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[tsab]

Resistive touch a possibility?

As backward as some may think, art academy was pretty good with the stylus

Not possible, but there are pens that work with capacitive screens

 

[OG_Original Gamer]

I'm still going to have a small glaring of hope that Nintendo had Nvidia add 2 more SMs and some embedded fast memory for shaders and no bottlenecks.

 

[LordOfChaos]

I suspect the 500 man-years probably does include quite a lot of software work (possibly even including work Nvidia was already doing anyway, such as bringing Gameworks to Vulkan), but if we're comparing the amount of work Nintendo and Nvidia need to put into software for Switch versus what Nintendo would have needed to do to get previous consoles to the same level, then Switch would be a bit of a cakewalk for them.

They did also mention creating a physics engine for the Switch and GPU accelerating the OS as part of the work, in the Nvidia blog.

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

The 3DS has a limit of 32GB, my 64GB works fine.

There is no hardware limitation for 128GB that I know of, it should work with a theoretical 2TB MicroSD card.

In an unrelated search recently I read that sometimes phone manufacturers will say something like "expandable to XX gigabytes" where XX is the largest commonly available size, because saying "expandable to 2 terabytes" sounds insane and currently isn't possible. Maybe same reasoning behind what Nintendo means for 3DS and Switch's non-limits, just with poorer wording?

 

[antonz]

In an unrelated search recently I read that sometimes phone manufacturers will say something like "expandable to XX gigabytes" where XX is the largest commonly available size, because saying "expandable to 2 terabytes" sounds insane and currently isn't possible. Maybe same reasoning behind what Nintendo means for 3DS and Switch's non-limits, just with poorer wording?

Its some of that and generally its the largest Card they tested at whatever time they did the testing so it may have been what was realistic pricewise etc. Nintendo is unlikely to test an SD card that is like $400 or whatever

 

[foltzie1]

In an unrelated search recently I read that sometimes phone manufacturers will say something like "expandable to XX gigabytes" where XX is the largest commonly available size, because saying "expandable to 2 terabytes" sounds insane and currently isn't possible. Maybe same reasoning behind what Nintendo means for 3DS and Switch's non-limits, just with poorer wording?

You make a reasonable assumption.

Also Nintendo is probably testing the Switch Hardware/OS with what is commercially available and advertising based on those results.

Edit: I'm also curious if the 200GB and 128GB SD cards are the same cards, a 256GB chip with varying levels of quality or extra cells for wear leveling.

 

[th3sicknness]

I am more concerned with how fast games will run off the SD card vs Carts. It seems there will be a significant difference? Can standard class 10 sd cards keep up with the carts they will be using with loads times and so on?

 

[calc84maniac]

I am more concerned with how fast games will run off the SD card vs Carts. It seems there will be a significant difference? Can standard class 10 sd cards keep up with the carts they will be using with loads times and so on?

SD cards these days have pretty solid read times. Writes are the real bottleneck, but you won't see those that often outside of saving games (and downloading).

 

[Thraktor]

They did also mention creating a physics engine for the Switch and GPU accelerating the OS as part of the work, in the Nvidia blog.

Nvidia's blog post refers to "a revamped physics engine", which makes sense as there's no point starting from scratch when they've already got PhysX. My guess is that they've taken the components of PhysX and Gameworks which make sense (there's no point wasting time on trying to get something like VXGI working on Switch) and are optimising them for the platform.

 

[Angel Whispers]

Resistive touch a possibility?

As backward as some may think, art academy was pretty good with the stylus

Excellent point. Many people are assuming that it would be a capacitve screen, because of multi-touch, but multi-touch resistive screens do exist. While it's true that capacitive screens can be used with pens/styli, a resistive screen offers greater precision, which is very important in a LOZ Phantom HourGlass, or a Kirby: Power Paintbrush, or a Super Mario Maker, or an Art Academy title. Gameplay ideas were born out of the inclusion of resistive screens, and I wouldn't rule it out on the Switch, because some games wouldn't be possible.

 

[LordOfChaos]

Excellent point. Many people are assuming that it would be a capacitve screen, because of multi-touch, but multi-touch resistive screens do exist. While it's true that capacitive screens can be used with pens/styli, a resistive screen offers greater precision, which is very important in a LOZ Phantom HourGlass, or a Kirby: Power Paintbrush, or a Super Mario Maker, or an Art Academy title. Gameplay ideas were born out of the inclusion of resistive screens, and I wouldn't rule it out on the Switch, because some games wouldn't be possible.

Not more than an active stylus if we're going there, i.e. Apple Pencil, Surface Pen etc. Even Nvidias passive DirectStylus was fairly accurate. So I hope better finger tracking isn't cast aside for that assumption. Capacitive can be better at tracking pens than resistive can be at tracking multi-finger.

 

[ShadowFox08]

I'm still going to have a small glaring of hope that Nintendo had Nvidia add 2 more SMs and some embedded fast memory for shaders and no bottlenecks.

4SMs? Keep your expectations low.. Lol. It would be really surprising if we get more than two. It's a shame we more than likely won't know until we tear it down after the switch gets released. /:

I'm really curious how much storage we'll get for the bundle versions. Keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for 128GB, but expecting 64GB.

 

[Mr Swine]

4SMs? Keep your expectations low.. Lol. It would be really surprising if we get more than two. It's a shame we more than likely won't know until we tear it down after the switch gets released. /:

I'm really curious how much storage we'll get for the bundle versions. Keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for 128GB, but expecting 64GB.

Isn't it better long term for Nintendo to use 4SM rather than 2SM if they want Switch to be out on the market for more than 4 years without worrying so much that it will be outdated so fast?

 

[Skittzo0413]

I'm really curious how much storage we'll get for the bundle versions. Keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for 128GB, but expecting 64GB.

I think the multiple SKU rumor has been backtracked so I'd expect just one SKU with the rumored 32GB of storage.

I'm taking one last pre-presentation opportunity to predict that there will be some other storage solution offered beyond micro SD. Something along the lines of an official Nintendo branded wireless HDD for game storage, or something else similar. They know digital revenue is far too important to hamper with such a small amount of storage.

 

[ShadowFox08]

Isn't it better long term for Nintendo to use 4SM rather than 2SM if they want Switch to be out on the market for more than 4 years without worrying so much that it will be outdated so fast?

Most definitely, but I've been burned out on console specs fir Nintendo since the Wii days. We all have. I'm not even expecting Pascal 16nm..

More than likely they will release a mid Gen upgrade with more SMs, better CPU and battery life. The switch is one of a family of console devices, according to Nintendo.

 

[Graphics Horse]

Excellent point. Many people are assuming that it would be a capacitve screen, because of multi-touch, but multi-touch resistive screens do exist. While it's true that capacitive screens can be used with pens/styli, a resistive screen offers greater precision, which is very important in a LOZ Phantom HourGlass, or a Kirby: Power Paintbrush, or a Super Mario Maker, or an Art Academy title. Gameplay ideas were born out of the inclusion of resistive screens, and I wouldn't rule it out on the Switch, because some games wouldn't be possible.

All resistive screens I've seen have a slightly recessed screen area, or raised border around them. No sign of that here.

 

[robotrock]

So since the patents showed a possible VR mount for the Switch, that got me thinking; if Nintendo was really serous about VR, wouldn't they go with a minimum of a 1920x1080 screen on the device? Because people who invested in the Oculus Rift DK1 are now about to start having horrible flashbacks.

Yes. 720 is way too low for VR.

 

[BuggyMike]

Well the wider memory bus is pretty simple, as the wider the memory bus is the higher the bandwidth (i.e. we're looking at either a 64 bit bus giving 25.6GB/s or a 128 bit bus giving 51.2GB/s).

The other two are to do with how efficiently that memory bandwidth is used. Nvidia's Maxwell and Pascal GPUs use a technique called tile-based rendering, or TBR, where the screen in broken down into individual tiles, which are rendered one at a time, rather than rendering the entire screen in one go. The benefit of this is that you can keep the tile you're working on in cache right on the GPU die, meaning that the GPU doesn't have to make loads of bandwidth intensive accesses to main memory while it's working on the tile, but instead can work on it in the cache and just send the finished tile to memory once its done.

More GPU cache makes TBR more effective, as it means you can use larger tiles, and still potentially have plenty of cache left for other uses (the GPU L2 cache also has to cache textures and any other data being fed into the GPU).

The problem with TBR, though, is that traditionally it has only worked well with "forward rendering". That is, graphics engines that perform pretty much all operations directly on the final framebuffer. Most modern graphics engines, though, are moving towards "deferred rendering", where they use intermediate buffers (called g-buffers) to store data about the scene and then only at the end do they use this data to create the final framebuffer. These don't tend to work as well with TBR because, under DirectX or OpenGL, g-buffers operate in a way which can't really be tiled, so you don't get the same level of bandwidth savings compared to a forward renderer.

Vulkan changes this up, though, due to the way it organises the graphics pipeline into what it calls renderpasses and subpasses. This is implemented in a way which allows g-buffers to be properly tiled by the GPU, potentially providing significant bandwidth savings for an engine which uses deferred rendering. For a system like Switch, which has relatively limited main memory bandwidth, but features TBR, having this fully implemented could be very beneficial, so it's the kind of thing which Nintendo should be looking at to get the most out of the hardware.

Thanks as usual for explaining things clearly. 6 hours to go

 

[frankie_baby]

Yes. 720 is way too low for VR.

Way too low for a 400-700 quid VR, but too low for a 50 quid bit of fun? I'm not so sure, customers have been happy enough for the last 6 years with a 240p handheld I'm not so sure resolution matters that much to people

 

[LordOfChaos]

Way too low for a 400-700 quid VR, but too low for a 50 quid bit of fun? I'm not so sure, customers have been happy enough for the last 6 years with a 240p handheld I'm not so sure resolution matters that much to people

It's different being right up by your eyes, if you use a 720p phone in Cardboard you can see how bad it is, and then the pixels per inch would be even lower on this on a 6 inch screen.

It may be fine for a few cute demos of VR, but I wouldn't expect to wear it long.

 

[frankie_baby]

It's different being right up by your eyes, if you use a 720p phone in Cardboard you can see how bad it is, and then the pixels per inch would be even lower on this on a 6 inch screen.

It may be fine for a few cute demos of VR, but I wouldn't expect to wear it long.

The headset could maybe hold it a little bit further from your eyes to mitigate the screen being larger

 

[Inuhanyou]

Isn't it better long term for Nintendo to use 4SM rather than 2SM if they want Switch to be out on the market for more than 4 years without worrying so much that it will be outdated so fast?

Switch has no other handheld competitors since Sony bowed out of the handheld race, it will stay viable for much longer than 4 years. There's no reason to worry about future proofing it to any degree.

It will stay the absolute minimum standard of development for games going forward if it takes off.

Staying competitive with dedicated home consoles in a mobile form factor on 1/10th the power draw is a pipe dream. PS4 and XB1 should not be looked at as the target

 

[Hoo-doo]

Isn't it better long term for Nintendo to use 4SM rather than 2SM if they want Switch to be out on the market for more than 4 years without worrying so much that it will be outdated so fast?

DS and 3DS were outdated at launch as well, it really doesn't matter. When it comes to handhelds, Nintendo has no real competition.

Just don't expect third party multiplats from the X1/PS4 and things will be fine.

 

[Malakai]

DS and 3DS were outdated at launch as well, it really doesn't matter. When it comes to handhelds, Nintendo has no real competition.

Just don't expect third party multiplats from the X1/PS4 and things will be fine.

Isn't that a misconception?

 

[AzaK]

Most definitely, but I've been burned out on console specs fir Nintendo since the Wii days. We all have. I'm not even expecting Pascal 16nm..

More than likely they will release a mid Gen upgrade with more SMs, better CPU and battery life. The switch is one of a family of console devices, according to Nintendo.

This is what I'd expect. They'll try and keep the price down low enough to make as much profit as possible. Hitting that "just enough" spot for the audience they are selling to. Then when price comes down for making higher end units, push out an update.

 

[robotrock]

Way too low for a 400-700 quid VR, but too low for a 50 quid bit of fun? I'm not so sure, customers have been happy enough for the last 6 years with a 240p handheld I'm not so sure resolution matters that much to people

Resolution matters when the screen is an inch away from your face. 720p is not going to be fun

 

[Radius4]

I had a Nexus 7 2012 and a Nexus 7 2013, while it was a noticeable step up when comparing it wasn't all that different for games.
The real improvement on the 2013 was the color reproduction.

People are buying phones with 4k just because they are available not because they can tell the difference in a 6" screen.

That said VR poses different challenges but I don't think resolution is the biggest hurdle to tackle.

 

[Malakai]

I had a Nexus 7 2012 and a Nexus 7 2013, while it was a noticeable step up when comparing it wasn't all that different for games.
The real improvement on the 2013 was the color reproduction.

People are buying phones with 4k just because they are available not because they can tell the difference in a 6" screen.

That said VR poses different challenges but I don't think resolution is the biggest hurdle to tackle.

The Nexus 7 (2013) version was very nice to hold. The texture on it's backside was excellent. Very grippy.

 

[rekameohs]

It's different being right up by your eyes, if you use a 720p phone in Cardboard you can see how bad it is, and then the pixels per inch would be even lower on this on a 6 inch screen.

It may be fine for a few cute demos of VR, but I wouldn't expect to wear it long.

Pixel density has no factor on the screen door effect if we're comparing the same resolution. A larger 720p would just sit farther from the face than a smaller 720p screen. Either way the whole thing will fill your line of sight and nothing more.

That opens up other issues with VR, of course, but pixel density won't be an effect in that way, only resolution would.

And since stylized-graphics VR demos look decent enough on an iPhone 7 (750p), I don't think VR is totally out of the question, it just wouldn't be anything special.

 

[foltzie1]

Pixel density has no factor on the screen door effect if we're comparing the same resolution. A larger 720p would just sit farther from the face than a smaller 720p screen. Either way the whole thing will fill your line of sight and nothing more.

That opens up other issues with VR, of course, but pixel density won't be an effect in that way, only resolution would.

And since stylized-graphics VR demos look decent enough on an iPhone 7 (750p), I don't think VR is totally out of the question, it just wouldn't be anything special.

Well said (written?).

It won't be as good as an PS VR, Vive, Rift, or Hololens, but it may well be good enough if Nintendo opts to release a Virtual Man (tm Ben Heck) headset.

 

[KingSnake]

I wonder if we get another Nvidia blog post today.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I wonder if we get another Nvidia blog post today.

They are the manufacturer, they should be pushing this thing as much as possible. I don't care whether its up to Nintendo to sell the product, they partnered with Nvidia over someone they have been going with with the GC, they don't have the right to stay silent about what they've done in terms of manufacturing

 

[Polygonal_Sprite]

Pixel density has no factor on the screen door effect if we're comparing the same resolution. A larger 720p would just sit farther from the face than a smaller 720p screen. Either way the whole thing will fill your line of sight and nothing more.

That opens up other issues with VR, of course, but pixel density won't be an effect in that way, only resolution would.

And since stylized-graphics VR demos look decent enough on an iPhone 7 (750p), I don't think VR is totally out of the question, it just wouldn't be anything special.

I enjoyed the simple VR games on my old iPhone 5c. People saying VR isn't possible for Nintendo who are known for using older hardware to provide new experiences are being too closed minded. No one is saying it's going to rival PSVR visuals but they can certainly do some interesting things with VR even with Switch's limited resolution.

Who knows they could have went with a 1080p screen at the last minute.

 

[Cow Mengde]

Are you guys ready for today? In 45 minutes time, it'll be the moment of truth. We will come away from the event just as clueless about the specs of the machine as we are now! I can't wait!

 

[prag16]

All resistive screens I've seen have a slightly recessed screen area, or raised border around them. No sign of that here.

Nah there have been various phones that have had flush resistive screens. HTC made a few several years back, at the minimum.

Still expecting capacitive here though.

 

[jroc74]

Isn't that a misconception?

I dont think so.

IMO just based on specs If they were phones they woulda been considered low end.