Fox Mulder
Member
And itll certainly be less than 3 hours of battery life depending on what you're doing.
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Laura Dale: NX battery 3 hours max on dev kit, dock improves performance, touchscreen
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And itll certainly be less than 3 hours of battery life depending on what you're doing.
SinCityAssassin
Member
I do wonder what game the Ubisoft dev was using the battery up for.
primasaurus
Member
Sounds about right, my iPad playing graphically demanding games will get about that
SinCityAssassin
Member
The possible total play time is mostly the issue here. I don't plan on playing on handhelds for long travels without SOME sort of power source anyways. And we can confirm you could charge it on the go.
My question is how long the thing lasts if you realistically just put it in sleep mode for most of your travels. I can't see anyone seriously thinking they want to play a game for 3 hours straight outside without any source of power.
Fulminator
Member
3 hours is pretty bad yeah...
i wonder if it will be able to be hooked up to a usb powerbank or something?
or maybe nintendo will make something proprietary like that
i wonder if it will be able to be hooked up to a usb powerbank or something?
or maybe nintendo will make something proprietary like that
callhitman
Member
it will have a separate charger to take with you on the go obviously. If it's three hours full on gaming that's not bad. Most people will be fine with 3 hours. My bet it will be closed to 4 hrs but nintendo will say 5.
3 hrs. would be close to iPad battery life playing a graphically intensive game. All the modern iPads have higher res screens, though.
8-Bit Sunset
Banned
Hope my flights are not over 3 hours then, or I'm left twiddling my thumbs 
Or playing on my Ipad ¯\_(ツ_/¯
There could always be battery packs etc.. though...
History repeating....♫
Or playing on my Ipad ¯\_(ツ
_/¯There could always be battery packs etc.. though...
History repeating....♫
Hope my flights are not over 3 hours then, or I'm left twiddling my thumbs
Or playing on my Ipad ¯_(ツ
There could always be battery packs etc.. though...
History repeating....
You would have another option. You could probably play smaller 3DS-like experiences, like Picross, and get substantially better battery life.
8-Bit Sunset
Banned
But isnt that going against the whole point of the Switch?
Enjoy all these new games, as long as you are going for a quick drive to the shops and back. Or play older games on longer trips?
Actually that doesn't sound so bad.
Still far from ideal though!
Yeah this sounds like the smart thing to do.
Waiting will be tough however!
BladeoftheImmortal
Member
Pretty much what I expected. My New 3ds lasts about that long.
I think I'll be waiting for a Nintendo Switch revision before I jump in. I waited for the Pro of PS4 till I jump in to ps4, so may as well wait for the better version of this down the line.
I think I'll be waiting for a Nintendo Switch revision before I jump in. I waited for the Pro of PS4 till I jump in to ps4, so may as well wait for the better version of this down the line.
Nostremitus
Member
So about like the OG 3DS? ...assuming the retail version gets an hour or so more with power saving options.
Another thing to consider is that Nintendo is consolidating their dev studios, but that doesn't mean that all of those studios are going to be making graphically-intensive 3D games. Neither will many of the indies and smaller 3rd-party devs who are sure to jump on board.
This means that the system will most likely have both types of games, and indeed might get fans of one type to actually be exposed to the other, which I am sure is something they have considered purely from a marketing perspective.
But the bottom line here is that there are, as others above have said, likely to be games that drain the battery much, much less than an Ubisoft game, as their games tend to be fairly (to very) graphically-intensive.
If you think about it, the market for simpler games that are made to be picked up and played for shorter periods on the go might be very attractive, because developers who target that kind of game will be on the same device that dedicated home gamers already own. And vice-versa. Kind of a built-in opportunity for the two markets.
This means that the system will most likely have both types of games, and indeed might get fans of one type to actually be exposed to the other, which I am sure is something they have considered purely from a marketing perspective.
But the bottom line here is that there are, as others above have said, likely to be games that drain the battery much, much less than an Ubisoft game, as their games tend to be fairly (to very) graphically-intensive.
If you think about it, the market for simpler games that are made to be picked up and played for shorter periods on the go might be very attractive, because developers who target that kind of game will be on the same device that dedicated home gamers already own. And vice-versa. Kind of a built-in opportunity for the two markets.
This was entirely expected if you were following the language "home console first and foremost" and have experienced the dismal battery of the Wii U gamepad and the entire 3DS series.
I know this is all devkit stuff, things may improve, but I would not expect much improvement.
I do believe that, due to performance disparity, the handheld aspect of the Switch will hold back the full potential of the games running in console mode.
Keep your expectations in check. I'm not saying you should be ready for doom and gloom, I just think it's important to maintain critical thinking until the hardware is out.
GhostTrick
Banned
The interesting thing will be if there's a battery pack to make it think it is docked and run at full speed.
coughlanio
Member
Considering Dev Kits have plenty of extra features on board, and judging by the leaked Dev Kit, it essentially has the dock built in, and maybe have extra ram and runs at a higher frequency 'docked' mode.
Nvidia are pretty decent when it comes to Tegra battery life, I'd easily expect 4-5 hours or more on this thing.
Nvidia are pretty decent when it comes to Tegra battery life, I'd easily expect 4-5 hours or more on this thing.
coughlanio
Member
I would bet that as soon as the tablet thinks it's docked it will go black and route the video signal to the dock HDMI. Part of me thinks the dock has an active cooling component that is required when running at the higher frequency.
3rd party/1st party battery packs will most likely be available (like with 3ds) and ofc this wasn't going to have great battery life. Do you see the games being played on it? At that resolution? on a handheld of that size? If you really need 3+ hours to game on the go, your most likely going to bring a charger anyway :/
SinCityAssassin
Member
Are you playing a console game for 3 hours straight while going to the shop for a quick run? No.
Are you gonna pick up food from a restaurant, but there's a long wait time so you just sit down, put on your earbuds and play your console game for like 15 minutes, half an hour while you wait? There you go.
Are you gonna be at a park BBQ and you're gonna be there for a few hours, are you gonna play a console game for all those hours and just ignore everyone? Or will you just pass the time with it for maybe under an hour when the BBQ party is on full swing and you don't feel like talking for a bit?
That's pretty specific.
4-5 on low brightness+gaming is more likely, probably more with wi-fi off.
I wouldn't expect much more than that short of Nintendo becoming wizards (or really rich for inventing new battery technology).
I'm curious what its stand-by/sleep lifetime will be but we likely won't know for a while.
It's not a matter of how much you'll actually be playing, it's about not having to worry being out of juice for your next short gaming session. Most people don't actually need a phone that can last more than 12 hours, but we like to have the reassurance that it'll last us through the day even in heavy usage.
AmyS said:
Ahh bummer. When I saw the OP's title, I thought maybe it was sort of an SCD.
If anything then, it sounds like the dock would allow Switch's Tegra SoC to run at its full clockspeed, whereas on the go the clockspeed is lower to save on power.
That would be good enough. I expect a pretty robust standby mode to make up for the shorter battery life. Maybe that's where cloud saves would come into the picture as well.
CrunchyFrog
Member
Disgusting.gif
Battery tech needs to catch up to the rest of the industry ASAP. Or they need to just man up and put a bigger one in there. It should be at LEAST 5 hours minimum.
Battery tech needs to catch up to the rest of the industry ASAP. Or they need to just man up and put a bigger one in there. It should be at LEAST 5 hours minimum.
SinCityAssassin
Member
I'm using the exact scenarios I keep seeing being brought up in this topic. Apparently it's common enough to mention.
But yes I want to know the standby capabilities.
8-Bit Sunset
Banned
Err... bit too much info there.
Lol, I know right?
We lead different lives, and have different expectations. I travel a lot and 5 hours would have been perfect (I know that's probably asking too much) This would be more for my kids who would be stuck in the back seat so the battery life is less than ideal. Especially if we are traveling by plane.
At social events I would not bring a game of any sort, as that defeats the purpose of going there, does it not? : /
primasaurus
Member
Try playing UR4 games on that phone, then see how long it go's
A Pascal based Tegra chip with active cooling should still be capable of some high clock speeds. And that's just the handheld alone, then you have the dock, which will allow better cooling. Nintendo also don't have to worry about battery while docked, allowing them to push the hardware without those limitations. In this sonario, the system totally has the posiblity to reach respectable power, especially for the type of system it is. At the end of the day though, it's down to what Nintendo decide to do and we're just gonna have to wait to find out the details. Hopefully Nintendo will be more open with the specs this time around. I can see it happening, as Nintendo is doing so much different with this system, and Nvidia might want to brag.
Still, even the most optimistic scenarios don't put Switch even close to Xbox One.
BackBackPunch
Member
I have a Nexus 9 tablet (which has a high-end Nvidia Tegra), and it lasts about 3 hours if I'm pushing it to the limit. I'm not really surprised by the battery life rumors...
SinCityAssassin
Member
These scenarios were mentioned by people in this thread as a reason why it sucks that the battery is 3 hours long. I said them in order to make people know how absurd it is to put it that way when in reality you're not gonna spend a few hours on a game console at an outing. And if you're gonna use it on a long flight, charge it on the plane. It charges without the dock, go figure.
Immaculate
Banned
>>portability central to concept of console
>>maximum battery life of three hours
lmaooo
That would require doubling the battery size, which makes the unit thinker and heavier, which still restricts portability. The only way to make it truly portable is to reduce the performance to something in-between Vita and Wii U so they can drop the fan, which also means either more battery space or the ability to have a smaller unit.
The point being, there's no way for a hybrid to function perfectly as both a console and handheld. Something has to give for it to lean one way or the other. Nintendo chose to lean on the side of being a home console. I'd say that NX is to a home console as a gaming laptop is to a gaming desktop, if you understand what I'm trying to say. Basically, you can have portable Skyrim and Breath of the Wind, or you can have good battery life. Unless Nintendo delays this a year or two, you can't have both quite yet.
That entirely depends on your definition of close. The best case is around 768 GFLOPS in FP32, which would perform more like ~850 GFLOPS compared to the AMD GCN GPUs in the other consoles. However, effective use of FP16 could result in as much as a 50% boost in performance (theoretically it can double it and NX faster than Xbone, but in practice there are a lot of issues with trying to do that). This is the most optimistic case of course, but even in realistic scenarios it would essentially be the difference between Vita and PS3.
There are two components to this. The one question is how valuable it is in principle. To that I'd say quite valuable, there are a lot of calculations in graphics which can be done just as well in FP16 as in FP32. Of course, it will never be all of them, so you can't just take the FP16 numbers directly either, even for the most optimized games.
The other part of it is how much it will actually be used. That is a lot more murky, as it will depend on developers performing platform-specific optimization for NX which doesn't really benefit them on most other gaming platforms. This is a question that depends on individual developers, and also on how easy the toolset and/or common third party engines make using it.
Eh, I wouldn't take this as an indication of the real battery life. Pre-release dev systems != consumer systems in terms of power consumption and even hardware spec.
Not to mention we don't know what 3 hours means in terms of what kind of usage, what background processes are running (keep in mind dev units probably have extra layers of diagnostics running a release system wouldn't bringing down the battery life.)
I still think we'll get 5-6 hours. If the leaked specs are real and it's only 720p, it can't be *that* big of a battery hog. Though, if the conrollers feed off the system battery then maybe that's enough to bring the battery life down?
Not to mention we don't know what 3 hours means in terms of what kind of usage, what background processes are running (keep in mind dev units probably have extra layers of diagnostics running a release system wouldn't bringing down the battery life.)
I still think we'll get 5-6 hours. If the leaked specs are real and it's only 720p, it can't be *that* big of a battery hog. Though, if the conrollers feed off the system battery then maybe that's enough to bring the battery life down?
Do you think that Switch might eventually cause MS and Sony to consider having FP16 enabled in future hardware?
The controllers have their own battery, obviously. They can function independently.
The dock rumours are the most intriguing for me, as rendering the same image for both the TV the console screen just doesn't seem optimal, especially if it's a "a home gaming system first and foremost".
At the very least I feel it has to have higher clock speeds while docked. This would also collaborate with Nintendo's statement to IGN about the dock, as the clock speed increase would be a function of the console (enabled by the mains power) and not a function of the dock.
At the very least I feel it has to have higher clock speeds while docked. This would also collaborate with Nintendo's statement to IGN about the dock, as the clock speed increase would be a function of the console (enabled by the mains power) and not a function of the dock.
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