skywake

Probably going to be called out as a Nintendo shill for this somewhat of a Devil's Advocate comment but just to be clear up front this is obviously not a good thing. I just think this story is somewhat overblown. So with that out of a way, a few thoughts from a resident "Nintendo shill": 1. There's a dock in the box, no matter how valid this complaint is (and it is) for most people it's pretty academic 2. As I understand it they did similar things with the original Switch. It was equally BS then but over time docks eventually supported Switch and.... 3. There are already Switch 2 compatible third party docks and firmware updates for some existing third party docks to support Switch 2 4. The Switch 2 dock technically does support VRR (link, yes, the Verge, I know) it's just not enabled currently. Presumably there were issues in testing which, honestly, maybe fits with this story. Possibly all of this is a result of them doing the minimum viable amount of integration testing to get it out the door? Hopefully a firmware update adds VRR. I'm hopeful it will given they originally claimed VRR support docked before withdrawing it last minute. For context, PS5 added VRR support well over a year after launch and Valve (officially) only supports VRR on the official Dock over Display Port 5. As the video states, the USB-C "standard" is a bit of a nightmare. This example here is pretty egregious but it's not isolated. As a Deck owner who swung and missed with the first third party dock I tried there's a reason why even Valve, a company who actually puts effort into trying to open things up, sells an official dock. One that's not dissimilar in price to the official Nintendo dock. I don't think it should really surprise anyone that Nintendo, who has "Surprise and Delight" and "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" as their two guiding design philosophies, falls short here

Worth pointing out that at this point there is no Switch 2 emulator. There are people claiming that they have made a Switch 2 emulator but the ones I have heard of ended up being literal scams. Opportunists will do what they do I guess. But yeah, I wouldn't trust anyone claiming that there is an emulator for Switch 2 already or they are even remotely close to that. Buckets of salt, have your scam detectors up for those In terms of the account bans? What happened here is that every game has a unique key, Nintendo can and would log the unique game keys you have on your system. If they detect that the same key is being used by multiple accounts at the same time? There's no legitimate way to copy keys therefore one of those users must have an unauthorised copy of the game. Violating the terms of service. So they block them from using online services I'm not a huge fan of this action but I also don't feel a great amount of sympathy for someone who pirates the game and then gets upset when the platform gets out the ban hammer. It's like being caught for shoplifting and then complaining they stopped you at the door the next time you go there. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes I get that this is a PC gamer centric site and people like to project this kind of image but there's nothing smart about being ignorant. At the end of the day every hardware platform is fundamentally the same. There are different stores and sometimes different philosophies or forms but the end result is largely the same thing. I'd much rather play games on a modern ARM SoC than I would the PC I had 10 years ago, and if you think different while also bragging about the performance of your preferred platform family there's something wrong there I think Yes, Nintendo has used ARM since the launch of the GBA. But the GBA used a single core ARM7 clocked at ~17Mhz paired with 0.4MB of RAM while the Switch 2 has an 8 core ARM Cortex-A78 clocked at 1Ghz with 12GB RAM and paired with a GPU core that's probably best described as like a heavily modified mobile 3050. Saying they're "the same architecture" is about as descriptive as saying that a gaming PC and the original Apple AirPort are "the same architecture". Technically true, but completely meaningless Lastly, as far as "potato spec" goes. It's a portable device, it can run games on sub 10W, no shit it's not competing at the high end. That's not what it's for. But within that power range? This is the only NVidia product on the market of this class. It's easy to shit on NVidia for, well, being the way NVidia be. But you can't deny that they're masters of efficient GPU architectures. We can talk about the merits of one platform over the other all we want but the hardware itself? As of right now, nothing else comes close to what Switch 2 is doing in this device category. And certainly not your phone

While fair what you're saying ultimately boils down to "I have a Switch, I didn't have a Wii U, I don't care for Switch games running better and Breath of the Wild is more impactful than Mario Kart World" Personally I don't think the natural improvement and occasional outright remasters of Switch content should be dismissed here. If Mario Kart 8 Deluxe "counts" then surely Splatoon 3 now regularly hitting 4K native probably also counts. Echoes of Wisdom being a locked 60fps and (according to DF) hitting around 1600p in places it was 720p on Switch I would say counts. And even outside of explicit patches the various game ran so bad on Switch and now just brute force stable performance. Especially those with unlocked framerates or dynamic resolution scaling. Surely that also counts There is plenty of content here to explore. In the same way that there's new content to explore when you upgrade your GPU. Just because you wouldn't explicitly put them in the box of "new releases" doesn't mean it doesn't exist

It's funny, between the competent Switch BC, enhancements to Switch games and third party ports to me it seems like one of the stronger launch lineups. Are these games I'm playing "new" other than Mario Kart and Fast Fusion? No. Not yet. But when the Switch launched the only new exclusive day 1 games were Breath of the Wild, Snipperclips and 1-2 Switch and even post launch most of the releases were Wii U ports Never buy a console at launch, it's dumb, there are never any games..... but at least with Switch 2 it improves performance on Switch titles

I'm obviously biased (look at my avatar) and this is probably cope (I did get one) but I do think a lot of the complaints about pricing and subs are somewhat overblown. I also think that a lot of the complaints people raise about Switch 2 for some reason appear to gloss over what competing devices are offering I have a Steam Deck OLED, I love my Steam Deck, but I also paid ~$130AU more for it than I did the Switch 2 + Mario Kart bundle. Enough to cover NSO+ for a year and a game (maybe not one of the $110AU games but still). Obviously there are other PC portables out there but I'm not convinced anything other than the non-OLED Steam Deck offers a better value. Most have more power, sure, but are substantially more expensive. And from what I've played on Switch 2 thus far I will say that, to my eye at least, it outperforms Steam Deck comfortably Is the Switch 2 bulkier than the original Switch? Sure. But it's less bulky than my Steam Deck OLED. Is the battery life worse than the Switch OLED? Sure. But personally I never had an issue with the original Switch except occasionally very early on when I was playing BotW endlessly. Also, for demanding titles, again, it's not dissimilar to the Steam Deck OLED The other thing people ignore here is that Steam Deck, and presumably Windows based portables are even worse, SUCKS as a dockable console. I mean sure, you can go into settings and change the video output (often per game), you can buy a separate cradle, you can fiddle around to get the cable in, you can pair a controller you had to get separately. It's possible. But Nintendo's hardware just makes it so much easier and, frankly, when I'm coming home after a day at work to wind down... I just want it to work Are there negatives? Sure. I'm still not super jazzed about the higher starting pricing for games even if I think the reaction is somewhat overblown. How much do games really cost when you consider the number of titles that have season passes (is Splatoon 3 really $80AU when the Expansion pass is an additional $37AU?). I'm also not happy that they've abandoned their voucher and gold coin programs which makes the game prices even rougher Also as great as Switch compatibility is on Switch 2, including improved performance and even some games getting patches to add new features.... you still have to wait for them to update these games so they can exceed their original Switch resolution/framerate caps. I get the technical reasons for it, it makes sense, console games don't have the display output flexibility of PC games and these games were built to target Switch. Doesn't change the fact that it kinda sucks you drop into a fairly low demanding Switch 1 game via BC on your Switch 2 with the possibility of 1440p/120Hz or 4K/60Hz..... and you get 720p/30.... because that target made sense on Switch....

Emulation has always been legal and honestly I don't know why people are surprised by this or think it's some kind of gotcha whenever Nintendo uses or mentions emulation. The problem is IP theft, so the illegal distribution of ROMs or firmware. And the test in court for these kinds of things is damages. Nintendo can't steal from themselves and it's not theft if you're using a copy of the software you purchased Not sure what this has to do with my post or this topic though. I may be someone who follows this topic closely, has a Nintendo avatar and is generally a fan of their software output. Doesn't mean I'm a fan of how heavy handed they are. FWIW I have a Steam Deck and there are a fair number of Nintendo ISOs and ROMs on there. But I don't bother emulating Switch because I have and use a Switch and the places you get Switch ROMs are.... pretty sketchy. Also Nintendo are a top-tier publisher and as a software dev I think software should be paid for IIRC YuZu was charging people for access to the newest versions of their emulator which was pretty brazen. I don't think ryujinx is being anywhere near as reckless

There's a latch on the top, you can't really see it in the trailer but it's in some of the higher quality renders on Nintendo's site. It's not entirely clear if it's used for attaching to the main unit but it's definitely used for attaching the straps. There's a lever on the back of the JoyCon which when you push in extends a pin that pushes the JoyCon away. It's not entirely clear if there's also a latch on the main unit like there is on the straps but..... I don't see why it wouldn't

Pretty solid video. Some minor notes from someone who lives in online spaces where this stuff has been obsessed over: 1. It isn't a version of the T239 released a few years ago. The T239 isn't an SoC that has released, it's a custom SoC Nintendo commissioned and collaborated with NVidia to design. There's also not really much certainty about the node at all, 5nm is the best educated guess ATM but it might be 8nm. It's unclear (and a point of much debate). But the features are fairly well known and we should be confident about. DLSS, RT. The main notable customisations that have been added that aren't in the more automotive focused Ampere Tegras are a file decompression block and that they backported the Lovelace media encode/decode 2. The comparisons to the PS4 are fair but only in very broad "which console is this closest to" strokes. It has similar performance to the PS4 in the same way that the Steam Deck is. But the thing worth noting here is that this is the estimated raw performance in handheld mode with efficiency clocks. When you dock the Switch? The clock jumps because you're not on battery. The same is true for Switch 2. Also.... we're talking 40 series NVidia feature set vs AMD HD 7000 feature set. It will outperform Steam Deck docked but be similar in portable mode and even there the comparison will break a bit because, lets be honest, DLSS smokes FSR 3. The streaming to the TV bit.... I get the appeal and this one is a bit more speculation on my part but... not a chance. Very unlikely. The obsessives who have been pouring over shipping manifests on this thing have a list of every screw, every plastic panel, every moulding. The Dock is a USB-C hub supporting HDMI and USB 3, a Gigabit Ethernet adapter, 60W power delivery circuitry and a fan. That's it. Maybe they do it through software with a second Switch 2 or maybe even a "Switch 1" being a thin client for the main docked unit. Certainly possible. But don't hold your breath for something built in /rant from someone who has spent way too much time over the last few years reading this stuff edit: Oh, and a very minor nit-pick. Xenoblade Chronicles X is releasing in March for the Switch so unless the April Direct is post launch it's not going to be a launch title. Legends Z-A and Prime 4 are good shouts for cross-gen and launch-adjacent games although, personal opinion, I would rate Prime being that game more than Pokemon purely because Retro Studios are a legendary studio and GameFreak is..... a little bit on the slow side when it comes to transitioning to new hardware.....

I don't think the PC comparisons are really valid. Different markets. Also as someone who built a second PC specifically to be a "console replacement" under my TV a few years back? The couch PC gaming experience isn't that great. I ended up whenever I wanted to sit down and play games on my TV just booting up the Switch instead because it was just easier and in the end I just converted it into an Unraid box. I'm sure this price will shift some people to PC but.... they're different devices for different use cases.... So the comparisons should be on the console space. And in that sense it's worth noting that adjusted for inflation and excluding stuff like NeoGeo that this is the third most expensive piece of console hardware. Behind the Sega Saturn and PS3. And while PS5 doesn't really have much competition now it doesn't take much for things to change. This reminds me of E3 2006 when they announced the PS3 would be $599US and people memed the crap out of it. And while Sony did eventually do well that generation they did open the door I mean, they only just decently started outselling the Switch. And in Japan it's still just straight up dominating it, and that's before they recently raised the price of the base model in Japan and announced the Pro at this price. Imagine how much better the Switch 2 is going to look on the market when it launches in the first half of next year for half the price of the fully decked out PS5 Pro and doing "good enough" versions of modern titles?

That's the thing though. I don't think the problem with the Wii U was poor marketing or that it was a bad platform. It wasn't the best platform, I should know I got one at launch, but it wasn't as bad as its lifetime sales suggest. I can certainly think of platforms that were worse at or near launch that ended up doing fairly well. 3DS comes to mind The problem with the Wii U was more that you buy consoles for games. And at launch while the Wii U did have games most of the library was stuff you could also get on the cheaper 360 or PS3. It got games eventually sure, but by the time it was starting to get some killer apps during the second half of 2013 the verdict was already in. Before it was buried by the launch of GTA 5 and then the PS4 and XBOne If the Wii U had instead been a "Wii HD" that launched around 2010 with Galaxy 2 HD. Even if it was still pushing the GamePad concept but maybe better if it wasn't and instead dragged Wii Motion Plus or something to be part of the package instead. I think that theoretical console does a lot better than the Wii U did. Even if it was marketed exactly the same as the Wii U was

For those wanting to get an idea of what Switch 2 sounds like it'll be here are the generally rumoured specs: - Tegra T239 which doesn't exist outside of Switch 2. The closest analogue would be something like a mobile RTX2050 - The above would allow DLSS and fairly basic RT, although realistically not DLSS to 4K - 12GB of unified system memory, LPDDR5 - 256GB UFS3.1 flash backed by hardware accelerated file decompression - HDMI 2.1 so, firmware supporting, potentially support for 120Hz VRR modes - 8" Touch Screen.... presumed to be a 1080p LCD - Current rumours/speculation is that backwards compatibility will be handled by running the game code natively on the CPU but with GPU emulation

the tl;dr: Nope LTT generally isn't the best place for Nintendo takes, mostly because @LinusTech is just generally openly hostile to Nintendo (which is probably fair), but I think this one is worth commenting on, relating somewhat to this video: There's a general view that the Wii U failed because people saw it as a "Wii accessory" or it didn't have any good games. I don't think that's right, I think these ideas are either views that people adopted or things that came to pass as a side-effect of the real reasons it failed. And I think it's worth exploring why it actually failed if we're going to talk about where the Switch 2 is going and also, potentially, what rakes XBox (who's the one in more of a Wii U position today) has to avoid. Basically, it all came down to timing I think people completely ignore in their assessment of Wii U is how fast things were moving against the Wii brand through the late 00's. 2008 was the peak of the Wii's sales with ~52% of the home console market. Notably the Wii was a console that mostly sold itself as a Standard Definition console that was cheap and had motion controls. But what else was happening around then? Well, the late 2000s was also when people were starting to pick up HDTVs and not long after Microsoft and Sony added motion controls. From 2007-2009 the Wii was about half of the home console market with Sony/MS being the other half. In 2010/11 they were sharing equal slices with the PS3 and 360 just continuing to sell more units every year (PS3/360 sales peaked in 2011) So there we are all rolling into the Wii U launch and Nintendo finally has a HD console on the horizon. But what are you buying it for? Sure the Wii U gets some support on day 1, it gets big third party titles like Assassin's Creed 3, CoD, Arkham City, FIFA. But why would you buy it over the, by then, much cheaper 360/PS3? There were some Wii U exclusives on day 1 like ZombiU, Nintendo Land, New SMB but nothing like a Zelda, Smash or Mario Kart. Those games did come but by the time they did people had already made their minds up about the console. And then just to completely kill any chance of it ever doing well while people were waiting around for a reason to pick up a Wii U in 2013 The Last of Us and GTA V released. Their only key difference was that they had a tablet screen which, even there, if you were a parent trying to get your kid a tablet device by then you're probably giving them an iPad The Switch in comparison, the Switch peaked much later and has had a much stronger dominance of the console market. 2020 it was at around 60% of all home console sales. It has fallen since to around about where the Wii was at around this time before the Wii U launch so there are some parallels there. But I think there are three key differences: 1. The Switch doesn't even remotely look as bad with the adoption of UHDTVs as the Wii did when people were picking up HDTVs. Partly because the HD -> UHD transition is something Joe Average cares less about than the transition to HD. But also because the Switch is also a portable console. I don't think people are abandoning Nintendo for higher resolution consoles in the same way that they were late in the Wii cycle. It's a factor for sure, a lot of Switch games look pretty average when you blow them up to a 55"+ TV, but it's nowhere near as big a problem as it was with the Wii in 2010 2. Game development times. Game developers had a hard time transitioning to HD and Nintendo was no exception. They hit that wall with the Wii U right at the point where other studios were just getting through it. As a side note, this was the reason the Wii was the way it was. Everyone saw this coming but Nintendo decided to delay that transition. Which worked, for a while. Anyways, game devs are facing a similar problem now and Sony in particular is pushing for more and more cinematic games. Meanwhile Nintendo while they do have some large budget games they also release a lot of mid-tier releases. In many ways what we're seeing now is the reverse of what we saw with the transition to Wii U 3. There's less competition for people transitioning from Switch now than there was in the early 2010s for people transitioning from Wii. By the time the Wii U released you had plenty of other options. You could go to the cheaper 360/PS3 or you could wait it out for the upcoming XBOne/PS4. You could also potentially have moved on to an iPad or maybe built/upgrade your PC. Most of which were either cheaper or offered significantly more than Wii U. But going from Switch? Less so. There's gaming on iPhone now which seems like a bit of an afterthought and is almost surely going to be a worse experience in the long run than Switch 2. There are portable PCs which are something I'm hyped about but they're not exactly super mainstream in the same way. XBox as a brand is going the way of Sega a bit ATM so I'm not sure they're in a position to compete although I do think we will see a portable XBox which could be interesting. Sony with PS5 and potentially PS5 Pro, they compete but they're not portable. Same with PCs more broadly Basically, it's risky to predict the success of a console before it comes out because they're infamously unpredictable. I'd imagine it'd be even tricker trying to predict Nintendo if you're not a dude who has a Super Mario Kart as their avatar. But I think the landscape that created the failure of the Wii U was a bit of a conspiracy of factors that put Nintendo into a bind before it was even announced. And because of that they were leaning heavily on trick which was interesting but had failed to do much for them the multiple times they tried it before then (N64 DD GB cable, GC GBA link cable, DS as a Wii Controller) . In comparison the position they find themselves in now is SUPER favourable so I think it seems very unlikely we're headed towards another Wii U ..... that was a longer post than I intended to make.

A bit harsh on the Castle ep. Blinky boxes, cybernukes and cat videos as countermeasures? They knew exactly what they were doing

You know, that expansion card got me thinking. If someone put some effort into it the framework mainboardcould be the base for a pretty solid "prosumer" grade NAS. I feel like that space is pretty neglected. You're either going with Synology or QNAP and getting a locked down, buy once and bin when you outgrow it hardware platform. Or you go DIY and go full desktop CPU with its fairly limited case options for 3.5" drives. Basically your only "small footprint" options for the desktop route being the Node 304 and Jonsbo N2. Both of which limit you to mITX which basically has the same IO restrictions as the Framework motherboard anyways and both are, although relatively small, significantly larger than the off-the-shelf options Just have enough space for the mainboard, make a case with a backplane for like 5x 3.5" drives + multi-gig LAN that connects to PCIe expansion in some way. Have some way to deliver power to the mainboard and the drives via some external power brick. Boom, small footprint, power efficient NAS. I mean enthusiasts have been repurposing their old desktop hardware as servers for years. Why not do the same with old laptop hardware? edit: Also I'm pretty sold now, going to go with Framework for my next laptop. It just might be a while given the 3 year old Dell with its Zen 2 Ryzen is still plenty enough for the things I actually use it for

As a developer and inadvertent dev-ops guy at work this very much pleases me. There's no better feeling than having an automation save you hours of time during the day. And I definitely feel the pain of those small tasks that are just frequent enough to demand your full attention You know this is a novel and kinda cool idea in a way, points for that. But not really something that makes sense. I mean if you were to do this you'd probably do something like set up a VM with multiple GPUs indirectly attached. Then have some kind of way to automatically swap them around in software, possibly spinning up a new VM with the new drivers already pre-installed. Sure you'd have an overhead with the VM but if the only changing variable is the GPU it'd be good enough However I think the main problem with your idea is that you kinda need to step back a bit. What's the actual goal here? Because I would imagine testing a variety of games across multiple GPUs would be only one of the goals. You'd also want to potentially test multiple CPUs on a variety of games, or multiple RAM speeds, multiple OSes, different BIOS settings. And in any case once you have run the benchmark for a particular config you have that data saved in a database. The main pain point they'd be trying to resolve would be the crunch before the NDA lifts when they're benchmarking one or two products across a suite of games. And the swapping of the GPU would be a very, very small part of that process