Nintendo reveals more specs for the Switch except for the ones that matter? That's not good....

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, AluminiumTech said:

But does it run almost all the games I have on Steam at 60fps at 1080p?

No. Didn't think so.

but no other handheld will either

 

that was a reply specificly to you saying skyrim on the switch. my point is you dont need the switch to have portable skyrim.

[skywake]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Both Nvidia and Nintendo are staying mum on the SOC which is a major letdown and hints at what kind of a failure the SOC was.

Can I just say that Nintendo has never talked about their hardware spec. Except to point out specs of stuff you interface with. For example the most technical segment of the whole hour long presentation today? Was this bit... about the controller, not the tablet...

 

[Bcat00]

You make it sound so simple to make things run at 60FPS

[AG1233]

3 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I'd rather it ran at 60fps and had short battery life. That way, we could call them out for it and make the 2nd Gen have way better battery.

But thats just you from what i have heard from other people and comments by other people they would rather have larger battery life.I am pretty sure you are in the minority of people here.Also are you sure that it doesn't run at 720p 60FPS when in handheld mode as I dont believe there is more info about it.

[AlTech]

2 minutes ago, Bcat00 said:

You make it sound so simple to make things run at 60FPS

it is! You need good hardware and game developers to optimize their games to get the performance!

 

Great optimizations cannot save bad hardware.

[Bcat00]

Show them the money. Otherwise, forget about it.

[AG1233]

1 hour ago, Gale said:

I'll be treating the Switch as a portable console only, so these specs don't really bother me... except for the battery. "2.5 to 6 hours" is too vague. This is what will determine if I'll get the Switch this year or not.

But considering it uses USB type C we will probably be able to use power bank for charging.

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, Bcat00 said:

Show them the money. Otherwise, forget about it.

$300 is expensive for the performance Nintendo is touting.

 

The PS4 and XB1 have better specs and now  they cost $300 or 250 in some cases (I know the initial price of both were higher).

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, skywake said:

Can I just say that Nintendo has never talked about their hardware spec. Except to point out specs of stuff you interface with. For example the most technical segment of the whole hour long presentation today? Was this bit... about the controller, not the tablet...

 

for nintendo its about providing fun games, with an interesting way to interact with them, not about measuring meat size compared to the other options on the market. they have the choice to either advertise a truly revolutionary experience over the box that's already next to your TV, or they could advertise 60FPS and literally not a single soccer mom will care.

 

2 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

it is! You need good hardware and game developers to optimize their games to get the performance!

 

Great optimizations cannot save bad hardware.

you seriously overestimate ARM, like.. seriously..

 

and no, you're not gonna put x86 in a handheld with any kind of acceptable battery life, you're just not...

[treeroy]

15 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i'm sorry to break it to you then, but you're in a tiny minority of people that's too small for devs to really care about.

 

dont take that as a personal attack, that's simply how it is. there may be one percent of people like you, where the increased cost of development and manufacturing hugely outweighs losing the market that is you guys.

i dont understand console minecraft.. seriously.. i probably have in the thousands of hours of pc minecraft, i simply cannot grasp why console minecraft exists.

(in terms of skyrim, i fail to see how they have the balls to call the pc version a pc version, and i dont understand why it suddenly needs to be on nintendo stuff 6 years after launch.)

There is NO development cost for allowing people to play at 60fps, it just requires dev to make a graphics options menu.

 

there is no excuse for not running a game at 60fps.

[skywake]

7 minutes ago, manikyath said:

for nintendo its about providing fun games, with an interesting way to interact with them, not about measuring meat size compared to the other options on the market. they have the choice to either advertise a truly revolutionary experience over the box that's already next to your TV, or they could advertise 60FPS and literally not a single soccer mom will care

Pretty much, but a bit of both is nice. I just think it's a bit absurd that people in this thread are jumping to conclusions based on the lack of information regarding the specific spec. That somehow it's going to be a potato because they didn't spend the whole presentation talking about GFLOPS, Core count and so on. But that's not how Nintendo operates. Nintendo doesn't do that. What Nintendo does is have an awkward presentation that shows about half the information they should show. Then pretend that the hardware runs on magic.

 

Hell, they didn't even show the trailer for Mario Kart during the presentation. They had a whole segment in there for a bunch of third parties to walk on stage and say basically nothing. No Mario Kart. Until after the presentation when they just dropped the trailer on youtube. And people are expecting them to outline specs? Come on.

 

Anyways, this thing is a $300US tablet. It'll probably perform about in line with what you'd expect out of a $300 tablet engineered with gaming in mind. So like whatever the 2017 version of the NVidia shield would be. If anything the announcement today should have people expecting MORE performance from this than we thought. Not less. Same with the lack of internal storage and LTE. All of this costs money and they don't have it. So what do you think that money is going towards?

[manikyath]

Just now, treeroy said:

There is NO development cost for allowing people to play at 60fps, it just requires dev to make a graphics options menu.

 

there is no excuse for not running a game at 60fps.

you'd be surprised how much dev cost goes into power management on what is essentially a mobile platform. this thing has a VERY limited power target when detached from the dock, we're talking a case where if putting essentially a PS4 worth of performance in that formfactor would make battery life minutes, rather than hours, would make it stupidly heavy, and require an "impractical" amount of active cooling.

 

you need to think of the switch more as a follow up for the handheld line, than as a new tv-connected console in terms of performance. if i'd have to take a very crude bet on their power target for handheld mode, it'd be somewhere in the 5-15 watt range, that i a point where not having backlights on the buttons is an actual considerable difference in battery life. and while @CUDA_Cores likes to carry around 27 18650 cells, most kiddo's dont.

[LAwLz]

8 minutes ago, manikyath said:

with all that, one gotta wonder why the raspberry pi (aside from wifi on the 3) only has one usb2.0 port worth of bandwidth...

Most likely cost reasons. I mean, the Raspberry Pi was not exactly designed to be powerful with lots of connectivity. Adding more USB bandwidth might have made the design a lot more complicated.

[Dabombinable]

24 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Let's just say that I didn't binge on hours of Mario Kart or New Super Mario Bros with my DSi when I was young.

 

Even when I had my iPad (retina display/gen 4) I had to stop playing some games after 30 minutes to keep me from feeling bad. My brother experiences similar things as well.

 

As for PC, I never play on game settings in games which do not allow me to achieve around 60fps or above. I always ensure that I have a minimum of 60fps.

Lucky SOB. I was stuck at around 30 (most of the time less) at minimum settings 640x480 for years (Riva Vanta aka utter POS even in 1997<Mobility Radeon 9000igp<Geforce 7200Go/uadro NVS110M<GTX 650ti<GTX 970). And its why I still prefer my old GTX 650ti OC 2GB over my GTX 970-that graphics card combined with my first post 2006 CPU the i5 4440 and my 1024x768 85Hz screen to this day is the biggest improvement I've ever seen with anything.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, skywake said:

Pretty much, but a bit of both is nice. I just think it's a bit absurd that people in this thread are jumping to conclusions based on the lack of information regarding the specific spec. That somehow it's going to be a potato because they didn't spend the whole presentation talking about GFLOPS, Core count and so on. But that's not how Nintendo operates. Nintendo doesn't do that. What Nintendo does is have an awkward presentation that shows about half the information they should show. Then pretend that the hardware runs on magic.

 

Hell, they didn't even show the trailer for Mario Kart during the presentation. They had a whole segment in there for a bunch of third parties to walk on stage and say basically nothing. No Mario Kart. Until after the presentation when they just dropped the trailer on youtube. And people are expecting them to outline specs? Come on.

the thing is, it's not gonna be a potato, even if the GFLOPS are those of a potato, nintendo has control over their ecosystem, so the games will happily hit their performance target on said potato, providing a very pleasing experience to the marketshare they want to reach. and if that means ditching a small portion of marketshare, they gladly take that to be the only console manufacturer left to do absolultely crazy stuff, whereas the other options are "essentially just a pc under the hood".

 

you dont buy nintendo to be blown away by specs, you buy nintendo to be blown away by fun.

(as a sider, i like to mention this: the original wii had a total of 91MB ram, split between a pool of 24, a pool of 64, and 3MB framebuffer, the wiiU "blew that out the water" with 2GB, of which one is dedicated to the OS.)

[Bouzoo]

12 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

$300 is expensive for the performance Nintendo is touting.

 

The PS4 and XB1 have better specs and now  they cost $300 or 250 in some cases (I know the initial price of both were higher).

Wait. If you want more than 2.5-6 hours gaming, then say goodbye to Skyrim 60, if you want Skyrim at 60, say hello to 30 min of battery. You can't have both. Even at 720p.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Bouzoo said:

Wait. If you want more than 2.5-6 hours gaming, then say goodbye to Skyrim 60, if you want Skyrim at 60, say hello to 30 min of battery. You can't have both. Even at 720p.

basicly this.

 

except, change that first timeframe to "the amount of time spent on public transport in your daily commute to and from work" and that second timeframe to "minutes, at best".

[Bcat00]

Just now, Bouzoo said:

Wait. If you want more than 2.5-6 hours gaming, then say goodbye to Skyrim 60, if you want Skyrim at 60, say hello to 30 min of battery. You can't have both. Even at 720p.

I totally disagree here. The main factor is always money. Show the company they will earn big, then i guarantee they will jam whatever hardware needed and whatever excuse down our throat.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Bcat00 said:

I totally disagree here. The main factor is always money. Show the company they will earn big, then i guarantee they will jam whatever hardware needed and whatever excuse down our throat.

that's why those companies are companies, and not charity

 

that said, if you so wholely believe you can do better, go and piece out what it'd take to have 60 FPS on a handheld, and report back with your findings. i've dug around "portable" ideas before, and battery life.. is shameful.. i'm happy my laptop has an extended battery with 9 cells, because when you actually start asking some serious performance off battery, it quickly drops far below the target you would expect from a handheld.

 

and i'm calling it now, if the switch does less than 2-3 hours of gaming on battery i'm never buying anything nintendo again.

[Prysin]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

I meant generic ARM CPUs. Custom Chips can obviously add that functionality but my understanding is that Nvidia uses off the shelf designed cores and they have no SATA support.

 

I heard $299............ Not $399.

ARM SoCs are module based. As far as i can see, ARM does not provide a storage controller themselves, they do however maintain compatibility with Toshiba and Samsung (at the very least these two are mentioned). Both of which DO have extremely high performance flash solutions even for mobile.

[Bcat00]

Never said i can do better but hey, i did say excuses.

If nintendo finds out they can sell the thing for 1k$, i'm pretty sure they gonna start marketing it with a portable battery bank the size of a laptop.

Then when people call it out and say "WTF", they will just say "Its the way of the future"

See, they are innovating in a whole different way now, just not what we expect.

 

[manikyath]

4 minutes ago, Bcat00 said:

 

If nintendo finds out they can sell the thing for 1k$, i'm pretty sure they gonna start marketing it with a portable battery bank the size of a laptop.

i doubt they can market anything for that much, and sure, if they can expect 1k a pop for their consoles, they'll gladly press on ARM, nvidia, and some battery company to make shyte work so they can squeeze some extra out. at the 1k a pop range they can also do better than "make do with what nvidia didnt put in their failed line of tablets"

 

EDIT: on that note, if our other two console options would have 1k a pop they could have an intel i7 and super fancy GPU in there.

[Bcat00]

Hey, i never expected the Titan cards to sell for over 1k$ either, but you know, they did some nice marketing and jammed it down our throat.

So now its the norm for the top of the range card.

That's how marketing works, they make illogical things become logical to those that can afford it.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Bcat00 said:

Hey, i never expected the Titan cards to sell for over 1k$ either, but you know, they did some nice marketing and jammed it down our throat.

So now its the norm for the top of the range card.

That's how marketing works, they make illogical things become logical to those that can afford it.

but the titan isnt marketed to the big audience, the vareous consoles are, and the big audience doesnt have 1k to toss at a device.

 

or.. i'll put it like this: you know how nintendo always launches in japan first? (or at least, i'm pretty sure they still do that)

in japan, the price of a 300USD console, is at this time, roughly 35000 yen, where minimum wage (which is probably a very good indication for the category of people nintendo aims at) is around 4000 yen per month. (that's based off crude math, if you're japanese and read this, let me know how wrong that number is.)

[JoaoPRSousa]

1 hour ago, Bouzoo said:

*1 hour of Pokemon GO, if they were ever to release it. 

 

Pls no, Pokemon GO isn't even a Pokemon game...