Switch 2 Speculation

Like they were when launching the Nintendo DS without texture filtering in 2005 (10 years after the launch of the 3Dfx Voodoo)? And then the 3DS without programmable pixel shaders in 2010 (9 years after the launch of Geforce 3)?

 

yes it worked for them in the past.

I think they are going to have tougher competition in the future if what I've seen goes to market. But i've talked about it before in other posts that are more relevant for it.

 

I really wish Sony or Microsoft would have picked up the mobile console market by now. Nintendo left alone in the handheld console market is such a drag for anyone who just doesn't want to play mario 34 and zelda 28..

At least there are now Tiger Lake and Ryzen 4000 handheld "PC consoles" coming to the general market in 2021 so I guess I'm going that way. The Smach-Z was also a massive letdown as they apparently just hid behind the pandemic to disappear into thin air.
But those will still be >$800 handhelds, they're really not competitors to Nintendo.

 

Does RT matter for Mario?

It might be Metroid and a few other games.

Animal Crossing?

 

DLSS 2 matters a hell a lot more for Nintendo than any RT hardware.

 

5nm ryzen 4/5 with navi 3/4 targeting 4tflops with 12 gigs of ram would make a nice system , add in game pass and you have a great companion system to your xbox series next

A lot of the popularity of the switch comes from playing 3rd party games. It may not seem like it now but in 2022/23 as both ps5 xbox series take over the older consoles and raytracing makes it into $100-$200 gpus will developers want to strip out ray tracing from their games to get them to run on nintendo hardware ? Will they even be able too if the game is designed with ray tracing form the start.

 

Van Gogh is supposedly a Zen2 + RDNA2 SoC with LPDDR5 at 7.5 to 18W coming already this year. No one knows what it's for yet.



It's not the Zen3 Ryzen 5000U/H Cezanne which AMD is expected to announce at CES, and the leaked roadmaps show it in a separate branch from the current CPU and APU lines.

It could be a SoC for a new mobile Xbox or Playstation, but those don't usually appear in the same roadmaps as the CPUs and APUs that AMD sells directly to the customers.
Perhaps we'll know more about it at CES, but with them having to announce at least the mobile Ryzen 5000 and Navi 22 I have a feeling they won't talk about Van Gogh. Meaning any product based on it is probably still many months away.
Hopefully, I'm wrong and this becomes the perfect SoC for a handheld PC console coming in Q2 2021.

 

You may want to look at the hardware specs of Nintendo's last three consoles compared to Microsoft and Sony's offerings. They're not cared about about performance or cutting edge tech for three generations. Wii outsold Xbox 360 and PS3 and Switch has outsold Xbox One despite launching three-and-a-half years later.

 

While that catch-phrase is true overall, the switch had FEATURE parity with ps4one and that was key in making many next gen downports it received viable. We are running in circles here...

 

What's the PC space like in terms of laptops with RT? I'm wondering because although a Switch 2 wouldn't be able to do much ray tracing when portable, perhaps there's scope for it to do so when docked?

Tensor units performing DLSS would be useful in both portable and docked modes.

I think Nintendo would have quite a compelling piece of hardware on their hands if they could manage something like 540p without RT, upscaled to 1080p when portable; 720p with RT upscaled to 1440p when docked.

 

Surface laptop 3 i'd wager

Mobile xbox wouldn't be till 2023 imho

 

But why would Microsoft want a CPU with lower performance than Zen3 Cezanne in their Surface line?
The Surface laptops were never touted as being gaming powerhouses, to justify cutting on the CPU to gain on the GPU.

Van Gogh is basically a low-power PSeries5 derivative (Zen2 + RDNA2), which makes it look like it was designed around the same time frame and for the same purpose (gaming).

 

Surface laptop 3 has a ryzen 5 3680u with a vega 9 or 7 3780u with vega 11


So its a quad core zen+ @ 2.2 to 3.8ghz @ 15 watts / 2.3-4ghz for the 3780u

So how would a zen 2 + rdna 2 apu be cutting on the cpu ?

anyway surface laptop 4 is coming in a matter of weeks(thur maybe) so I"m not a 100% sure on what amd chip it will use or if it will at all

 

Yes of course, Zen2 Van Gogh would always be a substantial CPU upgrade over the Zen+ Picasso that is present in the current 2019 Surface Laptops (those were very late adopters of Picasso APUs..).

What I meant by cutting on CPU performance is relative to their competitors (Lenovo, Dell, Asus, etc.) which will be using Zen3 on Cezanne.
Is Microsoft willing to lose on CPU performance when compared to the other OEMs' laptops?

I also have some doubts over whether or not the volume of the whole Surface line justifies the development of a truly semicustom SoC, let alone the Surface Laptop. The "semicustom" Ryzen 3580/3780U on the Surface Laptop 2019 were just higher binned Picasso SoCs, and even the Vega 11 on the top model had already seen the light of day as the embedded V1807.
OTOH, that Subor console with a custom Zen+Vega+GDDR5 does exist..

 

Its time frame.

When can an oem(microsoft) have van gogh laptops available on store shelves ? When can an oem(microsoft) have Cezanne ?

What road blocks if any exist from launching a van gogh product and later in the year refreshing with Cezanne ?

Microsoft recently refreshed the pro x with new cpus but only at the higher end, the low end still has the older cpus. I don't see a big issue for them doing the same now. Surface for Microsoft is a continual growth market for them. They just introduced another new product late last year the surface laptop go. It would be great if Cezanne would be ready for a January product but i kinda doubt it

On the flip side I don't think van gogh would make a good mobile companion to the series consoles. I think by the time MS is ready to launch a hand held we are looking earliest 2022 and we will have 5nm apus with rdna 3 and newer zen cores avalible that should be more efficent and offer a better experiance.

 

Why enter an unwinnable territory when they already have xcloud available for every android mobile without any additional cost?
And why are we talking about microsoft's handheld on the Switch U thread?

 

its hard to talk about a rumored switch 2 without talking about the market at large and what other plays may be out there.

As for a dedicated hardware vs xcloud . People still want dedicated hardware for gaming. I know when I fly for work or take the train to the office I don't reach for my phone to play xcloud. I reach for my switch or i bring my pie retro handheld depending on the mood I am in that day. I do this for multiple reasons.
1) I don't want to kill my phone battery
2) My signal is not always 100% . At some points i go under the Hudson River and I don't expect to keep a stable connection. Even traveling at train speeds sometimes will cause issues with tower switching
3) often times a dedicated device feels better in the hand.

 

I agree with your observations about the Switch 2/U needing to be compared to the market. I definitely agree about not burning the phone battery. I disagree about what defines the market for those intending to buy a Switch or something like it.

I've done train and bus for years throughout school and elsewhere, for routine transport (usually over 40min each way). I had a load of anecdotes for various transit systems in various cities around the world that I have lived in, but I deleted them all in favor of my generalized observations:

I think the mobility of the Switch isn't to overcome boredom on a train - with the types of console games out there, missing a stop can be somewhat serious. Many transit riders probably need bite sized games more than we need JRPGs with cutscenes, MMOs, SP/MP FPS, ARPG grinds, etc.

Small games work reasonably well on mixed multimedia devices with large-ish displays (modern phone).

Among my friends, coworkers, and former classmates, a portable console is more about bringing a console to meet up somewhere, or play in/at a place of convenience. Public transit is just neither of those things.

Finally, my opinion:
Adding more general purpose capabilities to a portable console would result in a poor cell phone/tablet that isn't of great value vs the yearly flagship/midrange iterations.

 

The switch has a slew of games ranging form bite size to epic. The great thing about the switch is every game can be paused and resumed later. I played BOTW on the train and never had an issue missing my stop. Of course its kinda impossible to miss mine since its the last stop before turning around. The thing is there are people out there that may not be able to afford a switch + home console. So for many it pulled double duty.

The problem with my phone is 1) no physical buttons for gaming. 2) battery life. I have a note 9 right now and a duo. When playing higher end games natively on the phone it kills my battery. My commute would easily drain my battery down to 20-30% on the way into work. So i'd need to charge it once I'm at work and then on hte way home i repeat the cycle. So now i'm constantly charging and draining the battery over and over again on my phone. My note 9 is 3 years old now and the battery still holds up because I'm not doing that.

I use my switch to play games with my nieces and nephews but I don't really game in groups outside of that.

I don't think that a company would want to add more general purpose capabilities to a portable system. I wouldn't want that in a playstation portable or xbox portable or the switch with the exception of an lte /5g option for mobile gaming. What I would love is a portable console that can play my pc games and console games on the go and offer a comparable on the go experiance.

I never got that on the switch. Doom 2016 while a technical feat on the switch was a horrible experience and games like outer limits were also really bad. So if MS came out with an xboy and i could play my xbox ecosystem games on it and better yet just play all my game pass games on it or Sony doing the same with ps+ to me and I am sure countless others that would be a major game changer.

The switch is a weird half step of a console that doesn't really do mobile gaming great ( mine gets like 2h30 minutes and its super low resolution in 2020/1) and of course its bulky for the screen size. It also isn't a great home console because its of course limited to what it can output on the tv by the size of its portable form factor.

So Sony and MS who both have new home consoles wouldn't need to design their portable to work in a dock. They could simply make the distinction that this other product is for gaming on the go

 

Thinking about it the xboy could play xbox one gen games natively and stream the series version of games if you wanted to play those games.

Also with the need to switch in and out of games quickly xbox has you covered with quick resume!