MoogleWizard
Member
I know next to nothing about hardware, my question would be: will this hardware allow for good AA? That was my biggest gripe with Wii U graphics, especially in Mario Kart, the jaggies are hideous.
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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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th3sicknness
Member
The question is does Nintendo care about AA?
Schnozberry
Member
Nvidia's FXAA implementation is pretty close to free, so I bet you'll see it a lot more than you did on the Wii U. Portable mode, on the other hand...
MoogleWizard
Member
Yeah, that would be the better question. I had the impression that some levels in 3D World had AA, or was I imagining this?
Shogmaster
Member
Portable mode and docked mode has the EXACT SAME INNER CHASSIS FOOTPRINT. Nothing magical about its docked mode other than luxury of not worrying about the battery life.
...and having the fan increase in speed and not having to power the screen.
SM3DW was one of the very few Wii U games that had some kind of AA. Breath of the Wild is the same.
It's all about the roles a device can play. Kinda like convertible PCs.
Shogmaster
Member
Did I miss the announcement of Switch transforming into this thing when it's docked? What are you trying to say?
Shogmaster
Member
yes, those things impact the battery.
Shogmaster
Member
Switch would perfectly do both roles just as well even if they didn't concoct a dock and only gave you cables for the TV out and power cord. The dock is for simplicity and convenience, not for additional functionality. If the dock had additional GPU or fan, you would have a point, but as it is now, it's no more hybrid than every damn Android mobile device out there.
At least some games had AA in 2D mode.
The problem with this problem though is the fact that most people don't even know a Shield TV exists or what it is. Console warriors online might know, or dig it up, but most people don't know and don't care and have no idea who Nvidia are. All they care about is whether it plays Nintendo games, and more importantly with regards to the Switch, that you can play on your TV or on the go seamlessly.
Yeah these leaked specs are a bit disappointing but when it comes down to it people are going to flock to the device or shun it based on Nintendo's ability to market the hybrid nature of it and the games they have in development for it and how steadily they can deliver new, desired games throughout its life. The fact that it is underpowered compared to other devices is really irrelevant as long as the core concept is seen as desirable and it has compelling software to back it up.
Making you aware that there is already a portable using a Tegra X1 running at higher GPU clocks than Switch docked and not halving the CPU clock and without a fan.
Being portable doesn't excuse anything.
The current clocks on TX1 on Switch also don't explain the necessity of a fan.
So stop inventing excuses.
That's a tablet with the X1 clocked higher than the docked Switch.
Yes but most portables/tablets don't have a fan at all. It's a big difference.
th3sicknness
Member
I would imagine if they could get free FXAA and run games at the native resolution of 1080p we wouldnt as many jaggies (or fuzzy images).
It's all sorts of ridiculous how well those textures hold up, there's so much detail in that snow texture that simply isn't visible on a 3DS screen lolIQ has nothing to do with that. As for models, yes they were lower poly, the game actually had to push more. But the way it looked ? Definitely better. As for 3D World... come on, that was barely an FXAA equivalent. Nintendo not caring about IQ isn't new.
The simple artstyle helps to hide all its shortcomings
Here's how 3D Land looks when running at higher internal res:
TAA is barely different in terms of performance cost and it looks massively better. If they can nail a good balance between TAA and sharpening (to counter the blurriness) their games will look ridiculously clean and sharp. The jump in Zelda for example would be massive, iq would be *close* to those famous bullshots.
Skittzo0413
Member
Honestly they're even better than some of the BotW ground textures. Not that that's in any way a fair comparison due to BotW being a massive game with a massive landscape object but it's interesting to note anyway.
Shogmaster
Member
Pixel can throttle down 15 minutes into a game and Google won't give two shits about the game experience being ruined.. Nintendo won't have that luxury with the Switch.
EDIT: Why the fuck am I keep defending the Switch and Nintendo to it's own crazy fandom? This is stupid. I'm done. You guys can bury it for all I care. Go on and rain on your own parade. I'm tired of saving your asses from your ridiculous expectations.
PdotMichael
Banned
What happened with "3D mode will hide jaggies" GAF?
Well, these are very small tiled textures, they just did a very good job at masking the tiling, but look close enough and you can see repeating patterns all over, BotW's textures are probably larger and as you said, open world, have to make sacrifices somewhere
Wasn't it the opposite? Some games used a form of super sampling for 2D mode to reduce jaggies. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask straight up got better texture filtering in 2D mode as well. That one singular guy with an opinion doesn't represent the entire damn forum either, no one does, I really don't like the way some people go "GAF thinks this and that", it's a forum, not a person, it's not a hive-mind lol
Skittzo0413
Member
Thraktor had posted in the Digital Foundry that he couldn't really find much information on the Pixel C's throttling, and what he did find seemed to suggest it was throttled a very, very small amount. Do you have any source about the level of throttling or how quickly/often it does?
Regarding the BotW landscape textures, based on my limited experiences with landscape texturing I really believe that it's just a matter of some spots needing a touchup rather than the textures we've seen being held back by the hardware. So more of a dev time issue than a hardware limitations issue.
Do you have any source for this?
Shogmaster
Member
Do your own research. I'm done trying to bolster this thing to its supposed fans. I don't think I give a shit anymore.
They'll probably fix that in time for release, it's 6 months away if LKD is to be believed about this (and not less than 3 anyway, even if it was a launch title). I think these are the last things they touch up in the development process, and Nintendo games have a long history of looking better in their final version. Uncharted 4 is a good recent example of this as well, the final version looks way better than the clearly unfinished one they showed back at the PSX.
Cow Mengde
Banned
Nintendo came out with the first console that supports AA. It's just that it became such a resource hog, that they didn't make it a priority after that.
Skittzo0413
Member
Yeah and I think this type of thing is greatly exacerbated when it's an open world game you're talking about, specifically one as enormous as this. There's no magic button you can press to fix every stretched texture in the world- you have to actually go through it bit by bit to find any weird artifacts. Even on Scorpio it wouldn't get any easier.
Considering their first goal in QA is to fix actual logic-related bugs I think this type of thing will only see improvement close to the very end of development like you said.
calc84maniac
Member
I just want to say that I, for one, appreciate your groundedness. Which is very rare on all sides of the Switch discussion.
I love TAA. Or TXAA. I wish that would be the method on all switch games.
Shogmaster
Member
Appreciate that but I really hope I'm not the exception, otherwise Nintendo will have a tough time with the Switch. I do think that it's a weird NeoGAF fanatical bubble having this negative reaction to the leaked specs and not the majority.
Not a single point you've tried to bring up today wasn't already used as an argument by somebody else. I don't understand what you were trying to prove as most predictions in this thread were already quite conservative.
Skittzo0413
Member
I don't even think the majority of this GAF bubble cares all that much about the Switch's hardware just for the sake of hardware- it's all about how easy/likely it could be for multiplats to come over.
Shogmaster
Member
Beerman462
Member
Pixel C is 9.5" x 7" (10.2" screen)
Switch is guessed to be 5.7" x 3.2" (6.2" screen)
That means a lot smaller battery and less room for passive cooling. Also the Pixel C lasts about 5 hours running a CPU benchmark. Now that's the CPU alone, but it's also running full speed the entire time which won't necessarily be the case when gaming, but you will also have to use more GPU when gaming than you would during a CPU bench. The review was on Anandtech and they tried running some game benches, but the Pixel C wouldn't run them for some reason.
Either way the Switch will have a much smaller foot print than a Pixel C. My math isn't great, but the Pixel is 66.5 sqin the Switch will likely be 18.24 sqin that means the battery in the pixel could be up to three times larger than the Switch. It actually kind of works out that the un-docked mode is 307MHz or a little under a third of the Pixel C clock.
Three times the battery/clock or 1/3rd...Half-Life 3 confirmed Switch exclusive.
Shogmaster
Member
Multiplats won't come over easily. Get to terms with that now. And that won't determine Switch success. It's apples and oranges. It's not Wii U. It's a portable system.
calc84maniac
Member
And I don't see why people are freaking out over this when developers and insiders have been saying for months that ports will be possible.
Skittzo0413
Member
You're forgetting that battery space also takes thickness into account, so volume is the important number, not area. The Switch looks quite a bit thicker than the Pixel C. Then on the other hand the Pixel C is made of mostly aluminum making it much better at dissipating heat, so your point likely still works.
The Switch's success will be defined by Nintendo's consolidated first party output, along with the same type of support the 3DS saw. However, I'm very hopeful that- if the Switch does take off rather well- we'll begin to see a good amount of multiplats come out on it because I would much rather have them on the Switch than any other console or PC. The form factor is just so much better for my gaming habits.
Yeah this is why I'm still rather hopeful.
ShadowFox08
Member
New 3ds
Gotdatmoney
Member
It's a hardware speculation thread. If you dont want to source any claims or debate/talk tech why are you even here? What are you so mad about?
You have a problem. You can't have an discussion with arguments without bursting into flames.
You made a statement that is undocumented. I've read about Pixel C before this discussion and nowhere the throttling was brought into discussion as a big problem. The burden of proving this undocumented statement is on you. If you have nothing to back it up, I will just categorise it as bullshit and move on.
You keep saying that you're done and you don't give a shit but you keep having over the top reactions to a normal discussion and to a very simple and not offensive question like "do you have a source for that?".
On the other hand Pixel C is much thinner (so Switch can compensates in the thickness of the battery) and has a bigger and higher resolution screen which for sure is more power consuming than Switch's. And all these are a matter of design and decisions in the end. But saying that it couldn't have been better because it's portable is plain wrong.
calc84maniac
Member
I think it's fairly self-evident that throttling in a gaming-focused device would be a very bad thing, for both developers and consumers. A quality control nightmare.
Beerman462
Member
The Switch is a little bit thicker, but not by much, maybe 20%. The CPU is also half clock in the switch so there will be some savings there as well.
It's pretty obvious the handheld mode is the base target and console mode is just the easiest multiplication of that target.
Likely not much thicker, but it will help.
You have to define better in this case. Nintendo could have taken the base X1 unchanged and shoved it into the Switch and had 2hrs of battery or even less. Then what do they do with docked mode? Overclock the X1? Not sure there is much to be gained there. NVIDIA didn't use the 20nm on their GPUs due to power leakage. So you would have parity between docked and mobile for what? 1080p mobile, more effects and 720p docked and mobile?
If speculation is true you have what is basically a portable Wii U@720p with 5+ hours of battery and a 1080p Wii U with possibly better frame rate when docked. If they went Pascal or shrank the X1 they could gain a bit more power and efficiency, but NVIDIA has to fulfill their contract so these are the way to keep prices down.
I'm talking about a source for how bad the throttling on Pixel C is. Because he used a hyperbole (15 minutes into a game) to try make a point. And if you read Pixel C reviews and benchmarks you don't find this mention as a big issue.
Nothing about the specs surprises me, this is Nintendo after all.
What is surprising is the unusually positive comments from companies. Developers were already leaking concerns about the Wii U at this point in the release cycle. Yet here we have Bethesda and From Software being more than polite in their comments. Is the portable console gimmick that good?
What is surprising is the unusually positive comments from companies. Developers were already leaking concerns about the Wii U at this point in the release cycle. Yet here we have Bethesda and From Software being more than polite in their comments. Is the portable console gimmick that good?
Shogmaster
Member
I'm calling it right now: most of the ports for Switch will be from 360/PS3/Wii U, not XBO/PS4. It's just too much hassle for devs to accommodate the Switch as a part of a multiplat effort for a new game. The RAM count and the GPU discrepancy will force that reality.
Trimming down a game for Switch will require hiring of an outside team to do the port, away from the effort of the main dev team, in which case the issue becomes justifying such budget. If Switch sales are high enough, such efforts will be made as was with Wii and 360/PS3, but true multiplat development for Switch along with XBO and PS4 is very unlikely, even with use of UE4.
If anything, the fact that the Switch as a portable is so damn good is kinda working against it because it's so much closer to the current gen systems than likes of 3DS ever was with 360/PS3. It's making the fans make huge leaps in expectations.
Trimming down a game for Switch will require hiring of an outside team to do the port, away from the effort of the main dev team, in which case the issue becomes justifying such budget. If Switch sales are high enough, such efforts will be made as was with Wii and 360/PS3, but true multiplat development for Switch along with XBO and PS4 is very unlikely, even with use of UE4.
If anything, the fact that the Switch as a portable is so damn good is kinda working against it because it's so much closer to the current gen systems than likes of 3DS ever was with 360/PS3. It's making the fans make huge leaps in expectations.
Skittzo0413
Member
Basically, looking at the design of the device and their decision making, it seems likely that they lowered the clocks to portable mode to an exact speed where power draw and performance balanced for their ideal battery life. Hopefully 5-8 hours. Then when docked you give developers 2.5x the GPU power for the resolution bump, and a bump in some effects. That all makes perfect sense.
The only problem with reading the clock speeds this way is the presence of the fan. It's certainly possible the fan isn't run in portable mode, but given the docked clock speeds and what we know about comparable device (Pixel C) it still seems very unlikely that the Switch would need active cooling when docked to avoid throttling. The throttling for the Pixel C likely had to do with the battery moreso than heat, considering what we've seen from even the Shield TV in terms of heat generation.
So why did they include a fan in a portable? That's not something that they would have done lightly- it's a moving part in an otherwise completely solid state device, takes up a lot of space and adds a good deal to the BoM of the device. I think this is really the pickle we have now.
Maybe it could be due to things like 4x A53s running the OS, or just in case they want to bump up those clock speeds in the future. But it's still an odd decision when it seems like it could have been avoided.
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