Nintendo Switch Tech Speculation discussion

[Clukos]

Nintendo hardware is solid and reliable. Nintendo do not prioritise performance hardware and there is zero evidence high performance hardware is what customers want. It's why PS4 Pro is not outselling PS4. It's why 1080 cards do not outsell 1070 cards. Good enough is literally good enough!

WiiU didn't fail because the hardware was weak, it failed because nobody had any fucking idea what it was supposed to be. Nintendo, included!

But hardware being weak has a immediate effect on the games available for the system. That's definitely one reason third parties didn't spend time (and money) porting games from X1/Ps4 to WIi U and it's not that outlandish to say the same may happen to Switch as well. Come fall/holidays, RDR 2 is out, new COD, potentially new Assassin's Creed, Destiny 2, Battlefront 2 how many of those big name games will be ported to the Switch? That is important for consumers looking to buy the Switch as a console and not as a complimentary piece of hardware.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

But hardware being weak has a immediate effect on the games available for the system.

Play Zelda Breath of the Wild and tell me that game is compromised due to Switch's / Wiiu's hardware. BoTW has flaws with some mechanics and design but definitely not due to the hardware's performance.

 

[Clukos]

Play Zelda Breath of the Wild and tell me that game is compromised due to Switch's / Wiiu's hardware. BoTW has flaws with some mechanics and design but definitely not due to the hardware's performance.

I'm not saying Nintendo games can't be great on their own. That happened to Wii U as well, the system has a great game library. What I'm saying is that when you have to target multiple systems and one is so far out power wise you either have to spend significant resources to develop a port separately or just ditch that version all together. First party support is guaranteed to be A+ quality like the Wii U had, I'm not questioning that.

 

[bunnybug]

Cost and time, basically.

No customisation potentially saves hundreds of millions of dollars. Even minor customisation requires chip layout and validation , hardware debugging, re-spins etc. Older IP is cheaper, older process (like 20nm) is cheaper, no R&D needed on the chip at all ... no point dropping half a billion dollars when you don't think it'll help your USP much. Nintendo have better things to spend that money on.

Also removes some uncertainty very early on, which Nintendo have always been keen on.

As said a few months back, custom could me anything, the down clocks to make it run in handheld and docked technically make it custom. credit to eurogamer, they gave us the specs a long time ago, never understood the people that wanted to ignore there info.

 

[Goodtwin]

How many times did people bring up the concept with Wii U that Nintendo should have used (insert stock processor model) instead of the custom AMD GPU and custom PPC CPU? That was a very common argument. The Tegra X1 meets pretty much all the requirements Nintendo prioritizes with their hardware, and saved loads of money they would have spent on something custom, that most likely would have been very similar to a Tegra X1 anyway. As soon as the Chinese pictures popped up showing a 64 bit memory bus, I had no doubt left that it was a stock Tegra X1.

That's disappointing (stock X1). But I guess that should be a given, Nintendo doesn't give a damn about h/w. At least, they should be making a nice change for each unit sold, the Switch isn't all that different from a Shield and that goes for $199.

Yes, it has the same processor, but the Shield TV is missing a screen, battery, HD rumble, IR camera, motion controls, and the dock. Switch has 32GB of memory instead of 16GB, and 4GB of ram instead of 3GB. Its not hard to start adding up the cost of this tech, and the jump from a $199 Shield TV and a $299 Switch isn't hard to make sense of.

Nintendo hardware is solid and reliable. Nintendo do not prioritise performance hardware and there is zero evidence high performance hardware is what customers want. It's why PS4 Pro is not outselling PS4. It's why 1080 cards do not outsell 1070 cards. Good enough is literally good enough!

WiiU didn't fail because the hardware was weak, it failed because nobody had any fucking idea what it was supposed to be. Nintendo, included!

Exactly! Its hilarious how unimportant these things are to your average consumer. If high end graphics were the end all be all, PC's would have taken over the gaming world by now, and that obviously hasn't happed. We also saw the PS2 absolutely destroy the more powerful Xbox. Wii trounced the PS3 and 360. Even currently, the Xbox One was able to sell an "inferior" product to 30 million people, and is about 35% less powerful than PS4. Wii U failed because of terrible messaging and a lack of compelling software at launch.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

This isn't the first time I've heard this. Is Unity themselves doing anything about it? I mean because while I am Setsuna is a nice looking game, it's pretty much PS2/Wii era visuals. Sounds like Unity needs to get their shit together. XD

A question I had for you guys. It was said that an enhanced performance mode was added for handheld configuration. Basically it clocks up one part and clocks down another. Could they do that sort of thing for the console configuration as well? Because some games will be more CPU heavy, but less GPU heavy and vise versa. I know the Switch was clocked down due to battery life and to keep the system from throttling like the shield does, but could they let devs trade one thing for another?

Unity is much like Unreal Engine, in its base form it's not terribly well optimized for all situations. When development time is put into optimizing the engine for the game, performance can be great just like Unreal Engine. When development time isn't put into optimizing the engine for the game, performance can be atrocious. Both engines can scale from mobile to high end PCs.

All you have to do is look at the low budget development efforts on both Unity and Unreal Engine on PC. Performance for the level of graphics delivered is bad, sometimes atrociously bad. You see indie games marketed using Unreal Engine 4 try to drum up sales. But performance and graphics of the game ends up being really really bad. The same goes for Unity.

Likewise, you can find some very well optimized Unity games (Oni and the Blind Forest is a prime example of a well optimized Unity game). The problem here is that most AAA developer use Unreal Engine. And AAA devs can typically afford to spend a lot of time optimizing the engine for their particular game. The same cannot be said for Unity. The developers using Unity are dominated far more by smaller indie developers who don't usually have the time or resources to properly optimize the engine.

BTW - all this also applies to CryEngine (which doesn't target mobile devices AFAIK), except CryEngine has a smaller pool of developers than either UE or Unity. But just like UE and Unity, a well optimized game using CE runs very well, while a not so well optimized game runs like arse.

TL: DR - Unity, UE, and CE all run like arse if not properly optimized for the game and platform. Not all developers have the time, knowledge, or resources to properly optimize their game.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

Actual hardware details here: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...a57-4-cortex-a53-gm20b-maxell-gpu-core.59968/

I don't see the need to continue the speculation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

TL: DR - Unity, UE, and CE all run like arse if not properly optimized for the game and platform. Not all developers have the time, knowledge, or resources to properly optimize their game.

I don't know how much 'optimise' is the right term. Some of it is a case of the engines being unforgiving for poor code. Worst I've seen is The Heist on PS4. If you take over a half dozen drones, framerate can drop to <20 fps. Clearly the AI on that is doing rubbish tests and path finding and is far, far, far from optimal. However, on a decent PC it probably doesn't show up, and if it could be shunted onto a separate core on consoles automagically by the engine, would be more forgiving.

I suppose it is optimisation, although I tend to think of that as fairly specific platform tweaks, like platform specific shaders (which are possible but starts taking you outside the realm of why Unity is used in the first place ).