Nintendo Switch Demand Adds As Much As $192 Million To Nvidia's Bottom Line

Neat. I hope to get a Switch this year, still loving my Wii U 💕

Chipmakers make me hungry

@MartyFlanMJFan yea I'm in the same boat. I'll be getting it with Mario, he'll need my help saving the princess

That is great news. Not just for Nvidia, but for Nintendo as well.

I hope they will sell a lot of units and earn a ton of money hihi

That's good news.

If USD 192 million is additional revenue than this adds to their "Top Line". "Bottom Line" should be significantly lower ...

They have conquered the golden egg after whining against AMD for the other two console platforms.
Better you take care of Nintendo and secure a contract for Nintendo's next generation too nVidia.

So, just to check, Tegra wasn't Nintendoomed either?? Fake news!

@UK-Nintendo I bought my Wii U the day Super Mario 3D World was released, if I don't get a Switch before it then I'd imagine Odyssey will be the game that forces my hand! Can't wait

great news hopefully bring cost down for Nintendo to make switch cheaper & sell more

Spawnwave made a really good point that the money brought in by the X1 could very well lead to increased R&D into improvements in the Tegra line for gaming. Pretty obvious really, but it hadn't crossed my mind until he mentioned it

@MartyFlanMJFan yeah. I really hope we get a good mario bundle.

That's a lot of chips and gravy!

This news may sound great for the strict console gamer, but coming from the PC gaming space, it is a more complicated situation to consider.

Their investment understandably paid off. The more pressing question is, when will this prompt further investment, translating into upgrades beyond the Tegra X1 in the gaming space? The Pascal and Xavier Tegra chips are still only being used in the automotive GPU business, and those premium prices likely aren't going down soon. Even the Pascal chips are still being used in $1500+ boards for expensive Tesla vehicles, so we can't expect that kind of upgrade for a future NS SKU any time soon.

Considering how NVIDIA tries to monopolize the PC gaming field with their proprietary platform, compared to AMD/ATI utilizing a more open source platform, I'm not sure it entirely bodes well for Nintendo that NVIDIA will only gain a greater grip on them. Nintendo used to be all about finding business partners to fit the circumstances of their hardware at each point in time. Now, NVIDIA will significantly dictate when Nintendo hardware will see improvements.

@PlywoodStick Let's not jump to conclusions top soon about what happens next with Nvidia. I prefer to wait and see where this goes.

@Kalmaro I've been in the PC gaming field long enough to witness how NVIDIA operates. Release new GPU, new games come out that use new version of software or API (or now GameWorks) a couple years later, NVIDIA ends up latently degrading performance of existing users' cards relative to new cards on new games over the driver update process, Team Green has to upgrade every 2-3 years to realize all the benefits of new NVIDIA optimized programs.

Meanwhile, Team Red has been getting refreshes of the Polynesian line since 2011, and Polaris being only a minor upgrade with refreshes that are finally being retired once Vega 10/11 releases this Summer/Autumn. At the very least, however, Crimson updates aren't keeping previous year's card owners out of the loop. My R9 380x isn't any worse the wear, because AMD/ATI keeps their hardware going for years with their driver updates.

Of course, this situation has largely focused on PC gaming rather than console gaming up until now. But yeah, at this point of x86 integration into the console gaming space (even with Nintendo opted out of it), what's likely based on NVIDIA's past behavior is that 3 years from now, the original NS SKU is going to be gimped compared to whatever new SKU exists at that point. Whereas with PS4Pro/Scorpio, even though they're upgrades, owners of the original SKU likely won't get screwed over by AMD/ATI. The saving grace for NS is ironically going to be programs considered to be more directly beneficial to AMD/ATI, such as the Vulcan API.

@PlywoodStick Fair enough, they have a history then with the PC world. This may be a bit different though since we are talking about console gaming and Nintendo, of all people.

I don't agree with you on Nvidia being any worse than AMD. I have own both and have always had more trouble running games on AMD. Granted, I haven't had an AMD chipset since 2012.

If only I had the money to invest in Nvidia stock when it was cheaper... I'd have more cash than I'd know what to do with right now, ay yi yi...

Nintendo and NVIDIA have created a freaking Frankenstein's monster known as the Nintendo Switch. With just about 3 million worldwide, the demand is extremely high and could end up reaching 10 million at the end of this year.

@PlywoodStick And then you people mock me when I say I had to upgrade the GPU and then that largeley meant the whole mobo and machine every other year! I was always using nVidia cards...until card #2 on that last machine....which failed...with barely any use...

You're right about Nintendo though in terms of Tegra reliance. The only key there though is, if it sells well, nVidia will put the funding in to generate improvements, especially since it's their ONLY foothold in the console space right now, making Nintendo successful only pads their own pockets. LONG term that might become troublesome. Near-term for the next 2 generations or so, meeting mutual goals would be mutually beneficial. By the time 10 years and 2 platforms rolls by, no doubt Tegra will have a competitor.

@Therad That's mainly due to NVIDIA gaining market pressure and emphasizing that more PC games are optimized for NVIDIA hardware instead of AMD/ATI. With the upcoming Vega architecture and increased focus on API's like Vulcan, however, AMD/ATI aims to correct the imbalance that NVIDIA has imposed.

@NEStalgia Lol, whoever told you otherwise was fibbing hardcore. There's always been strife in the PC industry. It's not that bad anymore with motherboards and CPU's, but it used to be a rougher field. Especially since PC's in the past were much more poorly designed. In hindsight, I'm pretty glad I largely didn't do PC gaming back then.

NVIDIA + Intel upgrade cycles to the power of NESTea's curse = bad times. I hope you'll forgive me, but I try not to think about it too deeply. Don't want to revert to bed wetting from nightmares every time I sleep.

And yeah, I'm hoping Nintendo will pressure NVIDIA to not bite off more than they can chew. They need to make sure they don't get pushed around and set some boundaries. Maybe the big red N can reign in the big green N and tame them? Then we can have the big watermelon N. Wait... That sounds really wrong... Whatever, it's a watermelon Sandswitch.

@NEStalgia Actually, I take that back, the new AM4 platform has been having teething troubles and needed BIOS updates and such. Plus RAM compatibility issues that require the user to read the motherboard instruction manual to see which configurations actually work. (!) Sorry NESTea, I lied again.

Why you always lying dead meme song from 2015 plays

@PlywoodStick shock surprise PC hardcores....here??? sigh I was once one of them. My PC did not agree though. Not any of the collection.

My parts seldom failed wholesale. They all "work" so I kept them....they just work intermittently and fail in weird ways at random times until you have pulled the last hair from your head.

Selling to a bunch of greasy PC nerds is one thing....but I've always believed nVidia treated their corporate contracts differently. And this is quite a big contract. All the laughing people do about Nintendo versus Sony and such aside, Nintendo's still a VERY big manufacturer. They're probably making more money from the Nintendo X1 contract than the Tesla X2 contract, that's for darned sure...they'd cut Musk before Kimishima And while I believe Iwata was easy to push around and that led to some of the infamous fallout with publishers during WiiU, Kimishima doesn't strike me as a guy that ends up on the bad end of a deal any more than Yamauchi was. We'd see a CDi-2 before nVidia would push them around Big Green's probably worth quite a bit more, but they're only as good as their contracts. And a lot of nVidia's contracts have gone bust in the past decade.

LOL, new platform, BIOS updates, ram compatability issues, motherboard manuals, verifying configurations to be sure THAT compatible part is A compatible part? Ohhh where do I sign up, it's just like old times!? Sounds like every single month of my PC gaming life........I'm so grateful for Switch and PS4

@NEStalgia That's just the beginning. There's NVMe SSD's now, which also need an update to run at their full capacity of 32 Gb/s. You have to make sure it's of the Gen2 M key for max performance, too, not the slower SATA or Gen1 B key variety. Oh, but don't forget those are using PCIe lanes, 4 to be exact. And even though there can be multiple PCIe slots, if a more expensive board isn't being used (I'm using an $85 board that was on sale for $35 as part of an AM4 startup bundle deal), the x16 slot gets turned into x8 if a second graphics card is used in the second "x16 slot," because surprise surprise, it's only an x4 slot electrically. It still works, but with decreased performance.

Oh yeah, I also spent many hours researching which fans work best in which positions, specific models to use, ordering and learning how to use rubber push pins that I've never used before, and I snapped a rubber pin because I stretched it too far. Cryorig H7 replacing stock heatsink/cooler is a must on a budget, gotta get that. Had to pick just the right case available. (Old Thermaltake "New" Soprano from 2013.) It's dark inside, have to use a flashlight to see anything. PSU is modular, had to make sure it wouldn't run up against the bottom intake fan. Uh oh, the SSD didn't come with a screw, need to get one from work. Burn an installation disc, take old Windows 7 license off a laptop I barely use for Win10 so I don't have to pay $100+ for a new license.

Okay, I think that's everything.

...

If that 802.3ac router doesn't cooperate, I'm going to...

Go back to my SNES and play some more retro games.

@PlywoodStick MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOOOOOOP!!

NINTENDO IS DOOOOMED!!!!