The Switch combines lower powered A57 (a soc from..2012 on a 20nm process) with a Maxwell GPU (9+ years old at this point)
Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.
That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds.
I would instantly buy this, we would be looking at mobile machines more powerful than a PS4 Pro which is imho more than enough for the type of console.
Nintendo doesn't even need to build it on the latest state of the art TSMC process, even the 5nm should be enough.
All they have to do to keep me and my kids as customers through the next gen is commit to back compat with our Switch library and build something that can run their big-budget first party titles like Zelda at 720p60 handheld / 1080p60 docked. So sort of 2.5x what we’ve got now. Spend the rest of the TDP budget on pushing out the battery life. Hardware upscaling for bonus points only. Job done.
I 100% agree. This is what I was hoping they would maybe surprise-announce just before TotK's release, but my hopes were too high. I'm excited to play it, but $70 for a game with PS3-era visuals at 30fps while everything else has modern visuals at 60-120fps with various techniques is a tragedy.
Yea, they also added a 20fps limiter in certain cases when the hardware is pushed to its limits. Super unfortunate, and honestly, I'd be hard pressed to believe that it helps.
Nonetheless, the game performs loads better than BotW ever did. Quite a feat for such old metal.
>Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.
They've been working on successor for 4+ years now. That's how long new console cycles are now. PS5 dev cycle stated 2 years after PS4 released.
I mean, that might be gaming industry standard, but they should be able to do better than that given that the Switch is essentially just a fairly standard ARM SoC-based tablet, with some joycons attached. Phone and tablet manufacturers are constantly pushing new skews.
> Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.
Correction, Nintendo has more specifically thrived on cheap hardware, which is often correlated with 'underpowered' but does not mean the same necessarily. The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.
> Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games?
These are not the only (though they are important) factors to consider. With a portable platform, battery life, size, weight, heat, all matter much more than with a stationary console. A 2x more powerful Switch with the same power envelope as the original would be able to play games for longer using the same battery due to being more efficient. If you're playing a significantly demanding game, that might mean the difference between only being able to do short sessions on battery, and being able to play for a satisfying amount of time. Or it might mean that you can play it with the screen at a higher brightness, and thus make the game accessible in more environments.
And if the games are have performance issues, having more powerful hardware can make those problems less frequent and more bearable. You can argue that gamedevs need to do a better job, but that doesn't eliminate reality where most people just want to play the game and don't particularly care about the specifics of how to get the best experience.
> The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.
I'm not sure why you mention the controller or how to measure its power, but the console itself was definitely underpowered compared to PS3 or X360. Heck, it was comparable to 6th rather than 7th gen.
That's my point exactly - you can't measure it's power, yet that one feature made the Wii sell like hotcakes, and caused both Microsoft and Sony to try making their own versions.
Always is a bit strong isn't it? Prior to the Wii their consoles tended to be similar to their contemporaries in processing power.
I certainly experienced areas in BOTW which took a heavy FPS hit and it sounds like TOTK is similar. Such an FPS drop does take me out of the game so if the console was powerful enough to avoid that then you could argue it would allow more fun games
While their older consoles weren't as far away from modern stuff as the Switch, Nintendo wasn't often the more powerful console. Well-designed with good developer buy-in and incredibly strong first party titles, but not really pushing the envelope in terms of raw performance.
The GameCube was the weakest hardware-wise between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and ~~Dreamcast~~ edit: guess not the Dreamcast, but definitely behind Xbox and PS2. ~~The Nintendo 64 was weaker than the PlayStation or Sega Saturn~~ edit: was wrong here, N64 was definitely the stronger console of this generation.The Super Nintendo had less computing capacity than the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Even when it came to handhelds, the GameBoy was often much weaker hardware. Compare the GameBoy to the Lynx on a spec sheet and it's clear which is better. Actually hold and play both of them and you can see why Atari doesn't exist anymore. The Game Gear was practically the current gen home console in a handheld form and could even get a TV tuner attachment before the GameBoy Color was even announced. Later, the Genesis Nomad was a full blown Genesis console in handheld form. Good games, cheaper hardware, better pocketability led to Nintendo dominating that market despite usually having the weakest hardware around.
> Always is a bit strong isn't it? Prior to the Wii their consoles tended to be similar to their contemporaries in processing power.
Yup, you could say Nintendo always thrived on underpowered (compared to competition) hardware.
NES was twice less powerful than SMS;
GameBoy didn't even have a color display;
SNES vs SMD similarity as NES vs SMS;
GBC was weaker than Neo Geo Pocket or WonderSwan;
GBA didn't have competition (although, if we count N-Gage...);
Wii had hardware from previous generation;
NDS was way worse in raw numbers that PSP;
3DS analogically with PS Vita;
Switch isn't even comparable to PS4/X1, let alone PS5/XSX;
What all of those Nintendo consoles have in common? Being their the most successful.
Whereas when Nintendo focused more on being on par in hardware power during 5th gen. (N64) and 6th gen. (GameCube), they didn't sold nearly as much as other generations.
The exception to the pattern are Virtual Boy and Wii U. The former was poorly designed then sacrificed as "filler"; the later flopped due to bad marketing (and naming) + poor decision on betting on "casuals".
In conclusion: as we can see, there is a clear trend, not a rule, but a trend nevertheless.
Yes. Movement in an action game feels inherently better at 60fps than at 30fps. Metroid Zero Mission (2004), and Metroid Dread (2021) both feel extremely crisp and precise compared to Metroid: Samus Returns (2017) which runs at 30fps.
The biggest complaint that Bloodborne gets, outside of not being available on PC, is that it's locked to 30 fps.
I can't think of a single reason where a game at 60fps would be more fun at 30fps.
Might've worded it poorly. Just meant that a game running at 60fps is always better than that same game running at 30fps. In the worst case scenario, they're the same game.
Depends, some might be willing to make that trade. I think most consoles are making that option of performance or visuals these days. As an option, letting the user choose seems to be more the norm these days.
If i'm playing plugged in I would want better visuals (as the switch allows with the dock) the primary reason being more power available.
A lot of games get limited to 30 fps (and even dip lower) on the switch which makes them unplayable for me. I don't care about graphics at all, I'd rather play in some extremely low poly/low texture mode at 60 fps (ideally higher) than at 30 fps.
If they released a new version with a 120hz display that could actually run games at 120hz, I'd be ecstatic. I don't even mind the 720p resolution, it's fine on such a small screen in my opinion.
That's not really an issue for the stakeholders. Zelda is probably the only game that has this problem. Most hits - Mario Kart, Smash, Splatoon - run at 60FPS.
On the other hand, the 5th and 7th best selling Switch games (Pokemon SS and SV) were notorious for being unable to maintain 15fps. A lot of the workarounds made the game legitimately awful looking (downscaling shadows on the fly for demanding scenes, very reduced draw distances, slowing down and synchronizing background animations to slideshow speeds during battle).
It seems like the Switch is unable to have more than a handful of moderately complex animated objects at a time. It's a problem for Pokemon because they wanted to show a lot of different Pokemon doing different things, it's a problem in Breath of the Wild with just too many trees, and it's certainly a problem with all the Dynasty Warrior clones because the whole appeal of those games is hack and slashing through a big hordes of enemies.
Have you played games at 30 and 60 FPS ? I'm not one of those competitive 120+Hz gamers but try setting your desktop refresh rate to 30Hz - you can see mouse trailing and text delay while typing.
30FPS for an interactive experience is really bad. And them saying some regions are locked to 20 FPS - holly shit that's a slideshow.
I used to game on budget PCs when I was a kid, I rarely got to play at 60 FPS, but going down to 30 was just "OK I'm not playing that".
Yes. After like 30 seconds it's barely noticeable unless the animation/physics are tied to the framerate. Some genres benefit from it but I'm not sure Zelda really needs it. Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS on N64, not in SOME demanding scenes, everywhere. And it's still a beloved, fantastic game.
I also regularly play games capped at 30 FPS because it greatly increases battery life in the Steam Deck in a lot of titles and not everything really needs it.
>Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS on N64, not in SOME demanding scenes, everywhere.
And I used to find a lot of old games immersive - but I can't play them nowdays.
Things don't exist in a vacuum and my experience is impacted by what other experiences I've had to compare it to. There's a threshold in graphics/voice acting/etc. that just makes the games I spent weeks on as a kid not interesting at all (even for the sake of nostalgia).
I used to work on 800x600 CRT monitor with 256 colors and today I get a headache when I have to work on a low pixel density cheap LCD.
The problem with "SOME demanding scenes" is that inconsistent frametimes are much more noticeable and irritating than a lower, but consistent framerate.
BOTW feels bad in certain areas because rapidly switching from 30->20 causes noticeable stuttering. Even once it settles you're likely to be aware of animations and interactions behaving differently.
Yes, I make games as a hobby and have done both. I agree with the other commenter about fluctuation in framerate being a bad experience. If I make no changes beyond setting fps from 60 to 30, you can tell the difference in smooth scrolling, etc. However, a consistent 30fps can be just fine as an interactive experience with some thought put into it.
I see this kind of comment on Eurogamer all the time and don’t understand it. 60fps is so much better in every case. I can’t think of a single example of a game that isn’t materially improved as an experience by going from 30 to 60. The effect is far more striking than extra graphical effects. This isn’t cinema where 24fps looks “cinematic” - it’s just plain worse.
It’s 2023. No one is asking for 120fps as a mainstream baseline. 60 is such a sweet spot. It’s time for us to admit that 30 was a compromise for a certain console era that was defined by CPU limitation. If we don’t call bullshit, publishers will keep pumping this stuff out. Look at this week’s disastrous Redfall launch. 30fps on a 12tflop, 8-core Series X. Insanity.
A consistent 30FPS experience really isn't that bad in a lot of games. I'd much rather developers push game design with stuff like big open worlds and cool physics stuff like logs from the tree you just cut roll down the hill than a no risks locked 60 FPS static environment. Poor optimization like what is seen in Redfall or Pokemon Scarlet/Violet is an entirely different problem.
And we're talking about a game running on a 6 year old handheld! Not a CPU beast.
Yeah I’ve been playing TotK with my son all afternoon and I think they’ve done a great job with it - it looks and runs much better than BotW. Pretty remarkable technical achievement I reckon, given the well-known limitations of that machine.
But my point was about where we go from here, in 2023. I’d be disappointed if I couldn’t play this - or a remaster of this, or perhaps its sequel - at 60fps on a next-gen Switch successor, whenever that arrives.
I think there's two separate issues. The first which is your main complaint is the poor performance on modern systems of games. Totally agree, it's a combo of laziness, customer acceptance, and schedule/priorities that leads to it. I'm right with you on the frustration.
Tying into that is why I don't do a blanket 60fps in all cases, which is respecting the player's resources. If I was making a tetris clone, where the block falls at a set step every x milliseconds, all I'm doing is wasting their battery with double the frames.
It's not the framerate itself that bothers me, it's when the framerate drops on demanding scenes. I'd rather have a consistent 30fps than a game constantly fluctuating between 30-60. But even a consistent 30fps is kinda a dream for the Switch, there's plenty of titles where it regularly dips down to 10fps with inconsistent frame time.
Plus the other benefit to faster hardware is decreased loading times. The Switch has a lot of very long loading screens (and elaborate animations/cutscenes to mask background loading) and the PS5 with near instant loading very much increases the fun, because more time is spent playing vs waiting on a loading screen.
Older consoles could get away with much more. There's a Dynasty Warriors style Zelda game on switch called "Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity"[0]. It struggles with the hardware to the point that the choppiness of the frame rate makes the gameplay thoroughly unenjoyable. Even Breath of the wild is infamously laggy in certain areas.
I played Zelda: Breath of the wild through on switch. It was one of the launch titles, and it was fantastic. The slow loading times were the #1 complaint I had about the game. They really broke the immersive experience. Whenever I died, teleported between zones or entered & left shrines the loading time was long enough that I fell briefly out of the zone while playing.
I assume loading times haven't gotten any better for Tears of the kingdom, given the hardware hasn't changed. I'd probably buy the new zelda game instantly but when I think back to breath of the wild, my strongest visual memory is that black and red loading screen.
Something to note is Nintendo makes profits on their hardware where as the other two (Microsoft & Sony) typically take a loss on their hardware, until about midway point of the console's life.
I believe the other two make up the loss on the hardware with licensing rights on the software side of things.
I liked playing their AAA ports like the witcher 3 on the go. A more powerfull console would make such ports easier, so I would hope to see more of them.
It rather have a switch than can play nintendo games plus some AAA games, than a steamdeck or something like it.
i would rather have a larger catalog of games that are like the 2d metroid game or the remake of links awakening. games that remind me of playing my gameboy but without the limitations of the gameboy hardware nor the limitations of user interface and game design from that time.
yeah of course it's not either or, but if i had to choose, i would prefer a larger catalog of those kinds of games. but also i find the nintendo store to be confusing. i basically find games elsewhere then search for them there. none of the recommendations are very useful. so maybe that catalog is there i just dont find it.
There is a big problem with any switch upgrade plan: Current GPU architectures are too different to the original Maxwell GPU arch, so it is impossible for Nintendo to make a better console that is hardware compatible to the switch. The games themselves include low level GPU driver stuff, so they won't run in any other GPU architecture without an emulation layer.
In the past, Nintendo either forgone backwards compatibility completely (Nes->SNes->N64->GC, Wiiu->Switch), or specially built their upgraded consoles to have a low level hardware compatibility mode were it behaves 100% like the old console (Gamecube->Wii, Wii->WiiU, several handlheld upgrades). Today it doesn't make business sense for Nintendo to build a new console without backwards compatibility, and it is impossible technically to build one with low level compatibility. So they are left with the only option of a incompatible console with some partial emulation, which must be a much bigger step that kneecaps the existing switch once announced, so they will take only after the switch starts its decline.
If you crawl back up to the top level of this thread, it's someone pointing out that emulating it on PC is a lot nicer. Nintendo only needs enough emulation to match the Switch 1's performance on their new hardware; anything they get over its original performance is gravy. Plus they have the option of zipping into the games they really care about and putting in special cases for the most performance-intensive stuff.
The Steam Deck, AIUI, more or less at least matches the Switch 1 in emulation. Haven't done anything with it myself.
I don't think emulation is even remotely impossible, and every year it gets easier for them.
Emulation is a lot nicer when it works, but it doesn't most of the time (most games have glitches, and a significant number don't work at all). It is OK for a third party emulator to not offer a perfect experience, not OK for Nintendo itself. It is impossible (not-viable) for Nintendo to create a perfect Switch emulator that works for all titles, that you can just plug a Switch cartridge on the new console and it will guarantee it will work without glitches, there is just too many corner cases.
To sum up, it is impossible for them to make a hardware compatible console, impossible to make a 100% compatible emulator, so the only option is to market it as a completely new console (not backwards compatible by default), then have a small curated list of backwards compatible titles (either thru their "virtual console", or something like Microsoft did going from the original XBox to the 360, where you could put the original game and it would download a patch for the new console, only compatible with a limited list of games). But this limited backwards-compatibility options would create a big break in the Switch lifetime, so not something to be undertaken while the console is still going strong.
I am sorry but I don't buy this. If switch can be 100% emulated on x86 hardware if given enough computing power (and in fact greatly improved with all that residual power unused), it can be run anywhere fast enough. Ie latest Snapdragon must be more than 10x faster in raw cpu power, not even going into graphics. And once you have your hands directly on hardware you can cut a lot of processing middlemen layers. Heck there could be some 'compatibility' chip just for this, literally nobody cares.
People obviously want this and would pay for this.
Its a really strange company, able to produce amazing software but horrible, terrible outdated hardware (ie joycon durability saga) that they stubbornly consider OK in 2023. Its not so much graphics details themselves, they have chosen graphic style well in this case, but ie overall responsiveness of device, FPS etc. We are talking about very well optimized phone thats 10 years old. More and more not so much up to current standards, ie low PFS puts too much strain on eyes.
Emulated Switch games run fluently on a Steam Deck.....
In difference to previous Nindendo consoles the graphics API of the switch is very similar to "normal" PC/Console graphics APIs. Sure somewhat older ones but you can run many "switch old" PC games on modern hardware, if there are problems they often come from areas like DRM. But most switch games don't have DRM additional to what the switch provides...
I mean this similarity is one of the major reasons why there are so many 3rd party games from smaller studios one the Switch. (Through due to the switch hardware being incredibly slow for modern standards this is increasingly no longer the case as it requires small studios to better optimize their games, and while many of this optimizations are not switch specific at all they still are costly for a small studio).
Through there are some problems, one is that there was no (usable) successor for the chip they used.
My guess is:
They originally wanted to bring out a bit faster "switch pro" but due to a combination of there being no (usable) successor to the chip they have in the Switch and COVID and chip shortage and the CPU market stalling wrt. improvements (when the decision was made), and crypto mining making Nvidea not care about making a Chip for Nintendo they decided to skip it and bring out instead just the OLED upgrade. I.e. they skipped the next console directly went to developing the follow up maybe with the hope of bringing it out a year or so earlier.
But now on one hand the generational improvements in the CPU marked stopped stalling on the other hand maybe their follow up has delays due to technical challenges.
But in the end it's probably a financially good decision to just stretch out the life of the Switch. The only risk is that people will stop buying the switch or switch games because it being so slow that it isn't fun anymore. But given that people will still buy the new Zelda and the amount of money they made with the Switch and saved by cutting the development of the hypothetical direct successor that rally doesn't matter to them. It still sucks for the gamer anyway.
Is that how the wii u ran wii games? The 3ds also showed the old ds interface to configure ds games.
I’m not sure if either one actually just dropped a second soc in there though
More or less. The Wii U is architecturally very similar to the Wii, just with a higher clockspeed, a couple of extra cores, more RAM and a better GPU; the Wii in turn is just an overclocked overspecced GameCube. It's possible, through a homebrew application, to load and run GameCube games directly on the WiiU.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'd highly recommend the architecture of consoles series of blog posts[1][2].
That is an option I haven't considered. It would be possible, but a bit pricy. I don't think Nintendo would go this route because they like their hardware cheap, but I don't completely rule out either. Yes, if they go this route, will be much later in the Switch lifetime. They would wait until the Switch sales start showing the end of its life before pulling such a radical upgrade.
no due the the chip they use (more legal complications then anything else)
But also it should not be needed at all. The switch has a older but somewhat "normal/standard" graphics API (and also support actually standard Graphics APIs, especially indi games and similar likely use that one).
My guess is that due to various factors Nintendo decided that it is _financially_ the best decision to extend the Switch lifetime and maybe skip the "follow up console" instead only bringing out the OLED Switch (or change the design of the follow up console).
How come when I upgrade my graphics card on a PC I don't need to upgrade the binary?
When compiling for Nvidia chips there's only one target. I believe all Nvidia chips despite different architectures use the same underlying assembly language. So a cuda binary should work everywhere.
It's not gpu architecture here. Nvidia makes sure that the API to that architecture remains constant. The differences that are happening are high level architectures. Consoles aren't like PCs that follow the same overall architecture. They are usually massively different each generation, with different central chips different board layouts, etc. Etc. Sony use to get really creative with this... I remember the cell architecture was extremely innovative at the time.
However I believe for the most recent generations of playstation and for all Xboxes those consoles have closely followed the PC architecture. Nintendo consoles have yet to do this though, each console is massively different from the PC and each other with the exception of GameCube and Wii u which were largely similar.
> How come when I upgrade my graphics card on a PC I don't need to upgrade the binary?
> When compiling for Nvidia chips there's only one target. I believe all Nvidia chips despite different architectures use the same underlying assembly language. So a cuda binary should work everywhere.
Because on the PC, Nvidia only exposes high level targets for the shaders. Even PTX, the assembly you might be familiar with combined with cuda, isn't actually the device's asm, but instead it gets compiled down to the device's asm using a full compiler. It's poorly named and more a compiler IR than an asm.
People who bought a Switch many years ago are still willing to buy new games. They may not all be willing to replace it so soon however if Nintendo release pretty much the same but with better resolution and framerate and the release of a new one would probably mean the stop of new release on the current gen.
Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.
That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds.
I would instantly buy this, we would be looking at mobile machines more powerful than a PS4 Pro which is imho more than enough for the type of console.
Nintendo doesn't even need to build it on the latest state of the art TSMC process, even the 5nm should be enough.