for a heavily under-powered, lacking in decent launch titles, and less storage space your typical smartphone. As for the Switch, I'd be more than willing to pay £350 for a clearly powerful handheld device that can also be played on my TV, has detachable controllers, and a great launch lineup (so far).

@Octane Even if Nvdia made the deal at a loss, they would surely earn a whole lot more in the long run. Assuming the Switch will sell like warm cakes (I wouldn't go as far as hot just yet), they'd earn back the losses fairly quickly, not to mention other companies swarming to Nvdia to use their tech, since Nintendo used it.

@skywake I paid £300 for my Wii U on day one, and I'd happily pay another £50 on top of that for the Switch. As for the Nvdia Shield and its 16GB of storage, it should be noted that the main appeal of the Shield was the streaming capabilities. If the Switch launched with any less than 64GB with expandable storage, I would be disappointed, but I would still buy it and rely on cartridges.

@Portal_King
Moore's Law. The Shield tablet was $299US in 2014. The Switch is going to launch in 2017.

Shield Tablet -> Switch
Late 2014 -> Early 2017
16GB storage -> ~32GB storage
2GB RAM -> ~4GB RAM
400GFLOPs -> ~800GFLOPs
$299US -> ~$299US

Parker is already 50% more powerful than the X1, and the X1 was already omre powerful than the X2.

Im pretty sure the NS will be around the ballpark of the XB1/PS4, the Tegra X2 has around 1.2 tefaflops vs the XB1 1.4 teraflops

Im expecting a $299 price, maybe 2 SKUs with $249 and $299.

@Faruko Here's the thing. Its not just "Tegra", its custom for this device. The actual specs can be...well...anything, we just have a base minimum.

Im sure of it, it will probably be a custom Tegra chip

But why do i think its the X2 (or some variation of it) because itsbeen almost 2 years since the Shield with X1 and Nvidia hsa bene talking about the X2 for quite some time and have yet to release anything, so im inlcined to believe the majority of the waffle GPU production is being saved for the production of the NS

And the NVN API should help with to the metal develop

Basically we have an idea of what it could potentially theoretically be capable of. Which would be a tablet that's close to the power of the XBOne selling for around the current price of the PS4. Or less than that for less.

@skywake Do you think we could potentially see expandable storage space? Even if that means microSD cards, I'd happily purchase an incredibly large one for this.

Im sure it will have

Im actually expecting a SKU with 128/256gb space, althou it does depend which memory they decide to go for.

But even 64gb and 128gb with sd card would be appropiate... i guess

@Faruko If the default storage is 32GB, I would expect it to be expandable with an extra 128GB at a minimum, and 265GB maximum.

@Moshugan

This is a quote from Kimishima several months ago. It's unlikely that they will be selling hardware at a loss again, and the weak pound surely isn't helping the UK Switch launch.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/160428qa/02.html
"Next, about how we are looking at cost, we are not thinking of launching the hardware at a loss. When Wii U was launched, the yen was very strong. I am assuming that situation will not repeat itself. Selling at a loss at launch would not support the business, so we are keeping that mind in developing NX."

Most smartphones say "256gb maximum" but they can support up to 2tb SD cards

And i may be wrong, but if i believe the read speed being the most important one in game consoles, even u1 sd cards are as fast as HDDs

Any idea how the Switch Console instantly sends the video signal to the dock that then sends the signal via HDMI to the TV? I think that's, actually, pretty impressive technology - it seems to just work so I didn't think much about it. There is a bit of a delay in the video but that could be simulated to show how the concept works.

Would it need physical contacts on the bottom edge of the Switch Console? Is there wireless technology that can do this? Also, How could the dock boost the power of the Switch Console with no physical connection between them (ie, a PCIe port, lightning type port).

@upsidedownjim In regards to this, the console itself seems to know, similar to a dual screen setup on a PC, when you disconnect one screen, it knows and almost instantly adjusts.

The dock appears to be just that. A dock for charging, storage and HDMI out. Probably a little tech in there that changes resolution obviously, but nothing major.

Again, the fact that this is an instant transfer, most likely since the connection to the dock is broken when the console is removed, therefore the system knows to turn back on, is mind blowing.

@Portal_King
I think SD card expansion is going to be a thing. There's no reason not to include it other than to try and charge your consumers more. I really don't think Nintendo can afford to go the Sony route (proprietary memory cards) or the Apple route (no expansion, fixed SKUs). Since the Wii they've been pretty open to the idea of decent storage expansion options.

@upsidedownjim
I'm pretty sure they'd be just physical connection. The HDMI on the back of the dock is probably just wired directly into the back of the tablet. There's probably some kind of proprietary dock connector. Enough to have Power, HDMI, USB and maybe a couple of other bits of I/O expand out the back. I honestly don't think it's anything super high tech. The massive leap is the fact that they can now put that much GPU horsepower in a tablet. Which has been a thing for a while.

Basically, the Shield is a newer, Nintendo supported version of this with custom dock and controller

Over 10 million views in 24 hours, and the most viewed video on their youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nintendo/videos?sort=p&view=0...

I'm betting on £250 for the standard package, £300 for the step-up. It's clear that Nintendo are marketing this console towards adults with disposable income - so it should come as no surprise that if the industrial design is spot on, the price will fit in line.

Personally I'm fine with this, as I would rather pay up for a more powerful, well designed Nintendo experience than another underpowered Fisher-Price console.

Iwata seemed very adamant about the NX "absorbing" the Wii U architecture. Clearly this isn't. I wonder what changed, and if it did, how different is the Switch from Iwata's initial idea of it.

@Emperor-Palpsy That's a lot more reasonable, especially if both of them come bundled with a game (heaven knows what game at this point maybe a choice out of the rumoured 4ish Wii U ports?). If they can advertise this product starting at £249.99 and the most expensive being £299.99 and avoiding the dreaded presence of a number 3 then I think they will have done well as far as pricing is concerned.

So much for 3DS games on the TV. >_>

Capcom, if you don't put MH5 on here...