Schnozberry
Member
I'm not telling you what to do. I'm meant excluding everything else is cutting yourself off from a lot of great stuff. I never said it wasn't your decision to make.
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Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Stats Leaked? Cortex A57, 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage, Multi-Touch.
- Thread starter Robert at Zeboyd Games
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I'm not telling you what to do. I'm meant excluding everything else is cutting yourself off from a lot of great stuff. I never said it wasn't your decision to make.
Skittzo0413
Member
I assume you were responding to him saying "non-Nintendo gamer". That does not explicitly mean "core gamers who are not interested in Nintendo" as there is a huge difference between people not being interested and people who are not currently planning to buy a Nintendo product.
People who have no interest in Nintendo are not being targeted here, only people who are and could be interested. And that's (in my opinion) a MUCH larger audience than you are thinking. People who are not interested in Nintendo, like you say, will not pay attention no matter what. So I don't know why it's a relevant topic.
Schnozberry
Member
I would think the "people who don't pay attention to Nintendo under any circumstances" list is pretty small, but probably over represented on websites like this. Trying to get the temperature of the general gaming audience by visiting Neogaf is a bad idea.
If you really only want a home console, then you probably don't give a shit about the specs because whatever they announce will be underwhelming and not a 'proper' jump over wiiU. Hopefully you take some solace in the thought of getting some previously portable only titles to play at home.
On the other hand, those that like their handhelds must be giddy - even if this is a gimped tegra it'll still be a massive leap over anything Nintendo has ever done in the handheld space.
On the other hand, those that like their handhelds must be giddy - even if this is a gimped tegra it'll still be a massive leap over anything Nintendo has ever done in the handheld space.
darkazcura
Member
Fair enough I apologize. I thought that may have been the case so I missed that part of the conversation. I'm with the above, though. Nintendo isn't targeting an audience that doesn't care about them at all, IMO. They are a bit of a lost cause. They are targeting the core gamers who have interest in Nintendo software but have lost interest due to different control schemes and/or archaic hardware architecture. I think this audience is larger than the one that denounces Nintendo's games for being kiddy and doesn't even give them a shot at all.
Skittzo0413
Member
Yep, I completely agree. I don't know why ozfunghi is painting people who play CoD or Battlefield or WoW as people who have no interest in paying attention to anything Nintendo, while a large portion of those gamers I would argue grew up with Nintendo in some way, be it NES or Wii.
Tying this all back to specs, I think the majority of the gaming audience has at least a cursory understanding of specs, and getting Jen-Hsun Huang up on stage to really hype those specs, even just with buzzwords and little substance will play well with the general gamer crowd.
No, you're just calling me sad, lol. I prefer Nintendo games, their aesthetics, the purity in gameplay. I became a graphic designer because of playing Super mario World as a kid. That doesn't mean i never play different consoles. I have friends who own other brands which i will occasionally play. But anyway, thanks for the compliment. There are already too many games for me to play on Nintendo consoles i want to play but never get around to. Why would i need to spend an additional 700 bucks every 5 years (or less) just to pile up more games i'll never be able to play? PS: i also own an Atari 2600, Vectrex, Colecovision, Master System and two Dreamcasts.
I was indeed responding to his "reaching outside Nintendo's usual audience" and "non-Nintendo audience" remarks.
No problem.
Sure, just as much as the gamers that actually have an understanding of specs/tech are over represented here. Which is also an extra reason not to include that info in the main event.
th3sicknness
Member
All it takes is the right game to pull that crowd onto the platform. I have said this many times..If Nintendo worked (or is working) with Psyonix to get Rocket League on the Switch It would be the trojan horse Nintendo needs to drag a portion of core gamers onto the platform.
Rocket League in my eyes is tailor made for the Switch. Local multiplayer in conjunction with online play... specific crates and cars based around Nintendo IP and so on..
Specs wont matter that much if you can generate enough buzz and bring the right titles to build the platform. No one in their right mind would have thought pokemon go would be a thing.. hell even the developers didnt anticipate the culture explosion.
Schnozberry
Member
I agree, that's why they won't release much beyond the basics. If Nvidia speaks at the event, it will be with typical buzzwords about how unique the hardware is and how there isn't anything else like it in the industry. Going too in detail generally backfires, because it forces comparisons both flattering and unflattering.
Schnozberry
Member
Yeah, I'd dump way too much money into a portable Rocket League.
No, you interpreted the whole discussion in an extreme way. Gamers outside Nintendo faithful doesn't equal gamers NOT interested in Nintendo.
There is a huge gap between those two groups. Actually over the years (except for Wii era) a lot of Nintendo faithful moved towards the middle between the two groups going by the sales of Nintendo systems.
That middle includes people interested in Nintendo games who didn't find Nintendo hardware appealing lately or people mildly interested in both hardware and software but who never had that final impulse in buying or people interested in Nintendo in the past and who lost interest because of different reasons or there is a whole category of gamers who bought Vita and are will no longer be served in the future on the gaming market and for whom Switch might be an option if it gets the games Vita used to get. And so on. There are people who have a PS4, Xbone, PC and might find appealing the option of playing some of the games anywhere. There are a lot different category of people that might find interesting the Switch reveal event. There are millions of Nvidia cards owners who might find interesting what Jen-Hsun Huang has to say about this system.
The world is not as black and white as you painting it.
DeuceGamer
Member
I can't remember the details, but last time a lot of Gaffers pitched in and paid Chipworks to release the pics. Not sure who it was that contacted them though.
frankie_baby
Member
Think chipworks did it for free in the end didnt they?
BronzeWolf
Banned
This is probably the most important presentation in the videogame industry for the next half-decade.
People will watch
People will watch
I'm predicting a Vita scenario: We will find out (maybe) several years after launch, once it's hacked.
TwilightPrincess
Member
I am hoping they give the fp16flops to prove that it's a portable with homeconsole power. And they could say it's the worlds strongest portable console. Like Sony does it with the PS4 Pro.
Look, i don't know what to tell you. I know a lot of Nintendo fans, that don't even watch E3 or Nintendo Directs. I think the amount of tech-savy non-Nintendo minded gamers that will be watching this... well, it will be a small fraction.
Schnozberry
Member
Yeah, we pitched in some money to find out, and Fourth Storm contacted them. I believe what we paid for was an order of magnitude lower than what the actual photo would have cost had we actually paid full price.
Remember my previous post? It's always about you and your little anecdotes. This discussion really goes nowhere.
Edit: and I said nothing about tech-savy.
BronzeWolf
Banned
I guess we will have to see. Numbers are not backing up your assertion though. Switch reveal video is sitting shy of 20 Million views right now. By January 12th, the amount of people that will have watched that video could equal the amount of PS4's in houses.
We'll see
I read your posts. You clearly did not read the one you responded to with "it's not about you" because that post went completely over your head, and you clearly didn't read the follow up to that post, where i explained that. And this response of yours clearly proves it.
And if not tech-savy, then WTF does it matter to give detailed specs?
Thanks. If that is some of the reasoning then maybe we will see the tech put into Switch. That's be a nice value add for me, assuming it worked well enough.
Yes, that post flew over my head because it started again with "me and my anecdotes" and I faded out before acknowledging it was just an impersonation. I admit that. I didn't read your follow ups to that post because I found that impersonation disingenuous in the context of a quite decent and serious discussion in this thread, so I tried to continue the discussion that happened before that.
The whole discussion I made with you was about Nvidia CEO coming on stage and presenting the tech within in his flamboyant style, not about publishing some detailed specs. Talking about posts flying over one's head.
Which is funny, because i never claimed that that would be a bad thing. I've made it clear starting two pages back, that i was talking about detailed specs. And that i have no problem with the guy hyping the system on Nintendo's event. Let's see:
But apparently it's indeed not all about me, no, it's all about you, because you clearly don't read what other people are saying or discussing. You just read what you want to read and argue with what you think (without reading) that the person you engage in a discussion is claiming. So, no, it didn't fly over my head. But once more, over yours.
The discussion from that moved to the potential audience of the Switch event up until you mentioned tech-savvy. And at that point I reminded you that I said nothing about tech-savvy. Like I said nothing about presenting specs lists. That's all. So let me summarise my points so we don't go back and forth on this again:
The Switch event is supposed to be much bigger than you regular event. It's the first live conference Nintendo does in a long time. It's organised in a quite big and known location. For Nintendo to spend all these money, they must want to capture the audience beyond the regular Nintendo Direct audience. The fact that so many people watched the Switch teaser video in so less time is a good sign for the potential audience of the Switch event.
Switch would benefit a lot if it would be appealing for a larger audience than Nintendo faithful. Especially if it manages to capture a bit of the "core" audience. The "core" audience is quite diverse and not being currently part of Nintendo world doesn't mean that all of them are completely not interested. I would argue that a good part of the "core" audience still appreciates the games that Nintendo make, but they were not sold on the recent and past Nintendo hardware.
And here someone like Nvidia CEO could really help in selling the Switch hardware to a part of them. Like people owning a Nvidia card. Or people who are sensitive to marketing key words. And so on. Not tech savvy. People who buy a console for playing FIFA and might find value in playing FIFA anywhere and just need somebody (other than Nintendo) to tell them that it is good hardware. Just an example. The kind of audience that Nintendo actually need to improve the relation with the 3rd parties.
Fair enough. My remark about tech-savvy, was always in relation to disclosing detailed specs during the actual event.
As for the success of the reveal video... this basically proves the point i was making about not everybody, not even Nintendo fans, watching these events. The video was watched 10 million times the first day, 18 million after three or four days? Something like that? How many of those views by the same persons? Half? (I know i've seen it 3 or 4 times personally). Yet 60 million 3DS's have been sold, 15 million WiiU's have been sold. So, not even half of the actual Nintendo userbase has seen the video after many days after the reveal. That's what i was saying, about catering towards non-Nintendo audience, when a large part of the Nintendo audience itself, may not even watch it.
That was all i wanted to say about that.
See above. If you want to sell one unit, 10, 20, 50 or more people will need to actually know it exists. And 20 million views does not equal 20 million viewers. So, we'll need to wait and see indeed. Let's say there were 10 million viewers up til now. That's "only" 1/6th of the 3DS install base. If you look at it like that, that's not so great. That's a lot of people Nintendo did not manage to reach yet. That means 50 million 3DS owners didn't even see the video. And if you're arguing that a lot of non Nintendo gamers have been watching the video, that means even more 3DS owners did not see it yet. So many people who actually are partial to Nintendo in some shape or form, have not seen the video. This is what i was saying. It's not so clear cut. How much better will this event do?
Anyway, i've said all i needed to say. Moving on from this discussion.
PS4 announcement conference was watched by less than half of the actual PS3 userbase. How can it cater to the non-Sony audience when a large part of the Sony audience itself hasn't watch it even now, almost 4 years since the reveal.
As JoshuaJSlone mentioned, they officially confirmed that they were dropping the Shield tablets recently, but the decision was probably taken a while ago (there was a TX1-based Shield tablet expected to hit earlier this year which mysteriously disappeared).
I would be extremely, extremely surprised if you could stream your PC games to Switch. Nintendo's entire business model is based on the fact that you can only buy software for the system through them, so allowing people to play games purchased elsewhere (even if it is only streaming) certainly doesn't sound like the kind of business decision they'd make.
I suppose it depends on the final configuration. If it's 4x A72 + 4x A53, then it should be able to handle anything built for the X1 without issue, and the worst case scenario would be developers not making full use of the A53s. If it's 2x A72 + 4x A53, then it gets a little messier, as devs might have issues adequately parallelising across the four lesser performing A53s.
In any case I'm sure they would indicate what the final configuration and expected performance is (keeping in mind that clock speeds can vary until very late in the game anyway), and I think it's just one of those things you have to deal with when developing for unfinished hardware.
The Shield was a showcase of their Tegra tech, precisely to get Nvidia the kind of big client they've just got with Nintendo (hence why they're dropping the Shield line as soon as they've scored that client). A big, high-volume client like Nintendo (with opportunities for long-term recurring business) was the end-goal of the Tegra division, not a step along the way to something else.
Nintendo aren't going to use Shadow Play or GRID, and I don't see any reason for them to outsource VC emulation to Nvidia, so Switch wouldn't help push any of those things for Nvidia. Third parties will probably get access to versions of many of the GameWorks libraries on Switch, but I don't know if it would lead to much of a push in the PC space (the market for third-party games on PCs with a Nvidia GPU is likely far larger than the market for third-party games on Switch will be, so if they're not using GameWorks now, I don't see Switch presenting a huge pressure for them to change their minds).
There would potentially be some benefit to developers optimising for Nvidia's architecture on Switch and bringing those optimisations over to PC, as there's good reason to believe that this is happening for AMD as a result of PS4 and XBO. However, unlike PS4/XBO for AMD, Switch isn't suddenly going to account for the vast majority of Nvidia powered hardware out there, and it's certainly not going to become the default platform for AA western games. Some big third party engine devs will put the effort in to optimise for Switch (because their job is to provide an engine that's runs well on every platform its available for), but they're likely to be the engines, such as UE4, which are already pretty well optimised for Nvidia PC hardware anyway. Small indies who focus on Nintendo hardware will likely put in the effort too, but if their games do come to PC they're unlikely to require anything but the most entry-level hardware. Lastly are the mid-tier engines, which will possibly be lightly optimised for Switch, but probably not to the extent that would translate to big improvements to Nvidia PC performance (in many of these cases I can see developers putting their work into figuring out which parts of their shader code they can switch to FP16, which would be of no benefit to Nvidia's PC hardware, but perversely would be of benefit to newer AMD cards).
That's not to say I don't think that Nvidia at large wouldn't stand to benefit to some degree from having their hardware in Switch. A few extra people in the world working to optimise games for Nvidia's graphics architecture certainly wouldn't hurt them. I don't however, think that this benefit would be anywhere near enough for them to take a hit in a deal which is worth potentially billions of dollars in long-term revenue to them.
I'm talking about actual specs. I'm talking about press seeing numbers like 750 Gflops and 4GB of RAM in a press release and saying "they're lower than the numbers Sony and MS have, so this must be a pretty weak machine". Presenting stuff like that well, in a positive context on stage can make a huge difference to how it's interpreted compared to just dumping it on a press release.
To give a stupid off the top of my head example, consider the following two options for presenting the same piece of information:
Press Release said:
Stage Presentation said:
Anyone reading the first will simply compare the numbers to what Sony and MS has published, see that their FP32 figures are much higher and conclude that Switch is well behind the competition and that FP16 isn't really used in games so doesn't count.
Someone watching the second, though, will get the impression that FP16 is super-efficient secret sauce that Nvidia invented to allow Nintendo to cram console hardware into a portable, and that maybe it is possible that this really competes with XBO and PS4 in such a small box. It even pre-emptively counters the claim that games can't really make use of FP16 by presenting one game that does. Never mind that that game happens to be a complete outlier and most third parties are closer to 20% utilisation, as people are going to latch onto the one data point they're given, not ponder the possible distribution. Never mind, either, that it might only achieve half or less of that 1.5TF of FP16 when in portable mode, because most people will simply never think that hard about it.
I'd definitely be willing to double-dip with Rocket League on Switch. Remote play on Vita is no substitute whatsoever for being able to play it directly on a lag-free portable.
Fourth Storm
Member
Yup, Chipworks really hooked us up with those two die photos--some of the highest quality shots I've seen. They let us get a detailed look at all the SRAM registers to the point where we were able to make an educated guess at nearly every block on the GPU die. The leftover contributions were mostly donated to Unicef, with a couple other special requests as well from people (I recall the original plan was Child's Play, but that got some objections).
This time, I am hoping that Chipworks will publish a die photo on their blog, as they have done for the PS4 and Xbox One. If they don't plan on it, I do have a contact I can try reaching out to. We will need a leak or two, though, to aid the investigation. With Wii U, we had substantial information on the CPU architecture, GPU architecture, and eDRAM amount, thanks to vgleaks. The die photo (after much back and forth) allowed us to determine the shader, texture unit, and render backend count (160:8:8). Clock speeds were determined by hacker Hector Martin. External RAM amount/bandwidth should be the easiest to figure out, as RAM chips are usually labeled. So once someone tears that sucker down, that should be clear.
I honestly don't think we'll need to go to such lengths as we did with Wii U, but I am still extremely curious to see for myself what is inside the Switch.
DeuceGamer
Member
Thanks for confirming and the detailed info. I knew it was you I spoke with but didn't know if you were the one with contacts and really didn't want to speak for you
If we don't get the info on Switch and need to pitch in again, I'd be willing to help again. I don't post a lot in here but I'm usually lurking and soaking up the info the other great posters provide.
Without those shots of chip I wonder if we would actually know the flops of the Wii U.
Schnozberry
Member
I'll have to check if Chipworks has a die shot of a Tegra X1. Should offer a decent base for comparison when the time comes.
BronzeWolf
Banned
I'm in.
I am an electrical engineer and these things fascinate me to no end. I would chip in and help if need be
th3sicknness
Member
They may not leverage some of that technology, but it is a possibility they learn something from Nvidia in that aspect.
Yeah it would certainly require some serious thought. There could be two possibilities I can see.
1) Nintendo realise that PC gamers will be PC Gamers and buy on PC anyway. Therefore why not try and sell them a Switch too. And to follow this, they basically see it as a value add for console gamers to play a few PC games too.
2) Nintendo have a PC store too where your games are Switch streamable.
Would also be super cool for tournaments like Splatoon in the reveal trailer. People docking in their Switch looked badass.
ShadowFox08
Member
Can we get both for the Switch on March 17 please? ._.
BronzeWolf
Banned
Yeah it would certainly require some serious thought. There could be two possibilities I can see.
1) Nintendo realise that PC gamers will be PC Gamers and buy on PC anyway. Therefore why not try and sell them a Switch too. And to follow this, they basically see it as a value add for console gamers to play a few PC games too.
2) Nintendo have a PC store too where your games are Switch streamable.
PC + Nintendo has been a winning combination for some years now. They could take advantage of that
It would be appealing to a lot of people for sure. But Nintendo doesn't want you to stream Skyrim to Switch. They want you to buy Skyrim for Switch.
ShadowFox08
Member
Yeah.. Watch it include Nintendoland 2 and upgrade from 32 to 64GB for $100 extra. lol
Again, I think that's exceedingly unlikely.
Nintendo does not want you to spend your time with the Switch playing games you didn't buy through Nintendo's channels.
That's why it always astounds me when someone suggests that the Switch should run Android or have the Google Play Store.
Been thinking about the instant docking and undocking that Nintendo mention on their site about the Switch: Wouldn't there be a pause or delay if the Switch went into a lower clocked / lower resolution mode when undocking? The switching of performance, framebuffer size, shaders etc sounds like it would be a problem if someone tried to glitch the Switch by constantly docking and undocking, hah.
Yes, I think Laura Kate Dale said the switch takes a couple of seconds, it's not really instant.
All there'd need to be is a warning, that way only stupid people can't sue if their device breaks.
Edit: I mean, when you look at the trailer. The undock occurs after you pull the whole device out which was just an effect and not the real thing when it is likely the undock occurs after the connector is removed.
Yeah that would be a terrible idea. That said, I think the switch having android virtualisation and letting you purchase lightly modified android "ports" through the eShop would be a smart idea to get indies on board.
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