I don't agree. I think many people will just have it in their bags when they get home and only remember to plonk it on the dock if they want to resume playing or charge the thing.
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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 don't agree. I think many people will just have it in their bags when they get home and only remember to plonk it on the dock if they want to resume playing or charge the thing.
That's not what he's saying, I believe. He's talking about when you dock it to play on the TV, you need to detach the controllers, slide them into the grip, turn on the TV, select the input, sit your ass down on the couch... Before you get to continue playing. That's easily 20 seconds in which the switch has more than enough time to actually switch.
Ah, I completely misinterpreted the conversation. My bad.
That better not be the case. It's fine if docking the console takes a few seconds. But undocking has to be as instantaneous as demonstrated in the teaser. Why? Because it looked really cool. I'm not joking. The switch between TV to handheld was one of the most impressive things in the trailer. Having a few second delay would ruin that feel.
Skittzo0413
Member
That actually seems like an extremely impressive marketing ploy in my opinion. I sure hope someone from Nintendo sees that idea (if they haven't come up with it already).
Though the Pikmin subtitle will be Shadows of Olimar, not Revenge of the Pikmin.
gingerbeardman
Member
This is called HDMI CEC. It's a feature of HDMI, remote control signals are sent along the wire. So if Nintendo are licensing HDMI all that is needed is for them to make the effort to support CEC as a software feature/option.
I'd be surprised if they didn't include it. But, hey, this is Nintendo.
frankie_baby
Member
CEC works like ass
I think I have them if needed. I'll look around and see.
EDIT: I found the GPU shot, but I don't have the CPU:
High Res Shot
Ah I see, I think for QoL and just overall good user experience its something they do. Docking the Switch while it's on and then looking for the TV remote, pressing the input button until you select the correct HDMI input, and the little pauses each time the TV makes while going through all the HDMI inputs until it gets to the one the Switch is on doesn't sound like an elegant user experience hah.
Especially if you skip the correct input because the TV UI is a laggy piece of crap then you scroll over again
Not a deal breaker, but it drops the appeal of the Switching a bit.
Man, I was just trying Metroid Prime with the Dolphin Emulator on my computer, connected to a 1080p TV and playing with the 360 controller. It's not the gamecube, but I miss it so much. Maybe a bit of memberberries here but Metroid Prime is still amazing. Just the intro section feels so fucking great and has an amazing setting.
Hope we can see this someday in Switch.
Hope we can see this someday in Switch.
TannerDemoz
Member
Just wondering:
Where will save data go? Will it be cartridge based saves old-school style?
What about updates? That storage could fill up quick?
Where will save data go? Will it be cartridge based saves old-school style?
What about updates? That storage could fill up quick?
The difference there, is that you know what to expect from Sony. For Nintendo, this was a huge shift, again. And yet it struggled to garner more hype than the WiiU. I'm just trying to be realistic here. If you think this event is suddenly going to be viewed by every gamer on the planet, just because Nintendo "wills it so". The point wasn't to show that it doesn't matter if people watch it before buying the console. The point was if it even matters to disclose this kind of information, that is only important to a minority, when a large part of that minority will likely not even watch the conference.
Yeah, so basically lie about it, lol. Ok sure. You could simply achieve the same thing by giving the same presentation, without claiming 1.5TF etc. Just say how efficient it is, that it can deliver console gaming on the go but don't mention any numbers. Show a 3rd party multiplat game running with near PS4 graphics and that'll do just fine. Or you could also state in your press release that it is capable of 1.5TF in fp16? I mean, people who know what it means, won't be fooled. People who are interested in this kind of information, will find it anyway. So i don't see the point really. But ok. The people Nintendo needs to convince in the first place, is the 3rd party devs and publishers, imo.
Skittzo0413
Member
People have speculated that Nintendo could charge a subscription fee to allow PC streaming, but I agree it's pretty unlikely.
I think the 3DS game cards (and likely the Switch ones too) use read-only memory, so they wouldn't allow any games to write to them. There's a lot of evidence though that Nintendo is preparing for cloud saves, such as when they showed a slide about cloud saves in one of the recent investor briefings.
I don't really think you can say that the Switch trailer "struggled to garner more hype than the WiiU" at this point. I mean, for one thing the views on Youtube for the Switch have absolutely demolished the Wii U views. They're on pace to beat the PS4 reveal views too. I don't think number of views is really the best metric for hype, but then again I don't think there is a very good metric for hype at all, so I don't know where you got your "struggled to garner more hype than the WiiU" from.
And anyway, yes they should "lie" about specs. Thraktor's example is a perfect application of marketing, since marketing is essentially all about bending the truth. The vast majority of gamers do understand some tech talk- they will know gigs, flops and resolution. They will not know floating point precision. If you can give one good example of a game using as much FP16 code as possible to actually hit a real performance close to 1.5TF, then you can say "this portable console from Nintendo can offer up to 1.5TFlops of performance on the go!" That's a conecpt that most gamers will understand and eat up.
Press releases don't work that way because it's hard to ensure they are read in the proper context. Marketing is all about framing and context, and having someone on stage who's essentially made a meme out of himself for being able to talk about any small feature of a piece of hardware as if it's the greatest thing you will eve see would be a huge, positive marketing move.
Many HDMI devices come with Arc HDMI they comunicate each other, not sure if it really needs to be implemented, your TV/receiver will detect Switch regardles, at least my setup allow me already do that with Wii U.
Seriously? FIFA, Madden, NBA, Tiger Woods, Boom Blox, Sports Active, Need For Speed, My Sims, Harry Potter, Hasbro Family Game Night etc all had multiple games released on Wii and there were many other one-off games too.
I always thought the mainstream (and GAF for that matter) was a sucker for hype. If there was one thing that Nintendo has struggled in a while, it was decent marketing since the N64 days. Even during the GameCube era, they were still trying to shake off that "kiddy"
notion, and here we are now with the Switch reveal that contained absolutely no kids whatsoever in its presentation, showing of all things, a young adult enjoying Skyrim on a plane: That alone sends a strong message.
notion, and here we are now with the Switch reveal that contained absolutely no kids whatsoever in its presentation, showing of all things, a young adult enjoying Skyrim on a plane: That alone sends a strong message.
I don't think this is the discussion though about Nintendo's (future) marketing strategies. I'm more interested what's inside the box for the Switch, and how it ticks. So far, 4GB RAM is what rumors claim (what type?), and SDXC and beyond for storage, using similar (3)DS form factor "game cards" starting at 16GB and beyond, but we still don't know what fab process and we still don't know what ARM chips, other than it could fall into a number of Tegra configurations.
Skittzo0413
Member
Yeah it will be interesting to see the exact specifics, and what they choose to announce vs what will have to be broken down after it releases. I'm expecting them to talk a bit about the game cards and how they're faster than blu-ray discs, potentially even faster than HDDs... No idea if they'll go into specifics about the CPU but if there is an advantage there over PS4/XB1 (or even PS4Pro potentially) then it would make sense to mention it, at least loosely.
They also really need to discuss the Switch screen in terms of ppi rather than resolution. I mean, it has a larger pixel density than some of Apple's retina displays, so they could even go so far as to call it a retina display (unless that's actually trademarked haha). Either way, there will be creative marketing at this presentation, regardless if we wind up finding out everything about the specs there or not.
gingerbeardman
Member
In my experience, it's been great.
ARC (audio return channel) is only for audio. But I think I know what you mean - most TVs will switch to an input when they detect a new signal on it. Kind of "always watch the most recently connected input"
It's a hit and miss experience for me, I have Wii U -> receiver -> TV
I'm gonna miss TV button :c
JoshuaJSlone
Member
If it works like 3DS, the norm is the saves would go on the game card while updates would go to the internal storage or SD card. Though I'd theorize games that are particularly freewheeling with their amount of saves and ballooning save file size like Skyrim might allow saves off the game card.
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.
From a purely personal point of view, I'm predominantly a PC gamer at the moment who will pretty much buy all multiplatform games on PC by default. For me, the Switch is the first gaming device which would actually give me a reason to pick a game up on anything other than PC, as it would allow me to play it either on a TV/monitor or in portable mode. I wouldn't change to buying multiplats exclusively on Switch, and I don't expect that everyone is like myself, but there should, nonetheless be a niche of PC gamers who see the Switch as an actual alternative that would be worth buying games on instead in some cases.
They would be pretty much killing a lot of profit from that niche if they allow them to stream games from PC, evaporating a lot of the incentive to change their purchasing patterns over to Switch. It just doesn't seem like a sensible thing for Nintendo to do.
I'm imagining a game where you play as the pikmin king, leading your people against the ruthless tyrant Olimar, who landed on your planet and waged a brutal, destructive war, taking thousands of trusting peaceful pikmin as slaves and sending them to their deaths in combat, only so that he could pillage everything of value from the land and abandon a planet now littered with mangled corpses. I assume the story would be a treatise on the inhumanity of war and the futility of using it as a means to promote peace, as the pikmin king gradually realises that he is turning into Olimar himself, killing so many of those pikmin he once swore to protect.
Edit: From Software game, perhaps?
I'm saying they use PR spin, just as every other similar presentation does, whether it's for gaming hardware or phones or PCs or any other consumer electronics. The proportion of people watching these things who actually know what the specs mean is absolutely minuscule, and the rest will happily focus on the aspects of the specs that Nintendo wants them to focus on. This isn't exactly some radical idea, Sony put on a presentation in 2013 to promote the first console ever to be released with a less powerful CPU than its predecessor, and huge numbers of people came out thinking that moving to the x86 instruction set was a genius decision which would prove the key to creating powerful next-gen video games. We still have people today who regularly just assume that Switch using an ARM CPU completely rules out ports, which all comes back to Sony's "turbo-charged PC architecture" presentation.
I actually doubt that Switch game cards will have save memory on them. We have to remember that the DS/3DS game card standard was designed back around 2003/2004, when in-device storage was minuscule and the notion of cloud saves would have been considered, well, pie-in-the-sky. Games effectively had to save to card, so they designed an interface that could handle saves, and they designed the cards to accommodate a separate flash chip for saves to live on.
Judging by the video, Switch game cards use a completely new interface (the pin count and location is different from DS/3DS), so they get to rethink the assumptions they made over 10 years ago. Firstly, the Switch itself will have onboard storage, and even 32GB would cover a card-only gamers saves without issue, but they'll also be allowing microSD to complement it. Secondly, Nintendo have been hinting about cloud saves for the past couple of years, so save games should be able to follow you from device to device even without being stored on the card. Then there's the interface, as a read-only interface will be simpler and cheaper to implement. Lastly, and most importantly, is the cost of including flash memory (and the necessary control logic to accommodate it) on the card itself. This isn't a trivial cost when manufacturing hundreds of millions of game cards, and by eliminating it they can make higher capacity, faster game cards cheaper, making the system more attractive to third parties. In fact, even aside from that, it would be substantially cheaper for Nintendo to add 1GB of storage to Switch's internal memory pool than it would be to include separate 128MB flash chips in each of the 8 games that the owner may expect to buy.
On a completely separate note, the first device using ARM A73 cores was just launched today (and, for what it's worth, the second to use TSMC's 16FFC process). I don't expect Nintendo to use A73s in Switch, as I believe the device was originally intended to launch around now, and it would have been cutting it tight to to try squeeze them into that timescale. Nonetheless, if Anandtech to a similar analysis of the Kirin 960 as they did for the 950 it will give us a good idea of the power savings of 16FFC and any performance/power differences between A73 and A72.
Skittzo0413
Member
Pikmin do have souls when they die... Pikmin Souls? That would certainly qualify as From's "weird game."
The Souls game no one asked for.
Rebel Leader
THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
The souls game no one knew they wanted.
BronzeWolf
Banned
So this what people were expecting from the Switch right?
A73 core device
1080p screen
64 GB Flash memory
At least 6 GB LPDDR4 RAM
At least 6,000 mAh
But for 699 euro? Fuck that
199 or bust!
People sure are delusional
Skittzo0413
Member
Didn't he say he's not expecting A73s? I don't really see anyone in here who is expecting that...
BronzeWolf
Banned
I am not talking about Thraktor. I am talking about things that I have read here and in the 720p screen thread. Even if the thing did not have A73's all the other specs would surely push the device north of $249, which for some seems too much.
Skittzo0413
Member
Well I personally think Nintendo should try everything they can to get this priced at $199, not because I won't buy it otherwise or that I think it's not worth that, but because I think this gives it by far the best chance of success, because that's firmly within impulse buy territory. And I want this to be crazy successful for Nintendo so I can get future Nintendo consoles and games for years to come.
But people who want those things (1080p screen, bigger battery, A73's, 1.5TFlops of 32FP, etc.) are likely willing to pay more if it has them. I think it's fair that some people would like to pay more for more premium features, but I doubt that group is very large.
Currently the 3ds has games that save all onthe game card, others that save some on the sd and some on the card. Also I read Monster Hunter Gen saves everything on the sd.
I bet the switch will do something similar. Depends on the dev but mostly main data on de card and other stuff on the sd if necesary
Well, Pikmin do have little ghosts that float up as they're killed, but mainly I just think it would be funny for Nintendo to radically change the tone of the series.
Eh, what? I literally say right there that I don't expect Switch to use A73s. Not only that, but A73 cores are actually cheaper than A72s or A57s. Same with the 16FFC manufacturing process used, which are the only two things I talked about.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
I can see your points about things like the manufacturing savings per game card, but it doesn't really seem any different than for 3DS. Internal storage plus expansion by SD was the norm and the several gigabytes included was much much higher than almost any conceivable 3DS gamer would ever use for save data.
LordOfChaos
Member
Yeah, iirc when they saw how interested we were, they did us a solid and just gave it for free, though people did offer to crowdfund (or did)
Hope they do that again!
I do really wonder about that. It definitely would be cheaper to have games just save to the 32GB NAND Flash on the Switch since as you mention, it would save money on manufacturing game cards and, even I was thinking yesterday if game cards were going to have like 3 save slots standard again like usual instead of being able to have as many save slots as you want.
The cloud storage would most likely have to be more of a backup option than to actively use since the Switch isn't likely to have 4G wireless to get to save wherever. Unless they keep telling people to use the internet on their phone and use a hotspot.
Cuningas de Häme
Member
Would it be possible to have a NS SD card adapter, so you could fit a second (or two if the cart is big enough) SD Micro cards into your Switch? To manage your digital library. Saw this suggested on another forum.
I mean, you could have your "normal" SD card for saves and whatnot, and then just put 2 Micros on a adapter and put them in to cart cage so you can play your digital games without them eating up your space for more pressing things (saves, patches etc.?).
Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
I mean, you could have your "normal" SD card for saves and whatnot, and then just put 2 Micros on a adapter and put them in to cart cage so you can play your digital games without them eating up your space for more pressing things (saves, patches etc.?).
Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
Why are they cheaper? And how much more efficient are they?
This i can agree with
Because it's smaller per core.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10347/arm-cortex-a73-artemis-unveiled
A73 is a successor to A17 as it's not from the same designers. A73 is from the Sophia "Family" in France. A57/A72 is from Austin, Texas, A53 is from Cambridge.
And herein lies the biggest surprise of the Cortex A73 as a A72 successor: Instead of choosing to maintain A72s 3-wide, or increase the microarchitectures decoder width, ARM opted to instead go back to a 2-wide decoder such as found on the current Sophia family. Yet the A73 positions itself a higher-performance and lower-power design compared to the larger A72.
Thanks. Interesting.
So is this, i just came across. I wonder... it says this soc is on a 28nm process, they claim 5+ hours of gaming, they have no air vents (meaning no active cooling), 512 SPU's. and they claim around 850 GF judging from the chart. A 6" FHD screen to boot. They also have the removable/switchable D-pad Nintendo patented.
I don't think this is anything to worry about, but it is interesting, given the similar form factor, the much larger process node, lack of active cooling, better claimed battery life, and likely more GF in portable (!) mode etc... They also claim it's upgradable.
Price for the 4GB RAM version with 64GB flash: 299$
Price for the 8GB RAM version with 128GB flash: 499$
Kickstarter price starting at 249$
So is this, i just came across. I wonder... it says this soc is on a 28nm process, they claim 5+ hours of gaming, they have no air vents (meaning no active cooling), 512 SPU's. and they claim around 850 GF judging from the chart. A 6" FHD screen to boot. They also have the removable/switchable D-pad Nintendo patented.
I don't think this is anything to worry about, but it is interesting, given the similar form factor, the much larger process node, lack of active cooling, better claimed battery life, and likely more GF in portable (!) mode etc... They also claim it's upgradable.
Price for the 4GB RAM version with 64GB flash: 299$
Price for the 8GB RAM version with 128GB flash: 499$
Kickstarter price starting at 249$
BronzeWolf
Banned
Kickstarter...
Yes. What's your point? I'm not claiming this will ever see the light of day. I'm also not saying if it does, it's anything to worry about for Nintendo. I just thought it was interesting what these guys want to be doing techwise and the price they're asking. Furthermore, i think it's interesting that they are asking 200$ extra for 4GB RAM and 64GB flash extra.
BronzeWolf
Banned
It is, but electronics hardware kickstarters are famous for delivering late, under-specificated or more expensive than promised.
Schnozberry
Member
Not all A57's created equal? The snap dragon version seems to get really close in performance to the A72. In this benchmark anyway. I am also reading that there may have been overheating problems.
Snapdragon 810 was on 20nm. It was a problematic node for everyone.
Schnozberry
Member
Seems to be a scam cash grab. No actual prototypes, lots of unanswered questions, took months of of Kickstarter and reappeared, etc.
https://m.reddit.com/r/shittykickst..._z_aka_steamboy_is_back_on_kickstarter_after/
ShadowFox08
Member
That same page has a picture diagram that states that the Wii U is right under 500 GFLOPs... WTF lol
Cuningas de Häme
Member
But it wouldn't matter if you used an adapter to put extra Micro SDs into game card slot?
Like SD card adapter where you put a Micro SD so your card reader in your laptop can read it.
Game cards in Switch look like their size could hold even two microSD cards. Technically it should be possible, I think.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
The quoted 12-15W TDP and 5h battery means the battery capacity must be 60-75Wh - that's serious laptop territory. For comparison, the iPad Pro houses a 38.8Wh battery, and the largest CE battery I have at home is ~8Ah @ 3.77V = 30Wh (in a 10" tablet). Those 60-75Wh in a HH is bridge-sale territory.
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