Here's the price for the Switch.

[Sniperfox47]

14 minutes ago, goodtofufriday said:

Despite what others have said im 100% confident that the dock adds additional processing power. And that in tje future we will see upgrade docks for imporved performance as well as dock only games. 

Itll allow nintendo to upgrade the hardware in a way thats more afforable that what sony and ms can offer. 

While I'm fairly confident there's a dGPU in the switch I'm almost certain it's in the tablet if there is one. As others have pointed out, there are serious problems with having an external graphics card, not the least of which is memory duplication. How do you make it so that removing the external GPU switches to the internal one without losing data? You either need to use the tablet's memory over the external bus (maaaaaaaaaaasive latency) or copy the external GPUs state to the internal GPU which gets super iffy if they're not 100% exactly the same.

 

Just for reference, AFAIK thunderbolt 3 handles this by just... not handling it... if the dock is removed in an unsafe manner it just crashes your display drivers (In turn crashing any GPU accelerated applications) and reinitializes your display drivers. If you try to safely remove it the process will fail unless nothing is using the dock GPU.

 

The dock doesn't need any serious hardware in it for the tablet to perform better when docked though. It's providing power so you can have a much higher power limit on the GPU/CPU and if there'sa cooling element you can improve thermals too, allowing the tablet GPU/CPU to clock higher.

 

Edit: also a comment about the size as everyone is talking about what if the dock uses a passive cable and the power brick is in the dock? Explains the size.

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

56 minutes ago, Munteanu said:

 

Anyway, it's not coincidental that if you look at the exchange rate it's pretty much 300 € exactly, so it's pretty safe to say that will be the absolute high the Switch's pricing, but there is a chance is may come in at a lower price point.

 

Would bet a hand it is € 299  

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, Scruffy90 said:

Im talking specifically at launch. They should use their massive bank to take a slight hit on the switch and push out the best console they could

At launch prices, then you're right. Not even the Wii U was released at a loss.

[suicidalfranco]

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

[goodtofufriday]

3 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

While I'm fairly confident there's a dGPU in the switch I'm almost certain it's in the tablet if there is one. As others have pointed out, there are serious problems with having an external graphics card, not the least of which is memory duplication. How do you make it so that removing the external GPU switches to the internal one without losing data? You either need to use the tablet's memory over the external bus (maaaaaaaaaaasive latency) or copy the external GPUs state to the internal GPU which gets super iffy if they're not 100% exactly the same.

 

Just for reference, AFAIK thunderbolt 3 handles this by just... not handling it... if the dock is removed in an unsafe manner it just crashes your display drivers (In turn crashing any GPU accelerated applications) and reinitializes your display drivers. If you try to safely remove it the process will fail unless nothing is using the dock GPU.

 

The dock doesn't need any serious hardware in it for the tablet to perform better when docked though. It's providing power so you can have a much higher power limit on the GPU/CPU and if there'sa cooling element you can improve thermals too, allowing the tablet GPU/CPU to clock higher.

 

i get the feeling that it wont undock as simply as it does in the video. 

[christianled59]

Yes! I was hoping it'd be around $250-$300. I'll definitely be getting one. 

[Mr.Meerkat]

20 minutes ago, goodtofufriday said:

i get the feeling that it wont undock as simply as it does in the video. 

Why can't you people believe it's just a single set of chips (single GPU and CPU) or a sole APU/whatever Nvidia calls it rather than there being extra hardware in the base? If it was a single chip, as long as Nvidia can provide something powerful enough for 1080p 60fps gaming then they can very easily downclock it when it's in tablet mode. 

 

If Nvidia is able to produce something with the power of a 950m but at a lower power consumption, I cannot see why 1080p 60fps at lower settings can't be possible  

[Misanthrope]

7 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Why can't you people believe it's just a single set of chips (single GPU and CPU) or a sole APU/whatever Nvidia calls it rather than there being extra hardware in the base? If it was a single chip, as long as Nvidia can provide something powerful enough for 1080p 60fps gaming then they can very easily downclock it when it's in tablet mode. 

 

If Nvidia is able to produce something with the power of a 950m but at a lower power consumption, I cannot see why 1080p 60fps at lower settings can't be possible  

Actually I think the latest Tegra they use in the cars should give the PS4 (the old one) a run for it's money the only concern would be battery and power but as it's been pointed out, simply clocking higher while on the dock power would take care of this power limits and such.

 

 

[Mr.Meerkat]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

simply clocking higher while on the dock power would take care of this power limits and such.

The tegra X1 was decently powerful...now all they need is to get a even more powerful tegra with Pascal and 16nm  (btw, they do have a 10watt edition of their Car's chip so...that's a nice n low wattage for a tablet no? )

[Sniperfox47]

6 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Why can't you people believe it's just a single set of chips (single GPU and CPU) or a sole APU/whatever Nvidia calls it rather than there being extra hardware in the base? If it was a single chip, as long as Nvidia can provide something powerful enough for 1080p 60fps gaming then they can very easily downclock it when it's in tablet mode. 

 

If Nvidia is able to produce something with the power of a 950m but at a lower power consumption, I cannot see why 1080p 60fps at lower settings can't be possible  

While it's likely single chip it's also possible it's dual chip. The Parker Tegra SoC does support discrete embedded Pascal GPUs. I can hope right? If the switch just has a single Parker in it, I doubt the performance would be anything spectacular compared to the current (/last?) gen consoles.

 

1 minute ago, Misanthrope said:

Actually I think the latest Tegra they use in the cars should give the PS4 (the old one) a run for it's money the only concern would be battery and power but as it's been pointed out, simply clocking higher while on the dock power would take care of this power limits and such.

 

 

The Drive PX2 (their car processor) would beat out the PS4 by a huge margin but it's not a Tegra. It's 2 Parker Tegras plus 2 extra discrete GPUs in addition to the ones embedded into the Parkers plus all kinds of car stuff.

 

Each of the two Parkers themselves (0.7TFLOPS) have about a two fifths the GPU performance of the PS4 (~1.7TFLOPS) or about half the GPU performance of the Xbox One(~1.3TFLOPS).

 

A Parker plus a second embedded GPU would be a good match for the current gen performance wise though.

[Sors]

1 hour ago, Spork829 said:

Mainly the controllers. Too many buttons for one person using it as a mobile device (and also I think it's too big for that purpose), and then the two controllers are different in layout so 2-player coop will be super annoying.

Both controllers are identical, look at both, now turn the right one 180°, and you'll see they have the joystick up, 4 buttons below that, and the curve side on the left.   They are meant for multiplayer.

[Munteanu]

4 minutes ago, Sors said:

Both controllers are identical, look at both, now turn the right one 180°, and you'll see they have the joystick up, 4 buttons below that, and the curve side on the left.   They are meant for multiplayer.

My favorite thing about the joycons is that they look inspired by the original square NES controllers.

[Mr.Meerkat]

19 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

-snippy-

Problem with a dual GPU solution is...all the issues with CFX and SLI  

[Sniperfox47]

11 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Problem with a dual GPU solution is...all the issues with CFX and SLI  

You don't run them in that config. You'd use the weaker Tegra GPU as a dedicated physics coprocessor and use a slightly beefier dedicated chip for graphics.

[Mr.Meerkat]

2 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

You don't run them in that config. You'd use the weaker Tegra GPU as a dedicated physics coprocessor and use a slightly beefier dedicated chip for graphics.

Well we all know how much of a difference a physics chip makes  

[Nowak]

2 hours ago, Scruffy90 said:

To date, I dont think nintendo has sold a home console at a loss. It will most likely sit between 250-300 usd. Most of their consoles have sat pretty around those prices

The Wii U was sold at a loss. 3DS too, before the price drop.

[sof006]

Lets hope thats a mock up price. If its real then thats a bad price.

[Sniperfox47]

43 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Well we all know how much of a difference a physics chip makes  

Quite a bit actually...

 

A) on a powerful GPU, physics chips make very little difference but with weaker GPU they can be beneficial at taking load off the GPU.

 

B) you have HSA on the Tegra integrated GPU which will assist considerably with physics loads, since they share quite a bit of data with the CPU.

 

C) It's not just about performance. It's also heat. Offloading some of the load to a second GPU located in a physically different location on the board could have a huge benefit on thermals. Even if the physics load savings is quite minimal you'd get decent gains from it thermally because of the exponential relationship between GPU clocks and thermals. tablets are whole different beasts from computers or even consoles.

 

But note, I'm suggesting using it as a physics coprocessor mostly because it would be there anyways if the console has a discrete GPU. If it wasn't there anyways I wouldn't suggest adding it just for physics.

[Derangel]

2 hours ago, Aereldor said:

1080p 60FPS/4k 30FPS output?. Interesting. However, those specifications don't look too impressive. Also, does it line up with the report that it has an NVidia Tegra processor?

The specs supposedly come from a dev kit that a developer supposedly had. Nothing is confirmed. However some things are suspect.

 

Four A57 cores is definitely correct (at least to a point) since it's a modern Tegra. Both the X1 and X2 use four A57 cores. However the X1 uses four A53 cores as well and X2 uses 2 Denver cores in addition to the A57s. Since it's a custom chip that may not been the same with the Tegra in the Switch, but we'll see.

 

The Maxwell part is one of the biggest areas of suspicion though. Nvidia's announcement seems to be signifying that the Tegra in the Switch uses Pascal. Now, if these specs are based off a non-final dev kit they could be legit. Non-final dev kits sometimes do have different hardware than final, especially if the hardware in the final retail version isn't released yet. Nintendo has probably had dev kits in the hands of select studios for a while now so that is a possibility.

 

4GB of memory seems off. Like, that is way too low. That would create a serious bottleneck for the rest of the system and it seems like the kind of major oversight that even Nintendo wouldn't make. Though, again, if it's non-final hardware it is final.

 

The specs are suspicious enough to warrant not fully trusting, but some parts do sound at least viable and in line with a lot of other spec rumors.

[Mr.Meerkat]

15 minutes ago, Derangel said:

Four A57 cores is definitely correct (at least to a point) since it's a modern Tegra. Both the X1 and X2 use four A57 cores. However the X1 uses four A53 cores as well and X2 uses 2 Denver cores in addition to the A57s. Since it's a custom chip that may not been the same with the Tegra in the Switch, but we'll see.

I don't think ARM is the best choice  

 

The whole point of the PS4 and xbone is how they are the first consoles ever to be running x86...rather than ARM or what the PS3 and Xbox 360 was on, powerPC...hmmmmm...

[dragosudeki]

36 minutes ago, Derangel said:

4GB of memory seems off. Like, that is way too low. That would create a serious bottleneck for the rest of the system and it seems like the kind of major oversight that even Nintendo wouldn't make. Though, again, if it's non-final hardware it is final.

I think the memory is fine. I mean, the new 3DS didn't even have 0.5GB of RAM (I think the cartridge format helps with that). WiiU had 2GB of RAM (1GB for games). AFAIK, Nintendo's games have been carefully developed to the point where you won't actually see a game truly dip down in fps (though i think 3DS had problems with newer games once new 3DS was out).  

Sure, graphics might not look as good as it could be, but when did graphics ever become a priority for Nintendo? Graphics will look decent, and hopefully the game will run smooth.

[Derangel]

52 minutes ago, dragosudeki said:

I think the memory is fine. I mean, the new 3DS didn't even have 0.5GB of RAM (I think the cartridge format helps with that). WiiU had 2GB of RAM (1GB for games). AFAIK, Nintendo's games have been carefully developed to the point where you won't actually see a game truly dip down in fps (though i think 3DS had problems with newer games once new 3DS was out).  

Sure, graphics might not look as good as it could be, but when did graphics ever become a priority for Nintendo? Graphics will look decent, and hopefully the game will run smooth.

Nintendo can design around the limitations, but the big issue is 3rd parties. If Nintendo wants 3rd parties to release ports of their big games it needs to have more memory. Porting to and from RISC is fairly trivial these days but the specs still need to be roughly comparable in order for it to work without massive changes that might not be worth it if that games don't sell well.

[Squirrel724]

5 hours ago, Spork829 said:

Too many buttons for one person

I have 104 buttons for just my left hand. Your argument is invalid.

In all seriousness though its the same number of buttons as on a XBOX or PS4 controller (2 thumbsticks, 4 facebuttons, a d-pad). And the controllers are symmetrical so they would be identical for 2 players (you would hold them with the side that mounts to the screen on top).

[Magnetorheological]

If they can keep the price below $300, they will most likely fly off the shelves. I know I'd probably get one...but probably only if they release a new proper Metroid game for it.

[RagnarokDel]

I hope not $200 that would mean the hardware is crap.