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RUMOR: NX more powerful than PS4, Splatoon/Mario Maker ports in development

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Doctre81

Member
I have been manually refreshing all with the mouse all these years...

smh.

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10k

Banned
Like last time, I'm using the tiered rumors where a T1 means one source told me, T2 means two, Tier 3 means 3, and Tier 4 means four or more (there are no T4 this time). I will reiterate this, I am not the source of any of this information. I am simply passing along what I heard. It should all be taken with a grain of salt and not be taken as gospel. Don't cry and flame me if by June none of this is true.

Nirolak told me to contextualize the rumors and was a fan of the tiered system, so I did it. Please read it through and enjoy. Feel free to debate it, get mad at it, get hyped by it or whatever, just know things like these can change at any time and may never come to fruition exactly how it's worded.

T3 Rumors

The NX gimmick. I uh....was told not to post this part by some people. As usual, take it with a grain of salt (although I don't know why I would be warned if it was false) I'm not under any NDA though, and well, it could end up being false. But I was told a variation of this by three different sources. I don't believe they have a reason to lie to me. Here goes....

The NX is going to have a screen controller (whether it's optional or standard I don't know) and can be used anywhere to play your home console games. The controller itself will not have any processing capabilities, it'll essentially be a dummy vita. It'll likely have basic OS functions to access the NX console from anywhere, like a tiny cpu. Nintendo will use enhanced Wii U gamepad streaming tech, and allow the controller to be taken anywhere, connect to the NX console at home (likely through Wi-fi or personal hotspots and the NX console will likely have to be in stand-by mode). Basically, it's remote play built into the box and won't require a $200 add-on to experience it. This is likely what Kimishima meant in his interview with Sankei (http://www.sankei.com/west/news/160103/wst1601030012-n1.html) "different way to play with a dedicated machine" and the whole "new way to experience games" mantra that's been going around Nintendo PR.

Speculation: Nintendo could also sell personal hotspot usb adapters to get internet anywhere and plug either directly into the controller or a wall outlet to not drain the controller battery. The Supplementary Computing Devices may actually be portable hotspot devices with chips in it to boost the quality of the stream. (Maybe the NX will be called the Stream, a speculated final name during the WUST's).

Note: This does not mean there will not be a handheld. This isn't meant to be a replacement for the handheld as there will still be limitations and the controller won't have a full OS or the capability for physical game media (discs or cartridges). The needs of a handheld won't be fully met with this feature. It's just a nice add-on.

T2 Rumors

Luigi's Mansion 3 is in development for NX. This rumor gained popularity awhile ago from Geno but this isn't my source. This was a T1 to start but today I got another source to give some info on it. Two different sources have told me that it is in development for NX, and one source said it's being developed by Next Level Games, who is big enough to do this and Federation Force at the same time. One source said it started as a Wii U game but after the disappointing performance of the Wii U and the scheduled release date for the game being late in the console's cycle, Nintendo decided to switch development over to NX. (basically the same situation as Zelda for Wii U, but no word on if this game will also get a Wii U version). The other source said it's a pretty big deal (he didn't elaborate if he meant Nintendo is making it a big deal or his workplace is). To support this, http://www.nintendolife.com/news/20..._on_a_wii_u_title_then_stealth_edits_the_post
an employee stealth edited his post last year.


T1 Rumors

The NX will use a custom Polaris-like GPU. Likely will be on a FinFET 14nm fabrication node. The source told me it's on the same architecture with heavy customizations of course . It will contain the feature set of Polaris. It is "marginally better than the PS4" and theoretically could be "2x the power of PS4 GPU". I asked about PS4K being rumored to have a gpu 2x as powerful as the OG PS4 and how the theoretical performance of the NX would be and was told "Theoretically it could be close to the PS4K rumored specs". Of course, we know nothing of Polaris or the PS4K specs, but he gave that metric.

I'm going to paraphrase here, but one comment from a source about the power of NX was that "Dev's could port over a PS4 game easily and have power to spare. Even the most demanding ones". My own theory is any game that dips below 30fps on PS4 will likely stay at 30fps on NX and maybe have some enhanced effects.

One feature he highly touted, which improves performance greatly in games, especially graphically demanding ones such as AAA open world games is Primitive Discard Accelerator. A TechGAF member described it as
"designed to perform culling of triangles before they hit the geometry processor. Effectively, what this means is that it runs through the triangles (also known as primitives) as they hit the GPU and tests them to see if they're actually going to be visible on the screen or not (with a variety of tests), then throws out the triangles that aren't going to be on screen (i.e. discards them or culls them).

Now, this is a good thing, pretty much regardless of the type of game. Attempting to render triangles that aren't actually going to end up in the final image is a waste of GPU resources, and preventing that would be a pretty good thing. One of EA's Frostbite developers actually just gave a talk on this at GDC (PDF link, very technical), where they describe the software-based culling methods used in Frostbite. In their test scene, they could throw out over 75% of triangles before hitting the geometry engine, resulting in an almost 20% performance improvement. AMD have also recently released their own software-based culling solution, GeometryFX, which like Frostbite runs as software on the GPU's shader units. Hence, they're obviously interested in the problem of triangle culling, so it wouldn't be surprising if they developed a hardware unit to perform it more efficiently."
This was great to hear, but I asked if it was possible to get this feature set on 28nm GPU's since those are more established and cheaper than 14nm and there isn't a yield risk on those.
"Well, from a purely theoretical perspective, any "Polaris exclusive" feature could be adapted to a 28nm process. Work on Polaris had likely been going on for about a year or so when work on NX started, so it is in theory possible that they said to AMD "Hey, we like this primitive discard accelerator thing, can we have it on our planned 28nm chip?". The issue with this is that Nintendo would have had to fork over quite a lot of extra R&D dollars to get a functional block "back-ported" to 28nm, compared to components from existing GCN 1.2 chips, which were already ready to go for TSMC's 28nm process. The other issue is the assumption that the primitive discard accelerator is single functional block that can be just pulled wholesale out of Polaris. It could be an integral part of the geometry processor or command processor, or the manner in which it operates could depend on the newer geometry or command processors in Polaris. This would mean that you'd need to port the bulk of Polaris's improvements back to 28nm, or do a substantial amount of redesign work on the primitive discard accelerator to get it to work in a GCN 1.2-era chip (either of these would add substantially more R&D cost).

It's impossible to say how much it would cost them in the scheme of things, but it does seem like an unusual added expense over just taking existing GCN 1.2 tech, which would still be a generation ahead of the competition."

So with this quote, while it's not confirmed, it is highly likely Nintendo is using a 14nm Polaris GPU in the NX based off of the expensive nature of using PDA or any Polaris feature set and putting it on a 28nm chip.
If Nintendo does go with 14nm, it is very likely they will be taking a loss on each NX sold, but we don't know the dealings AMD have with Nintendo. Once source told me "AMD may have been desperate enough for the business to offer Nintendo, say, the first year's supply at a fixed price, to reduce Nintendo's yield risk. They may also have specifically pushed Nintendo into a 14nm Polaris-based chip, as it would allow Nintendo to also use a Polaris-based 14nm chip for the handheld. This would not only be a big business win for AMD in itself (Nintendo's handhelds typically sell a lot more than their home consoles), but it would also big a big PR win for them, by showing their ability to compete in the ultra-low TPD sector, which is a market they've made pretty much no traction in up until now."
.

So 14nm is still likely in 2016 and Nintendo could still sell it at a reasonable price and not lose too much money or even break even.

tl;dr The NX GPU is using features that are debuting on the Polaris chip, and is therefore heavily speculated to be a Polaris chip, as that would work well in a handheld too and help AMD prove they can make low wattage chips with good performance for small devices. (GCN 1.3, Vulkan, Primitive Discard Accelerator, etc)

Nintendo is using Vulkan with NX. This goes hand in hand with using a Polaris-based GPU, and goes with the announcement of Nintendo joining Kronos. But the dev I spoke to about the GPU, who is porting a PS4 game to NX said Vulkan is not ready yet (as of the 2015 December SDK, should be an update in May) and they are using a variation of the PS4 API, GMNX, until Vulkan is ready. Nintendo providing some nice tools like GMNX to help devs port from PC, XBox and PS4 to NX.

Most dev kits won't be given until Nintendo formally reveals the NX. As my previous post indicated, Nintendo is none too happy with the leaks and is keeping things on lockdown. Outside of close partners and internal teams, most devs are using SDK's until the NX reveal. Not a big deal, but I was told specs are pretty much final as of now, and the May update will likely be for the final spec sheet and not target specs.

MercurySteam has a dev kit and is making an already announced game for the NX. The only announced game they have is Raiders of the Broken Planet, currently under development for PS4, XB1 and PC. This is likely it. (Take this one as a T0.5).

Final Fantasy XV on NX. My single source on this said he's heard more of his sources mention it's coming to NX. No idea when. I pressed for FFVIIR but nobody has heard about it. Gaf's very own mod Kagari hinted that Sony may have co-funded it and it may never get released outside of PS4 and PC (like Street Fighter V).

NX will likely launch at different times per region. Only heard this from one source but it does make sense if the NX does use 14nm chips, as there's a risk of not having enough of those chips ready on shelves for holiday 2016.

No regions were specified, but one would assume with the slow adoption of consoles in Japan, and the popularity of handhelds over there, the NX will launch in the west first like some past Nintendo consoles (consoles are more popular outside of Japan). Likely North America and Europe.

There are lots of NX games in development. Once source told me to post this so I won't edit it at all
"And you can quote me on this on GAF too: "I think NX software output is going to blow away Wii U. There's a LOT of games in development. I don't know if we'll see all of them at E3, since a lot of Wii U projects weren't announced until January 2013, but I'm very impressed so far with what I'm hearing."

New IP are being developed. I asked this because I noticed some complaints about how there were no leaks about new IP and NX was looking like another Mario/Zelda factory with a bunch of remasters and ports. The source said "I'm not allowed to give specifics, but that's a sure bet."

Now if you'll excuse me, two well dressed Japanese men are at my door.
 

MuchoMalo

Banned
It's not as if Nintendo would divulge the specs anyways.

The problem is that we don't even know what type of hardware it is. Forget what's in it.

If it has Polaris though, I think they'll say it this time around. I doubt that it'll have it, but chances are that if it does, AMD pushed for it and will want to use it to help them with marketing.

EDIT: I'm going to ignore the T1 rumors. Also, to be honest, I think you should have listened to those people who told you about the gimmick. It would be nice to have some kind of surprise.

I'm actually hoping that this is all fake now, since it sounds like $500-600 console.
 

Kouriozan

Member
Thanks for the post.
T3 is interesting, I love Off-TV play and it's like an evolution of it.
About the different release time, I fear the worse for EU, Shibata-san, save us!
 

Kouriozan

Member
New IP are being developed. I asked this because I noticed some complaints about how there were no leaks about new IP and NX was looking like another Mario/Zelda factory with a bunch of remasters and ports. The source said "I'm not allowed to give specifics, but that's a sure bet."
I feel like we'll see a bit more "garage projects" like Splatoon in the future.
 

wheapon

Member
I can't help but feel disappointed by the possibility of another screen-controller system. I'm still hoping the gimmick this time is a bit more interesting.
 

georly

Member
Cool info, thanks tenkay.

Really hope LM3 is a return to form, if true. LM2's mission-based design made sense for a handheld, but it wasn't the sprawling zelda/metroid-lite that I enjoyed about LM1 on the cube.

The fact that he has link sources for all of his rumors make me think he is literally just guess expounding on existing rumors.

I doubt tenkay is making anything up, but it's always possible his sources are. I believe he's just reiterating what his sources are telling him.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
It'll likely have basic OS functions to access the NX console from anywhere, like a tiny cpu. Nintendo will use enhanced Wii U gamepad streaming tech, and allow the controller to be taken anywhere, connect to the NX console at home (likely through Wi-fi or personal hotspots and the NX console will likely have to be in stand-by mode). Basically, it's remote play built into the box and won't require a $200 add-on to experience it. T


Hmm. PS4 remote play doesn't work super well for me even on local wifi, I wonder if Nintendos will be any better or we'll have a wide spectrum of experiences based on different home networking setups. Even 720P streaming chunked out on me with the PS4 going straight to the router from a powerline and a 15" rMBP getting a 117Mbps signal on wifi.

They could use a newer codec and better encoding chip (1080p plox) I suppose, and the supplementary wifi extenders are interesting (but in the speculation section)
 

BY2K

Membero Americo
"And you can quote me on this on GAF too: "I think NX software output is going to blow away Wii U. There's a LOT of games in development. I don't know if we'll see all of them at E3, since a lot of Wii U projects weren't announced until January 2013, but I'm very impressed so far with what I'm hearing."

That sounds like something Emily Rogers would say.
 
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