Nintendo Switch Uses Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC, Clock Speeds Outed (arstechnica.com) 105
The Nintendo Switch -- the hybrid portable games console/tablet due for release in March 2017 -- will be powered by Nvidia's older Tegra X1 SoC and not its upcoming Tegra X2 "Parker" SoC as initially rumored. From a report on ArsTechnica: The use of Tegra X1, which also powers the Nvidia Shield Android TV, means the graphics hardware inside the Switch is based on Nvidia's older second-generation Maxwell architecture, rather than the latest Pascal architecture. While the two architectures share a very similar design, the Switch will miss out on some of the smaller performance improvements made in Pascal. When docked, the Switch's GPU runs at a 768MHz, already lower than the 1GHz of the Shield Android TV. When used as a portable, the Switch downclocks the GPU to 307.2MHz -- just 40 percent of the clock speed when docked. Given the Switch is highly likely to use a 720p screen rather than 1080p -- this is currently assumed to be a 6.2-inch IPS LCD with 10-point multi-touch support -- there is some overhead to run games at 1080p when docked. However, it's questionable how many developers will go to the effort of creating games that make use of the extra horsepower when docked, rather than simply opting to program for the slower overall GPU clock speed. While GPU performance is variable, the rest of the Switch's specs remain static. Its four ARM A57 CPU cores are purported to run at 1020MHz regardless of whether the console is docked or undocked, while the memory controller can run at either 1600MHz or 1331MHz in either mode.
Slower than a smartphone? (Score:3)
We have locked up our IP so fans will buy even wit (Score:2)
We have locked up our IP so fans will buy even with sub par video.
Just hope that any games that get ported are not dumbed down on other systems as well. And that games on other systems are not cut down to run on this POS.
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To paraphrase "It's the content, not the graphics, stupid!"
There have been lots of great looking, super shiny games that were absolutely terrible. And there are lots of games with less than stellar graphics that are absolute blasts to play. Not every game needs to look ultra realistic. For that matter, do you WANT some of Nintendo's IP to look ultra realistic?
http://www.mariomayhem.com/bowsers_blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/real-mario-face.jpg
How about no?
I definitely understand that it's good to have th
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Nintendo can't rely on Mario to save their asses every time they release a crap console. If they'd called this the GameBoy Pro or something, its specs would be pretty decent. As a living room game console, however, it's pathetic.
As for your graphics comparison, you know what looks like absolute crap every single time on a 1080P TV bigger than 20 inches? Anything Nintendo produces. Now hook it up to a 4K TV and really appreciate the suck.
Nintendo needs to grow up and let their hardware and IP grow up too
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Plus every time Nintendo gimps their hardware like this all they do is chase off third party support. Why should a third party give a rats ass about a Nintendo console when their 1080P 60FPS game that works great on PC, PS4, and XBone has to have its visuals slashed in half or further and needs a ton of other adjustments just to run on Nintendo's offering?
The only way they get third party support is if they get a large install base, but without hefty third party support getting that install base is nigh im
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But this isn't Atari 2600 graphics.... It's a Tegra X1, which was quite frankly beating the piss out of cheap Intel onboard graphics in desktops the same year it was released. Nintendo's consoles also cost considerably less than the competition and part of that is the price of the hardware because they use mature hardware that can be had cheap instead of bleeding edge tech that they'll pay a prince's ransom on and maybe even lose money on each console sold until the tech moves lower in the food chain, lik
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I'm probably in the minority, but my opinion is that the Wii is plenty powerful for fun and visually pleasing games. For that matter, so is the PS2. The focus here isn't on raw horsepower, but providing a new gimmick: being both portable and stationary. The majority of people don't care about technical specs, they just want to play games on the device they have. Having a consistent platform is good for developers because you don't have to factor in 100 different iOS configurations of 1000 different Android
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Enough people (from Nintendo's perspective) buy 3ds's to supplement their mobiles, because their mobiles don't run the big Nintendo exclusives. So it's fair to say enough people will buy these too, unless the Nintendo Run trend picks up a fair share of market (it needs that Android version out to be proven true first though).
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I would too. 2 screens are better than one and the DS and Wii U should be proof of that (even if the former didn't sell as much). Nintendo is going backwards, and worse, it's probably gonna kill it's portable market by committing to a portable that can "talk" to a TV but brings nothing new other than the larger screen and a wireless controller. Imagine a world where Nintendo releases a dedicated portable (the 3DS replacement) alongside the Switch - one won't make sense with the other by then, and it is know
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I would like to see the next DS be a one-screen behemoth with some form of emulating two screens, to kill the stupid two-screen mandatory widget everyone uses whether it's appropriate or not simply because having one black screen is apparently terrible (except on Wii U, since nobody looks at the tablet thing anyway, so it often goes unused).
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A number of games I primarily use the "tablet thing" WiiU controller Anything to do with Zelda uses it quite a lot. Hyrule Warriors I play on that screen while one of my kids plays on the big screen. Smash Brothers obviously has some advantages for either. This is to say nothing of the games that we play on that screen exclusively when someone is using the big screen for something else.
Basically, it depends on the game and your configuration.
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Remember, Nintendo is the company STILL calling the upgraded 3DS the "Nintendo NEW 3DS" after it's been out over a year now.....
In that case though, "New" is part of the name (even if it wasn't, it would have to be treated as such by this point). Whether or not one thinks that was a sensible decision (#), it's nothing that can be changed now without causing major confusion.
If they'd called it the "New Nintendo 3DS Super" (or whatever), they could have dropped the "New". But the way it stands, they couldn't do that without causing major confusion between the not-so-new "Nintendo 3DS" and the original "Nintendo 3DS"... so, no.
(#)
Re: Slower than a smartphone? (Score:2)
Consoles are pretty much dead in Japan, especially for casual gaming which is Nintendo's main demographic. Niche and indie games for hardcore players also mostly moved to portable and PC due to lower developments costs and better financing schemes.
Finally trends suggest consoles will die out in the West too.
Portable games still suffer from having the reputation of being cheap knock-offs and not proper games among more serious players, so fusing the two is a pretty smart move to ensure they can present a leg
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Enough people (from Nintendo's perspective) buy 3ds's to supplement their mobiles, because their mobiles don't run the big Nintendo exclusives.
That and mobile devices have no standardized, physical controls.
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While you and I agree you don't need fancy graphics for a fun game as a game dev having more horsepower is definitely appreciated as you start doing more physics simulations on the GPU.
Unfortunately consumers not upgrading their consoles doesn't fit into the business model of Microsoft and Sony who want to continue hawking the latest shiny unto consumers so you can buy last years game on new hardware. Nintendo is dragged into by consumers who "jump ship". It becomes an arms race of trying to beat the comp
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Mobile gaming tablet with a TV dock (Score:2)
We've known for some time that the guts would be Tegra based and we saw the promotional video that sells us the idea that this is meant to be mobile first. Looking at the list of partners they have on board at least one is a telecom provider (Web Technology Corp, aka Vodafone) another is a well known mobile eCommerce portal (DeNA). This is Nintendo creeping into the smartphone market.
What we have here is a 6" gaming tablet, how much of the mobile parts will make it intact to North American / European market
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Remember smartphone programmers build hogs, Nintendo programmers will optimize and actually use that hardware, I dont think anyone else is doing that. Tegra x1 seems like a pretty robust piece of hardware.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/04/heres-how-nvidias-new-tegra-x1-stacks-up-to-the-k1-and-apple-a8x-on-paper/
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You do remember smartphones are usually sold with a contract, right?
Without a contract, a standalone iPhone 7 (not Plus, no controllers, no HDMI output, no docking station and certainly no Zelda) today goes for a whopping $649- [mashable.com] Hardly the amount Nintendo would ask for any piece of hardware.
At Nintendo's traditional target of around $300, this is actually a fairly good deal.
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While running ports that don't use the OGL 4.5 extra features, extra memory available on the system and well actually use Open GL probably via a wine-like wrapper for DirectX instead of a low latency API like the one found on the Xbox 360 yes.
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It's not comparable to an smartphone because it can use a low level API that have access to all the Open GL 4.5 level shader commands etc available on the maxwell cores, while smartphones are crippled hard by the Open GL ES 2.0 API, that don't allow even some common Open GL 2.1 features like floating point textures.
So even if a smartphone is theorically faster, it still can't do the same things, like running the full profile UE4 engine.
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You just have to revise "reason
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Really depends on which games you liked in the SNES era. If you liked the first-party titles, much of what you like is still alive in new forms today - and the Switch will be perfect for that. Those games were all about gameplay, but never were about immersive storylines (that would then require fancy graphics). If you liked 3rd-party titles at the time, most of those work better on more powerful consoles.
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Generally agree with you, but don't believe that immersive storylines require fancy graphics.
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immersive storylines require fancy graphics.
Depends on how lazy your storytelling ability is. I do agree with you, but if the same publishers during that generation were doing the same games now but with the more powerful hardware, I'm sure of what they would choose to do.
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I think of the PC CD-ROM era, when all you had was VGA (on VLB or PCI bus), Sound Blaster, 2x CDROM. There were immersive stories with that, esp. when there was full voice acting, and the sound was still uncompressed because that's all you could afford (but a lot of 8bit 11KHz, just with no mp3/ogg/aac artifacts)
For the time though, those were fancy graphics!
But with those supposedly low specs ($1000/$2000 of desktop computer hardware) you had e.g. high value hand drawn graphics, professional voice acting a
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If you liked the third party games of the snes era, you're pretty much hosed, because not only all characters of that era are pretty much dead, as the focus on making a good gameplay by itself is dead.
wiggle room to update hardware (Score:2)
If they're encouraging developers to account for different clock speeds from the start, sounds like they're leaving themselves wiggle room to maybe update the hardware in the future, although they can't get too crazy unless they use an abstract enough api for graphics (Vulkan hopefully). Console developers won't like it, but it might be the only way this thing can survive against phones
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If it's 720p vs 1080p with AA, then the wiggle room might just be to handle the higher resolution.
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Yes and no.
Increasing the clock speed or the number of cores will demand more power but this can be counteracted by using a more efficient architecture or smaller transistors.
Newer hardware is typically more efficient and can be better without needing more power.
This is... quite underwhelming (Score:1)
Those specs put the Switch at the same ballpark performance level of a WiiU. It fares well if you consider the portable space, but those are still below average specs compared to recent Android and iOS tablets. Even docked, a fricking iPad has more gaming performance than this. Nintendo always releases underwhelming hardware, but considering the WiiU was already outdated on release, this time they really have outdone themselves.
Sure, sure, graphics are not important, etc. But the thing is, you can forget it
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Comparing Gflops like that is not very wise.
The only instance of the system actually running we had (the jimmy fallon show) actually shows it outperforming the WiiU quite easily by delivering a solid 30 frames per second performance, while WiiU is full of hitches and drops under 20 fps on any sort of onscreen explosion, while the switch don't drop a single frame on those.
Of course, could be that the game in general is more optimized if compared to the last build we seen on WiiU, and also you can't see how f
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The only instance of the system actually running we had (the jimmy fallon show) actually shows it outperforming the WiiU quite easily by delivering a solid 30 frames per second performance,
Wow, a whole 30 fps? Is it 1996 already?
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Yet PS4 seems to struggle to get to this magical frame rate, while WiiU have most of its first party titles running at 60 fps.
Novelty Kills Nintendo Again (Score:3)
it's questionable how many developers will go to the effort of creating games that make use of the extra horsepower when docked, rather than simply opting to program for the slower overall GPU clock speed
This. A thousand times this. No developer in their right mind is going to program a game that doesn't run properly on the portable. The downscaling of the portable is just too profound. 40% clocks? So the console will suffer from portablitis (similar to how PC games suffer consolitis).
If they then kill the portable line (currently 3DS) in preference to Switch, they may well kill both their portable and console markets with one stone. I know they have a NIH ("Not Invented Here") culture, and this has resulted in some excellent and novel gaming (thinking Wii here), but this new console seems strategically unsound.
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If the screen is indeed 720P, that's 44% of pixels of 1080P. So down-clocking the GPU by 40% seems fine to me.
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That second bit though, I don't buy that. A game targeted at consoles might not put effort into taking advantage of everything that a fancy PC has to offer, but unless they have some special relationship with the console maker they have no reason to deliberately make their game look worse
Scaling down is built in for any modern 3D API (Score:2)
Every current game on the market includes sliders to set the graphics quality so that it can be played on a wide variety of systems.
It is a non-issue to have 2 settings: docked, undocked.
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720p is about 44% the pixels of 1080p. 40% the GPU clock to generate just 720P rather than generating 1080P for external display and then also downscaling it to 720p sounds reasonable.
Ever seen settings on a PC game? (Score:2)
A console with 2 modes is nothing compared to a PC game's options.
Haven't you ever played with PC game options? Lowering the resolution has always helped FPS greatly but with newer GPU features it does not help as much. Many of the newer time consuming GPU features you can simply TURN OFF.
I would expect a Nintendo engineer who has a history of extracting performance from hardware estimated just what the needs are for THEIR game engine at 720p with some features like AA turned off. Plus the depth rendering
Disappointing (Score:2)
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I suppose they dont, just like the Wii U, Wii...
Does anyone else get the feeling... (Score:2)
...that Nintendo product planning meetings usually include a deliverable about "How do we make this not that great and then fail". Consider that Nintendo execs tried numerous times to kill off the motion controller for the Wii as it was expensive. Had they succeeded we'd be looking back at the SNES as the most recent success after failures by the N64, Gamecube, Wii, and Wii-U. Anyone else get the feeling that these folks couldn't find their own ass with both hands?
This device looks like it'll perform mor
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. LOL. Nintendo sold 13 million Wii consoles (at a profit), and prints money with the DS, at 154 million units sold. And I am not even bringing Pokemon into this, or the fact that people are lining up outside of stores for the NES classic. I promise, Nintendo is doing fine, as will this new console.
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LOL. Reading is fundamental, as is remaining on topic. The DS isn't a console. I noted the Wii as the only success since the SNES. The nintendo64, Gamecube and Wii-U all sold so badly I'm quite sure they didn't cover R&D costs.
People aren't lining up to buy the NES classic, resellers bought them up to resell on ebay and craigslist. There'll be thousands of them returned in January when they don't sell. And nobody has any visibility as to how many sold in the first place.
I bought every Nintendo con
VR (Score:4, Interesting)
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Talk to me about "VR" when we have holodecks or at least holographic projectors, wearing a smartphone on my face is not a "VR" that I'm interested in.....
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In other words, a small market. Flight, racing and space sims are a tiny bit of the gaming market these days.
And sales have pretty much borne it out - after strong starts, sales have petered
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The Switch should be able to do basically the same thi
Let the trolling begin... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just means that Nintendo hasn't changed it's strategy.
Just to let people who didn't look into it know: nVidia Shield TV - powered by the same SoC - has games like Half-Life 2, Portal 2 and Borderlands 2.
That's running Android, not an OS dedicated for games alone, though I'm not sure how much better things would be in a Nintendo proprietary OS. You usually have some gains there though.
Yes, it's not up to latest gaming standards, but it'll be powerful enough... a big step from the 3DS which seems to be the target anyways.
The move also makes sense if Nintendo is gonna keep prices down in comparison to the competition, and if the screen is at 720p it'll be better for power savings. I have no qualms with having older specs if that means I can actually use the thing for some hours rather than minutes as a portable device.
In any case, I see that every time some spec gets released Nintendo haters jump at the opportunity to criticize the company... like all previous Nintendo hardware releases, there always seems to be these opportunistic trolls that keeps repeating the same crap over and over again.
I'm not saying the Switch will be great, but how about we wait and see? None of the consoles and portables Nintendo made in the past decade or so were as powerful as competition offerings, yet at least part of them sold multiple times over the competition. Nintendo has repeatedly said in official statements that specs are not their priority. Putting the latest untested tech into new consoles also means there's not enough time to properly test things, that the price will have to go up, and that developers will have to deal with unknown variables that could end up delaying games and all.
If you don't like the strategy, just stay away from it. Nintendo does not need to be another Sony or Microsoft. Vita had plenty impressive specs when it came out, and we all know where that went. For all the crap people gave about Wii and Wii U specs, both consoles had great games even if the former failed to sell. 3DS, which has pretty poor specs for todays' standard, is still selling plenty well 5 years after it's release, with new games coming every month, which is usually more than all other consoles and portables put together... and the Vita trampled over it specs wise back when it was released, remember?
So yeah, let's keep things in perspective here. Is it a bummer that it's not using Tegra X2 and the latest tech? Sure. It'd be awesome to have some more recent titles running smoothly on the Switch, I agree. Some ports either won't happen or will have to be toned down to low settings to work. Things won't be all that different from the relationship between Vita and PS3/PS4.
That doesn't mean, and it never meant though that there won't be great games on it - which is what's most important for a portable/console system anyways. Did the DS or 3DS failed for not having specs on the same level as console counterparts?
Gameplay is all that matter (Score:1)
Success = Battery Life (Score:1)