People owe it to themselves to go check out the track "Primal Eyes" on YouTube, the theme to "Parasite Eve." Absolute banger, I still have it on playlists.
I was almost certainly expecting this on Switch 2. Mentioned earlier in the thread, the last gen console versions were fully screwed because of mechanical hard disks with slow I/O.
But like... anyone who has a Steam Deck could've told you this was going to work and probably pretty well. The most consistently rumored Switch 2 specs up to this point suggested a system with at least rough parity to the Steam Deck, but a more advanced feature set.
Having at least an Ampere-based GPU brings features (primarily DLSS) that the RDNA2-based modern consoles and Steam Deck lack, and those features can help close the gap a little, too. If the Ada-generation Optical Flow Accelerator is present - not outside the realm of possibility given the 120Hz display - then suddenly you have access to frame interpolation, too.
I'm dying to see what Switch 2 has under the hood. It undoubtedly has the raw horsepower to at least make Cyberpunk 2077 function, but there are other bells, whistles, and hacks available with modern Nvidia architecture that could let it punch well above its weight.
@ottoecamn This is gonna blow your mind, but virtually every piece of commercial art created is in some way compromised to reach a wider audience. And it's always been this way. This is actually hilariously a lot better than things used to be.
All things considered, this is really innocuous. you should see the kinds of hoops and censorship Nintendo made partners jump through back in the NES and Super NES eras. Castlevania games got censored over and over and over again.
"Type-1" and "Type-2" is kind of a weird solution; a spin on the aforementioned "Choose Your Style" from Splatoon would've been a better choice.
When we know better, we do better. Changing the outfits makes sense. Doing a little bit of work to make the remake more inclusive cost them nothing and it doesn't affect the game or the storytelling.
If any of this bothers you - especially a need for female-presenting characters to be more scantily clad while crying "CENSORSHIP" - you need to do some soul searching.
@westman98 Good lord I had no idea that much data had leaked. I'm usually wary of leaks but it's pretty tough to refute that given its provenance. Orin's gotta be a pretty decent sized chip, would be curious to see how they pare it back. Unusual for Nintendo to go for bespoke hardware (Tegra X1 released in 2015, so it would've been specced in 2013 at the latest, which makes me skeptical it had been co-developed with Nintendo), but I guess not altogether unheard of.
If you're looking at an Orin derivative, let's assume they stick with Samsung 8nm for fabrication. There's a die map of Orin here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/NVIDIA_Orin_press_-die-annotated.jpg/1280px-NVIDIA_Orin_press-die-_annotated.jpg
For reference, GA107 (3050 Ti mobile) is ~200mm2 and has 2560 shaders. Cut two of the shader clusters and you're at 1536. Replace those with...probably eight cores instead of the twelve in Orin, though those ARM cores don't take up much real estate.
Yeah, you could probably do a sub-200mm2 SoC fairly easily if you make some additional cuts to Orin. Curious to see how it handles running in the power bands the X1 runs in, since those are probably going to be your hard limits.
@skywake Happy to. Former tech journalist, current technology product manager. And the Digital Foundry guys 100% know their stuff.
Nintendo is never going to admit they're working on a new console until they announce it. So the "middle of lifecycle" is absolute crap, nobody in this industry announces their next big thing until the last possible second to build the most marketing hype because announcing too early will dampen sales. This is Marketing 101. It's logical to assume Nintendo is developing a new console, Switch or otherwise.
When Nintendo chose the Tegra X1, it was a massively path-of-least-resistance option and I think demonstrated Nintendo's recognition that they needed to support third party developers better, something that has been borne out over the life cycle of the system. Tegra X1 was a known quantity; bog standard ARM CPU cores, understood Maxwell GPU cores, and the chip itself had already been in the wild long enough for developers to get a feel for it.
So what can Nintendo do?
Nintendo never sells a console at a loss, so expecting them to ship something with 5nm chips is probably not in the cards. 7nm may be more feasible. They also haven't shipped bleeding edge since the Nintendo 64, maybe the GameCube. But never in mobile hardware. They've always gone for best power/price/performance.
Honestly, if you want to get a good idea of what kind of performance you can get on 7nm and in a low power envelope, the Steam Deck is a great example. Relatively modern but still cost effective technologies can get you double the memory bandwidth, double or better CPU performance, double or better on the GPU...Tegra X1 was never a particularly good chip, but it's not specialized either, and it's cheap, and that made it a killer fit for Nintendo. Tegra X1 is looooonnnng in the tooth.
I think the problem you run into is that NVIDIA doesn't seem to have anything announced that would do the job Tegra X1 does, and certainly doesn't have the feature set. So you either have NVIDIA custom engineering an SoC - which isn't unheard of but isn't a space they enjoy playing in the way AMD does and Nintendo has a history of not wanting bespoke hardware - or picking up something else off the shelf. God's honest truth they could literally just decide they want the Van Gogh chip used in Steam Deck and run an emulation layer on it and call it a day.
@Raikohsphere The Mariko Tegra X1 revision is "gimped" because cranking up performance could cause stability issues and corner cases. If you crank the clocks up on that, 90% of games will probably work fine, but other weird ones that might use bizarre timing tricks could misbehave.
Comments 6
Re: Street Fighter 6 Welcomes The Return Of A Legendary Composer This Week
People owe it to themselves to go check out the track "Primal Eyes" on YouTube, the theme to "Parasite Eve." Absolute banger, I still have it on playlists.
She's a legend.
Re: Hands On: Cyberpunk 2077 Might Pull A 'Witcher 3' On Switch 2
I was almost certainly expecting this on Switch 2. Mentioned earlier in the thread, the last gen console versions were fully screwed because of mechanical hard disks with slow I/O.
But like... anyone who has a Steam Deck could've told you this was going to work and probably pretty well. The most consistently rumored Switch 2 specs up to this point suggested a system with at least rough parity to the Steam Deck, but a more advanced feature set.
Having at least an Ampere-based GPU brings features (primarily DLSS) that the RDNA2-based modern consoles and Steam Deck lack, and those features can help close the gap a little, too. If the Ada-generation Optical Flow Accelerator is present - not outside the realm of possibility given the 120Hz display - then suddenly you have access to frame interpolation, too.
I'm dying to see what Switch 2 has under the hood. It undoubtedly has the raw horsepower to at least make Cyberpunk 2077 function, but there are other bells, whistles, and hacks available with modern Nvidia architecture that could let it punch well above its weight.
Re: Dragon Quest Creator Chimes In On Characters Showing Less Skin In Upcoming HD-2D Remake
@ottoecamn This is gonna blow your mind, but virtually every piece of commercial art created is in some way compromised to reach a wider audience. And it's always been this way. This is actually hilariously a lot better than things used to be.
All things considered, this is really innocuous. you should see the kinds of hoops and censorship Nintendo made partners jump through back in the NES and Super NES eras. Castlevania games got censored over and over and over again.
Re: Dragon Quest Creator Chimes In On Characters Showing Less Skin In Upcoming HD-2D Remake
"Type-1" and "Type-2" is kind of a weird solution; a spin on the aforementioned "Choose Your Style" from Splatoon would've been a better choice.
When we know better, we do better. Changing the outfits makes sense. Doing a little bit of work to make the remake more inclusive cost them nothing and it doesn't affect the game or the storytelling.
If any of this bothers you - especially a need for female-presenting characters to be more scantily clad while crying "CENSORSHIP" - you need to do some soul searching.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Investigates Switch's Lowest Resolution Games
@westman98 Good lord I had no idea that much data had leaked. I'm usually wary of leaks but it's pretty tough to refute that given its provenance. Orin's gotta be a pretty decent sized chip, would be curious to see how they pare it back. Unusual for Nintendo to go for bespoke hardware (Tegra X1 released in 2015, so it would've been specced in 2013 at the latest, which makes me skeptical it had been co-developed with Nintendo), but I guess not altogether unheard of.
If you're looking at an Orin derivative, let's assume they stick with Samsung 8nm for fabrication. There's a die map of Orin here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/NVIDIA_Orin_press_-die-annotated.jpg/1280px-NVIDIA_Orin_press-die-_annotated.jpg
For reference, GA107 (3050 Ti mobile) is ~200mm2 and has 2560 shaders. Cut two of the shader clusters and you're at 1536. Replace those with...probably eight cores instead of the twelve in Orin, though those ARM cores don't take up much real estate.
Yeah, you could probably do a sub-200mm2 SoC fairly easily if you make some additional cuts to Orin. Curious to see how it handles running in the power bands the X1 runs in, since those are probably going to be your hard limits.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Investigates Switch's Lowest Resolution Games
@skywake Happy to. Former tech journalist, current technology product manager. And the Digital Foundry guys 100% know their stuff.
Nintendo is never going to admit they're working on a new console until they announce it. So the "middle of lifecycle" is absolute crap, nobody in this industry announces their next big thing until the last possible second to build the most marketing hype because announcing too early will dampen sales. This is Marketing 101. It's logical to assume Nintendo is developing a new console, Switch or otherwise.
When Nintendo chose the Tegra X1, it was a massively path-of-least-resistance option and I think demonstrated Nintendo's recognition that they needed to support third party developers better, something that has been borne out over the life cycle of the system. Tegra X1 was a known quantity; bog standard ARM CPU cores, understood Maxwell GPU cores, and the chip itself had already been in the wild long enough for developers to get a feel for it.
So what can Nintendo do?
Nintendo never sells a console at a loss, so expecting them to ship something with 5nm chips is probably not in the cards. 7nm may be more feasible. They also haven't shipped bleeding edge since the Nintendo 64, maybe the GameCube. But never in mobile hardware. They've always gone for best power/price/performance.
Honestly, if you want to get a good idea of what kind of performance you can get on 7nm and in a low power envelope, the Steam Deck is a great example. Relatively modern but still cost effective technologies can get you double the memory bandwidth, double or better CPU performance, double or better on the GPU...Tegra X1 was never a particularly good chip, but it's not specialized either, and it's cheap, and that made it a killer fit for Nintendo. Tegra X1 is looooonnnng in the tooth.
I think the problem you run into is that NVIDIA doesn't seem to have anything announced that would do the job Tegra X1 does, and certainly doesn't have the feature set. So you either have NVIDIA custom engineering an SoC - which isn't unheard of but isn't a space they enjoy playing in the way AMD does and Nintendo has a history of not wanting bespoke hardware - or picking up something else off the shelf. God's honest truth they could literally just decide they want the Van Gogh chip used in Steam Deck and run an emulation layer on it and call it a day.
@Raikohsphere The Mariko Tegra X1 revision is "gimped" because cranking up performance could cause stability issues and corner cases. If you crank the clocks up on that, 90% of games will probably work fine, but other weird ones that might use bizarre timing tricks could misbehave.