@AverageGamer what's with all this misinformation? Why would adding VRR be hard or powering consuming? It's neither.
If any VRR should lower power usage because instead of having it refresh at a steady 60 or 120hz, it will refresh only at the actual frame rate the game is running at (assuming its dropping below 60).
This is just total nonsense. VRR doesn't have much to do with the display technology in itself. For example LG supports VRR on their OLED tvs ever since they started supporting HDMI 2.1.
Most likely there wasn't a manufacturer offering a ready made OLED panel with the specifications Nintendo wanted so instead of paying to get one made they opted for an LCD instead.
@Olmectron great if you're a kid living at home with your parents and have a part time job to get yourself some extra cash. Not great if have to make ends meet on minimum wage and now have to spend pretty much a extra day of work on your handheld.
Perceived value also plays a big role. Just because somebody could (easily) afford a higher price doesn't mean they actually think it's worth it. For example I could easily afford a Switch at 400 dollars but the 299 launch price was a lot more attractive. At that price if felt I could buy it and don't care much even if it didn't get that much great games while at 400 I would have expected more from the hardware and game library.
@johnvboy Not really. More like simple low quality textures that repeat a lot. Games like oddesey or breath of the wild are very stylized and well designed which is why they still look pleasing to the eye but it's nonsense to say Nintendo has better compression or whatever. They don't and even if they had, that doesn't turn a 50gb game into a 5gb game.
Those 50gb games have vastly superior quality assets and that isn't hard to see on a tv.
@ferryb001 saying it "doest look that bad in handheld mode" is just another way of saying it does look bad, but you just don't want to admit it. All the games I have look good on the big screen and in handheld mode.
Even if the smaller screen hides a lot of the imperfections that still doesn't change the fact that they completely ruined the art style. The original games simply look better because of that
@ferryb001 easy clicks because it's a crappy product that deserves all the hate it gets.
The game has nothing to redeem itself with. It's not like it has bugs but at least runs and looks great or runs poor but looks good and has no bugs.
No, it's looks like crap because they didn't make any effort to transfer the original art style at all, it's full of bugs and on top of that runs like crap as well despite looking like a complete turd.
Take two didn't care at all about this game and just saw it as an easy cash grab. Why else hire a bottom of the barrel developer that already did a less than steller conversion of the games for mobile?
Take take will have known about the horrible state the games are in and still decided to release it anyway.
I honestly don't see how you can enjoy a game that looks and runs as horrible as this. Sounds more like trying to justify ones purchase.
@ModdedInkling parents and content licenses are two totally different things...
Games like MGS or GTA use licensed content such as videos, music etc. which isn't very surprising given the type of game.
When they did the licensing they probably didn't expect the games to be on sale for such a long time or didn't think it would make financial sense to license the content for a longer initial period.
The only thing you might fault them for is now renewing licenses earlier.
As for Nintendo, given the kind of games they make it's far less likely they'll run into such issues. But who knows, Nintendo might have licenses on content used in their games as well. Maybe Nintendo is just a lot smarter about not letting the licenses lapse hence we don't hear about it.
@CharlieGirl Jesus, is there anything people these days won't whine about?
The company has rules as to when you appear in the credits. It is unlikely employees were unaware of this so why whine about it now?
Also good luck crediting everybody that "worked" on the game. So if somebody joins the team, creates half a texture and the leaves that person should be credited? For what? Expecting a reasonable contribution before receiving credit isn't unreasonable. Otherwise you'll have to credit everybody in the whole company.
As for being in the credits being important for future work; I doubt it. If that person did a decent job they'll be able to get a reference so it's a moot point. And it's not like some HR guy is going to check the credits of a game to see if you are actually in there.
Sounds like people here never had a real job. How often does the average office slave get credit for anything?
@Clyde_Radcliffe this is a pretty standard look for Japanese software/webpages from that era. Hell in Japan it's not that hard to find software that looks like that in 2021.
@pixelpatch nonsense. This has nothing to do planned obsolescency.
You want full upgradability? Buy a desktop. Most laptops allow you to change the memory and storage. Making a cpu or gpu upgradable just doesn't make a lot of sense technically, financially and practically. It's even worse for consoles. If if they'd make all parts upgradable, the cost to the consumer would be so high you are better off buying a new 400~500 dollar/Euro box.
But nobody is forcing you to buy new hardware. Your pc/laptop doesn't stop working after 4 years. You could easily use it for much longer. Same goes for a phone or console.
There is nothing preventing you from still playing games on a PS4 or PS3 or whatever. But do you really want to?
For a game console I think not. But a lot of computer hardware easily lasts 5+ years these days. The CPU in my main pc is nearing 8 years old but I can still play new(we) games on it because I did upgrade the gpu. For a lot of people there isn't much need to upgrade. Unfortunately people often buy crappy hardware and then complain they need something new a couple years later... Maybe people should just start buying good hardware to begin with.
There are multiple companies producing OLED panels. However LG is the only one that is producing larger panels such as the ones you find in TV's. They bought a patent from Kodak that allows them to use only white oleds with a color filter in front of it unlike the Samsung panels that require RGB oleds. This makes the LG panels a lot cheaper to produce.
But Samsung's process is fine for smaller screens hence they've been producing oled panels for phones since 2013 or something.
I've been in the park as part of a pre-opening event. The park itself looks really nice, somehow the materials/paint make it look like the actual games.
The Mario kart ride waiting area is also very nice looking. Maybe even better than the Harry Potter area.
The ride itself is a bit of let down though. It's definitely not a thrill ride. The AR is reasonably well done I'd say but it feels more like a rather average game than a theme park ride. I think it's definitely aimed more at younger kids.
The Yoshi ride is complete rubbish by the way. Not even little kids would enjoy that. Just a very slow and boring 3 minute train ride through three very uninspiring areas.
I get the feeling they really want people the buy the (expensive) wrist bands so you can so all the AR stuff inside the Mario area.
TL;DR area looks great, rides area meh. Hopefully the donkey Kong area will be better.
@StevenG Unless the TV is buffering how does it know what is ahead? Given the low input lag on oleds I doubt it's buffering the image a few frames at a time.
Anyway I don't notice any smearing. As I said, there isn't a whole lot of content that has a lot of pure blacks in it and without the pixels actually turning off there isn't any smear.
@Dirty0814 Nonsense. Refresh rates or response times or whatever you want to call it, don't get any more or less noticable depending on the screen size.
Viewing distance ratings are for immersion and aren't really any different for movies or games.
Also you aren't going to notice a difference between 1 and 0.1ms.
@StevenG cinema bright mode because it's most color accurate. Also turned off all the post processing.
I think there are plenty of IPS TV's. My previous LG was IPS and I believe all non oled LG TVs are IPS.
But blacks still depend a lot on the backlight. On my old tv backlight bleed was very obvious when watching a movie with black bars. Once you see, or rather do not see any backlight bleed on a OLED you don't want to go back.
Yes if you got a LCD with a lot of dimming zones the issue is less obvious but at that price point you might as well get an OLED.
@StevenG and LCD has fundamentally poor motion handling. And how often do you have a scene that has lots of full blacks? Not that often. I'm playing Super Mario Galaxy on a C9 and can't see I notice anything off.
What I do very much notice is that it looks miles better than any LCD I've seen.
@AZD1222 I don't think so which is exactly why this rumor makes no sense at all. Similar results can be achieved much easier (and cheaper) by simply switching to a higher brightness LCD panel and replace the tiny battery with a bigger one. There is plenty of space in the chassis...
@ymax56 I play on a oled TV and it looks amazing. While in theory oled can burn it, it's unlikely to happen at noticable levels with normal usage. Unless all you do is play the same game 8 hours a day and that game happens to have a totally static UI, you shouldn't have to worry about it.
This is simply not true. Oled has vastly superior response times to LCD. LCD motion is horrible compared to just about anything. Just ask people who switch from plasma to LCD.
Apparently the screendoor effect is less with LCD panels which might be why they are preferred for VR. Price is probably a not unimportant other factor. Doubt custom low volume oled panels come cheap.
Most of the comments are a complete joke. You don't get sick from going outside, you could possibly get sick from being close to somebody that had the virus.
If everybody is staying inside and you are walking outside, you're not going to get sick.
The title and article make no sense. Nothing has changed on the controller side, it's Android 10 that now has the correct button mappings for the pro controller.
The title should read: Android 10 now supports the pro controller.
Low quality clickbait article. Pretty much all stores still carry 3ds hardware and software. If it didn't sell, software in particular, then retailers aren't going to waste space on it.
Hardware sales don't matter that much for a system that sold 75million units and has a successor on the market. At some point the market for new units is saturated. But as long as software sales are reasonable nobody (retailers and Nintendo) is going to pull the plug.
End of the financial year in Japan is in April so that is not it. If any they probably don't want people to hold off for 6 months until the holidays if they really are releasing new models around than.
Wow, taking the sales of two games and basing the system's future on that...
The 3ds is cheap to produce, cheap to buy, cheap to develop for and has a giant software library. As long as overall software sales are at a sustainable level there is no reason to be so overly dramatic about the system's future.
How do you come up with this nonsense? It takes time (thus money) to create all those assets. Devs don't do that for fun, it's because games really use it. Large amounts of high quality assets simply take up a lot of space.
Most Nintendo games are fairly simple and reuse a lot of the assets throughout the game. Even a game like BotW doesn't have massive variation in assets or lots of high resolution textures.
On top of that Nintendo games usually have little voice acting or FMV content which helps a lot in keeping size down.
Nintendo isn't doing some kind of magical optimization nor using some kind of super compression others don't. Don't forget that with Switch Nintendo has a financial reason to keep size down as well as carts are very expensive compared to optical media so it only makes sense to keep games as small as possible so they can go with the smallest (cheapest) carts.
This article has a really poor technical background.
Why would a 1080p screen be an easy win? Besides that you could argue whether there is much of a perceivable difference between a 6 inch 720p or 1080p screen, Nintendo's problem is power consumption.
They have to clock the SoC way down in handheld mode because otherwise the battery won't last long enough. So slapping a 1080p screen in there isn't going to make any difference.
Reworking the SoC so it can be produced on a smaller, more power efficient process is unlikely as well as the cost most likely won't outweigh the benefits.
Another poor suggestion is that they could do yearly refreshes same as Apple. Difference is Apple sells ~250 million devices a year at premium prices. SoC and product development is very expensive. Apple has the cash for that but even in the best of years a console will struggle to sell 20 million. That simply isn't enough to warrant such investments. Not to mention fragmenting your user base is not a good idea. Consumers won't like it and neither will devs. They have to deal with it on mobile devices but it just doesn't make sense for a dedicated gaming device.
The reality is that there isn't much Nintendo can do at the moment. There isn't anything mobile out there that is going to be close to the next gen consoles making a handheld that can run those games in some form is a pipe dream for the next couple of year so that is one reason a revision with better hardware doesn't make much sense at the moment.
Secondly Nvidia doesn't have anything much better than Tegra either at the moment. Whoever says X2, that by now is a 3 year old chip. Nvidia is heavily invested in the automotive sector so they don't have anything small, cheap and efficient that would work for Nintendo at the moment.
Hopefully Nintendo will keep doing well and then they can commission Nvidia to do a semi-custom chip for a Switch 2.0 that has enough power to run downgraded next gen games 1 ~ 2 years after those consoles are released.
Before that I won't hold out for must of an upgrade on the SoC side. If Nintendo wants to do a refresh it would make much more sense to do things such as a bigger battery or larger screen. Both seem to easily fit in the existing chassis. And OLED screen to decrease battery usage a bit or maybe a glass screen or aluminum body.
Comments 32
Re: Poll: Are You Happy With Switch 2's Screen? Because Some People Certainly Aren't
@AverageGamer what's with all this misinformation? Why would adding VRR be hard or powering consuming? It's neither.
If any VRR should lower power usage because instead of having it refresh at a steady 60 or 120hz, it will refresh only at the actual frame rate the game is running at (assuming its dropping below 60).
Re: Poll: Are You Happy With Switch 2's Screen? Because Some People Certainly Aren't
@Haruki_NLI
This is just total nonsense. VRR doesn't have much to do with the display technology in itself. For example LG supports VRR on their OLED tvs ever since they started supporting HDMI 2.1.
Most likely there wasn't a manufacturer offering a ready made OLED panel with the specifications Nintendo wanted so instead of paying to get one made they opted for an LCD instead.
Re: Reggie Fils-Aimé Wanted The 3DS To Launch At $199, But Was Rebuffed
@Olmectron great if you're a kid living at home with your parents and have a part time job to get yourself some extra cash. Not great if have to make ends meet on minimum wage and now have to spend pretty much a extra day of work on your handheld.
Perceived value also plays a big role. Just because somebody could (easily) afford a higher price doesn't mean they actually think it's worth it. For example I could easily afford a Switch at 400 dollars but the 299 launch price was a lot more attractive. At that price if felt I could buy it and don't care much even if it didn't get that much great games while at 400 I would have expected more from the hardware and game library.
Re: Kirby And The Forgotten Land Nintendo Switch File Size Revealed
@johnvboy Not really. More like simple low quality textures that repeat a lot. Games like oddesey or breath of the wild are very stylized and well designed which is why they still look pleasing to the eye but it's nonsense to say Nintendo has better compression or whatever. They don't and even if they had, that doesn't turn a 50gb game into a 5gb game.
Those 50gb games have vastly superior quality assets and that isn't hard to see on a tv.
Re: Digital Foundry Continues GTA Trilogy Analysis, Sets Switch As 'Bottom Tier' Version
@ferryb001 saying it "doest look that bad in handheld mode" is just another way of saying it does look bad, but you just don't want to admit it. All the games I have look good on the big screen and in handheld mode.
Even if the smaller screen hides a lot of the imperfections that still doesn't change the fact that they completely ruined the art style. The original games simply look better because of that
Re: Digital Foundry Continues GTA Trilogy Analysis, Sets Switch As 'Bottom Tier' Version
@ferryb001 easy clicks because it's a crappy product that deserves all the hate it gets.
The game has nothing to redeem itself with. It's not like it has bugs but at least runs and looks great or runs poor but looks good and has no bugs.
No, it's looks like crap because they didn't make any effort to transfer the original art style at all, it's full of bugs and on top of that runs like crap as well despite looking like a complete turd.
Take two didn't care at all about this game and just saw it as an easy cash grab. Why else hire a bottom of the barrel developer that already did a less than steller conversion of the games for mobile?
Take take will have known about the horrible state the games are in and still decided to release it anyway.
I honestly don't see how you can enjoy a game that looks and runs as horrible as this. Sounds more like trying to justify ones purchase.
Re: Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D To Be Temporarily Removed From The 3DS eShop
@ModdedInkling parents and content licenses are two totally different things...
Games like MGS or GTA use licensed content such as videos, music etc. which isn't very surprising given the type of game.
When they did the licensing they probably didn't expect the games to be on sale for such a long time or didn't think it would make financial sense to license the content for a longer initial period.
The only thing you might fault them for is now renewing licenses earlier.
As for Nintendo, given the kind of games they make it's far less likely they'll run into such issues. But who knows, Nintendo might have licenses on content used in their games as well. Maybe Nintendo is just a lot smarter about not letting the licenses lapse hence we don't hear about it.
Re: Talking Point: The Metroid Dread Credits Debate Is Sadly Common
@CharlieGirl Jesus, is there anything people these days won't whine about?
The company has rules as to when you appear in the credits. It is unlikely employees were unaware of this so why whine about it now?
Also good luck crediting everybody that "worked" on the game. So if somebody joins the team, creates half a texture and the leaves that person should be credited? For what? Expecting a reasonable contribution before receiving credit isn't unreasonable. Otherwise you'll have to credit everybody in the whole company.
As for being in the credits being important for future work; I doubt it. If that person did a decent job they'll be able to get a reference so it's a moot point. And it's not like some HR guy is going to check the credits of a game to see if you are actually in there.
Sounds like people here never had a real job. How often does the average office slave get credit for anything?
Re: Scrapped Wii "Bulletin Board Channel" Uncovered In Nintendo Gigaleak
@Clyde_Radcliffe this is a pretty standard look for Japanese software/webpages from that era. Hell in Japan it's not that hard to find software that looks like that in 2021.
Re: Microchip Shortages Potentially Impacting Switch Covered In '60 Minutes' Report
@pixelpatch nonsense. This has nothing to do planned obsolescency.
You want full upgradability? Buy a desktop. Most laptops allow you to change the memory and storage. Making a cpu or gpu upgradable just doesn't make a lot of sense technically, financially and practically. It's even worse for consoles. If if they'd make all parts upgradable, the cost to the consumer would be so high you are better off buying a new 400~500 dollar/Euro box.
But nobody is forcing you to buy new hardware. Your pc/laptop doesn't stop working after 4 years. You could easily use it for much longer. Same goes for a phone or console.
There is nothing preventing you from still playing games on a PS4 or PS3 or whatever. But do you really want to?
For a game console I think not. But a lot of computer hardware easily lasts 5+ years these days. The CPU in my main pc is nearing 8 years old but I can still play new(we) games on it because I did upgrade the gpu. For a lot of people there isn't much need to upgrade. Unfortunately people often buy crappy hardware and then complain they need something new a couple years later... Maybe people should just start buying good hardware to begin with.
Re: Random: Want To Develop For Nintendo Switch? Better Make Sure You're Not A Yakuza, Then
This is pretty much a default inclusion in Japanese contracts.
Re: Video: This Is What Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Looks Like Running At 8K With Ray Tracing Enabled
@Real_Obsi
It doesn't have to be realistic, more processing power can just as much benefit very stylized games.
Anyway 8k doesn't do much for a game that doesn't have an awful lot of detail like breath of the wild.
Ray tracing can be nice but on a game that isn't built around it you can also end up with a lot of scenes that look out of place.
Re: Samsung To "Aggressively Position" OLED Tech In Console Gaming Space
@Thoughts
There are multiple companies producing OLED panels. However LG is the only one that is producing larger panels such as the ones you find in TV's. They bought a patent from Kodak that allows them to use only white oleds with a color filter in front of it unlike the Samsung panels that require RGB oleds. This makes the LG panels a lot cheaper to produce.
But Samsung's process is fine for smaller screens hence they've been producing oled panels for phones since 2013 or something.
Re: Video: Get A Closer Look At Super Nintendo World's Mario Kart: Koopa's Challenge Ride
I've been in the park as part of a pre-opening event. The park itself looks really nice, somehow the materials/paint make it look like the actual games.
The Mario kart ride waiting area is also very nice looking. Maybe even better than the Harry Potter area.
The ride itself is a bit of let down though. It's definitely not a thrill ride. The AR is reasonably well done I'd say but it feels more like a rather average game than a theme park ride. I think it's definitely aimed more at younger kids.
The Yoshi ride is complete rubbish by the way. Not even little kids would enjoy that. Just a very slow and boring 3 minute train ride through three very uninspiring areas.
I get the feeling they really want people the buy the (expensive) wrist bands so you can so all the AR stuff inside the Mario area.
TL;DR area looks great, rides area meh. Hopefully the donkey Kong area will be better.
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@StevenG Unless the TV is buffering how does it know what is ahead? Given the low input lag on oleds I doubt it's buffering the image a few frames at a time.
Anyway I don't notice any smearing. As I said, there isn't a whole lot of content that has a lot of pure blacks in it and without the pixels actually turning off there isn't any smear.
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@Dirty0814 Nonsense. Refresh rates or response times or whatever you want to call it, don't get any more or less noticable depending on the screen size.
Viewing distance ratings are for immersion and aren't really any different for movies or games.
Also you aren't going to notice a difference between 1 and 0.1ms.
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@StevenG cinema bright mode because it's most color accurate. Also turned off all the post processing.
I think there are plenty of IPS TV's. My previous LG was IPS and I believe all non oled LG TVs are IPS.
But blacks still depend a lot on the backlight. On my old tv backlight bleed was very obvious when watching a movie with black bars. Once you see, or rather do not see any backlight bleed on a OLED you don't want to go back.
Yes if you got a LCD with a lot of dimming zones the issue is less obvious but at that price point you might as well get an OLED.
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@StevenG and LCD has fundamentally poor motion handling. And how often do you have a scene that has lots of full blacks? Not that often. I'm playing Super Mario Galaxy on a C9 and can't see I notice anything off.
What I do very much notice is that it looks miles better than any LCD I've seen.
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@AZD1222 I don't think so which is exactly why this rumor makes no sense at all. Similar results can be achieved much easier (and cheaper) by simply switching to a higher brightness LCD panel and replace the tiny battery with a bigger one. There is plenty of space in the chassis...
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@ymax56 I play on a oled TV and it looks amazing. While in theory oled can burn it, it's unlikely to happen at noticable levels with normal usage. Unless all you do is play the same game 8 hours a day and that game happens to have a totally static UI, you shouldn't have to worry about it.
Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report
@StevenG
This is simply not true. Oled has vastly superior response times to LCD. LCD motion is horrible compared to just about anything. Just ask people who switch from plasma to LCD.
Apparently the screendoor effect is less with LCD panels which might be why they are preferred for VR. Price is probably a not unimportant other factor. Doubt custom low volume oled panels come cheap.
Re: Pokémon GO Player Ignores Italy's Coronavirus Lockdown, Tells Police "I Have To Hunt The Pokémon"
Most of the comments are a complete joke. You don't get sick from going outside, you could possibly get sick from being close to somebody that had the virus.
If everybody is staying inside and you are walking outside, you're not going to get sick.
Re: The Nintendo Switch Pro Controller Now Supports Android 10
The title and article make no sense. Nothing has changed on the controller side, it's Android 10 that now has the correct button mappings for the pro controller.
The title should read: Android 10 now supports the pro controller.
Re: Feature: A Guide To Shopping In Japan's Retro Gaming Paradise, Akihabara
@Don
Unless you got hundreds of games it really isn't difficult to store a couple of dozen games even in a small one room apartment.
Re: Feature: Best Nintendo DS Games
Too bad Contact (grasshopper) isn't on there. That was probably my favorite game on the DS.
Re: Sorry Nintendo, But The 3DS Really Is Dead Now
Low quality clickbait article. Pretty much all stores still carry 3ds hardware and software. If it didn't sell, software in particular, then retailers aren't going to waste space on it.
Hardware sales don't matter that much for a system that sold 75million units and has a successor on the market. At some point the market for new units is saturated. But as long as software sales are reasonable nobody (retailers and Nintendo) is going to pull the plug.
Re: Nintendo Moves Switch Manufacturing Out Of China, Two New Models Reportedly In Production
@Freddo
End of the financial year in Japan is in April so that is not it. If any they probably don't want people to hold off for 6 months until the holidays if they really are releasing new models around than.
Re: A Trio Of Classic Resident Evil Games Is Coming To Switch This May
@Edu23XWiiU
You are preordering a download only game. Afraid Capcom is going to run out of bits on release day?...
Re: Talking Point: Come In Nintendo 3DS, Your Time Is Up
Wow, taking the sales of two games and basing the system's future on that...
The 3ds is cheap to produce, cheap to buy, cheap to develop for and has a giant software library. As long as overall software sales are at a sustainable level there is no reason to be so overly dramatic about the system's future.
Re: Yoshi's Crafted World File Size Revealed, Almost 3GB Smaller Than Yoshi's Woolly World On Wii U
@Heavyarms55
@Heavyarms55
How do you come up with this nonsense? It takes time (thus money) to create all those assets. Devs don't do that for fun, it's because games really use it. Large amounts of high quality assets simply take up a lot of space.
Most Nintendo games are fairly simple and reuse a lot of the assets throughout the game. Even a game like BotW doesn't have massive variation in assets or lots of high resolution textures.
On top of that Nintendo games usually have little voice acting or FMV content which helps a lot in keeping size down.
Nintendo isn't doing some kind of magical optimization nor using some kind of super compression others don't. Don't forget that with Switch Nintendo has a financial reason to keep size down as well as carts are very expensive compared to optical media so it only makes sense to keep games as small as possible so they can go with the smallest (cheapest) carts.
Re: Yoshi's Crafted World File Size Revealed, Almost 3GB Smaller Than Yoshi's Woolly World On Wii U
@jcgonzmo
Screen resolution has nothing to do with file size.
Other than that I don't see the point in comparing file size of two different games.
Re: Talking Point: What's Next For Nintendo After Switch?
This article has a really poor technical background.
Why would a 1080p screen be an easy win? Besides that you could argue whether there is much of a perceivable difference between a 6 inch 720p or 1080p screen, Nintendo's problem is power consumption.
They have to clock the SoC way down in handheld mode because otherwise the battery won't last long enough. So slapping a 1080p screen in there isn't going to make any difference.
Reworking the SoC so it can be produced on a smaller, more power efficient process is unlikely as well as the cost most likely won't outweigh the benefits.
Another poor suggestion is that they could do yearly refreshes same as Apple. Difference is Apple sells ~250 million devices a year at premium prices. SoC and product development is very expensive. Apple has the cash for that but even in the best of years a console will struggle to sell 20 million. That simply isn't enough to warrant such investments. Not to mention fragmenting your user base is not a good idea. Consumers won't like it and neither will devs. They have to deal with it on mobile devices but it just doesn't make sense for a dedicated gaming device.
The reality is that there isn't much Nintendo can do at the moment. There isn't anything mobile out there that is going to be close to the next gen consoles making a handheld that can run those games in some form is a pipe dream for the next couple of year so that is one reason a revision with better hardware doesn't make much sense at the moment.
Secondly Nvidia doesn't have anything much better than Tegra either at the moment. Whoever says X2, that by now is a 3 year old chip. Nvidia is heavily invested in the automotive sector so they don't have anything small, cheap and efficient that would work for Nintendo at the moment.
Hopefully Nintendo will keep doing well and then they can commission Nvidia to do a semi-custom chip for a Switch 2.0 that has enough power to run downgraded next gen games 1 ~ 2 years after those consoles are released.
Before that I won't hold out for must of an upgrade on the SoC side. If Nintendo wants to do a refresh it would make much more sense to do things such as a bigger battery or larger screen. Both seem to easily fit in the existing chassis. And OLED screen to decrease battery usage a bit or maybe a glass screen or aluminum body.