Only reason I could see them going for UFS is because it's possible to support both MicroSD and UFS in the same slot. But the tech is so new that I can't imagine Nintendo supporting it unless Samsung reached out to them to make it happen.
Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Stats Leaked? Cortex A57, 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage, Multi-Touch.
- Thread starter Robert at Zeboyd Games
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Skittzo0413
Member
I'm expecting them to either focus on that or offer a proprietary "local cloud" storage device. I'm speculating about the latter only because data caps will be a big problem for people choosing to use cloud storage, going all digital. And Nintendo clearly understands the importance of encouraging digital purchases.
Edit:
Like I said, I expect them to focus on that, meaning tout it as a feature for digital buyers. Since the amount of physical storage available appears to be fairly small, they will need some sort of messaging to give to people who buy all digital.
You already have cloud storage on all their consoles for digital titles, it's called the Nintendo eShop.
Are there any products (or cards) with UFS shipping? I couldn't find any on Amazon.
Couldn't find any on the web and my Google skills are on-point. I don't think that there's a single device in the market that supports removable UFS cards. This makes the idea of the NS supporting the new standard even more unrealistic than it already was.
I don't know the answer to this, but I imagine extra/replacement docks will be available at Nintendo's website.
manueldelalas
Time Traveler
If the console is cheap enough, I'm seriously considering buying two, one for the kids (half controller looks PERFECT for them, and if they have motion, better, for Just Dance) and one for me. And it's weird, because I had skipped this generation consoles in favor of a PC.
lwilliams3
Member
That would make sense.
If the dock is as passive as it seems to be, then absolutely. You could always buy 3DS docks on the Nintendo website.
uncle_koploski
Banned
What are the possibilities of the Switch to hot spot from your phone for 4G capabilities?
frankie_baby
Member
That's certain, done it many a time on my 3ds
As far as I know every wifi capable device can hotspot from the iPhone. So pretty high.
uncle_koploski
Banned
Maybe they will push/encourage hotspot functionality?
lwilliams3
Member
They have encouraged that since the DS era IIRC. They made special deals with McDonald's wifi at one point.
Skittzo0413
Member
I think he means that they might encourage using your phone as a hotspot somehow. With data caps I don't know how many people would want to do that, but who knows.
TwilightPrincess
Member
If it was 256cores at his assumed clockspeed it would be around 460gflops..... the stronger than ps4pro could be a "what if" case. I don't believe it too.
Sooo, I'm going play devil's advocate, while my stance is that we should not expect something very different from a Tegra X1, at the same time I find that Reddit post kind of interesting if there is some truth behind.
Some of the things in the post might be just translation mistakes and some bits seems like they are just speculation, plus the leaker might not be much into tech, so I'm going to give an "interpretation" of what I think makes sense or not from my point of view.
I wanted to comment that reddit post, for two reasons, one for fun, and two because we are so close to release that at this point this kind of leaks seems likely and at the same time barring some controversial points (1080p, 4G) everything fits very close to what we know already, it may be fabricated but if the 1080p is just a misjudgement from the leaker and 4G has been mistaken for something else this could very well be a real leak.
Again, not saying I'm endorsing this, but I'm giving it some reasonable doubt status in my eyes.
Cow Mengde
Banned
Yup. Also, how do we know game's aren't 60GB today simply because devs not bothering to compress everything? I mean, they have a ton of space, and they rather spend the time to work on the game rather than worrying about compression. Some games are very wasteful of their memory simply because they can.
It's pretty easy to let things bloat. Adding tons of textures (whether we use them or not), not removing things that we don't need anymore (art assets, music, etc.), not compressing sound files or textures, etc. A couple of months ago I realized that my game was fairly bloated, so I started compressing things and removing things that weren't used in the game anymore. Went from about 5 GB to 1.7 GB. I was pretty happy about that. I imagine for larger projects with more people working on them this kind of thing happens a lot. It's soooo easy to have excess waste when there's so much space to work with. It's pretty easy to "trim the fat", but a lot of the time there's no need to worry about it when there's so much space available to use.
Cow Mengde
Banned
Hell, we have SNES games that still has tons of unused data hidden in the game for hackers to find.
I no longer have the link with games through 2016, but this link shows XB1 game sizes through 2015.
As you can see a lot of the games on that list can fit in just 16GB, a larger portion of that list could fit on a 32GB cartridge, and all of it could fit on a 64GB cartridge. So the game card isn't going to be an issue on size (cost is TBD).
I'm more curious about MicroSD card options since patches aren't included in the sizes at that link.
As you can see a lot of the games on that list can fit in just 16GB, a larger portion of that list could fit on a 32GB cartridge, and all of it could fit on a 64GB cartridge. So the game card isn't going to be an issue on size (cost is TBD).
I'm more curious about MicroSD card options since patches aren't included in the sizes at that link.
lwilliams3
Member
The GameCube unless you count the mini DVD issue. Otherwise, the SNES.
You can't. There aren't any devices which use them yet (although Samsung have been ready to go for a few months on the card manufacturing front, and I'd imagine companies like Toshiba and Micron shouldn't be too far behind, as they already make embedded UFS). The Galaxy S8 should use them, and will likely be released around the same time as Switch, and there will probably be a few more flagship phones released through 2017 with UFS card support.
They'll be more expensive than MicroSD at first, although it's impossible to say by how much. Prices should come down over the course of 2017 as they become more ubiquitous, though. The fact that UFS is a royalty-free standard (unlike SD) should also help somewhat on this front.
A few points:
- The UFS card is a standard (JEDEC ESD220-2 to be precise, you can download it here).
- I didn't mention writing speeds in my post, all speeds quoted were read speeds.
- Class 10 MicroSD cards only guarantee 10MB/s write speeds, there's no guarantee when you buy a Class 10 (or a UHS-1, or a V10, or an A1) card that you'll get any particular read speeds. Some of these will advertise 45MB/s reads, or some other number, but real-world performance is likely lower than this, and both read and write performance will decrease with age (which can be pretty fast with low quality cards).
- Even if a customer does buy a MicroSD with 45MB/s reads, and (optimistically) gets 40MB/s real-world read performance out of it, this is still substantially lower than the eMMC or eUFS internal storage in the Switch or the system's game cards. It's also notably lower than the performance of PS4 and XBO's HDDs (although random reads would probably be somewhat better on MicroSD). It could have big difficulties running games built around being able to stream data at 100MB/s+, a category which includes almost every modern open-world game.
- While most customers may put in a bit of effort to make sure they buy a sufficiently fast card, that doesn't mean all of them will. Amazon may have plentiful reviews showing customers which cards to avoid, but someone buying a card in Gamestop or Walmart or some small phone accessories stall in a shopping centre doesn't have that luxury, and the sheer complexity of the SD standard isn't going to help them figure this out. (For example, did you know that UHS-1 and UHS-I are different things?) Even if only 1% of owners buys a ~20MB/s card to use with Switch, and only 10 million buy the hardware, that's still 100,000 pissed off customers who have to endure extremely long load times or open-world performance problems.
Your last point, about Switch being the start of an iterative family of Nintendo hardware is actually precisely the reason I'd like to see them adopt UFS cards right from the start. It's all about setting a baseline. If developers have to target 40MB/s reads as a baseline for Switch, they'll have to adopt the same baseline for Switch+ and Switch Pocket and so forth, as games designed for them will have to run on the regular first-gen Switch too. Even if they have storage that's 10x as fast (not an exaggeration, btw), developers wouldn't be able to make use of it in any meaningful way. This would last until support for the first-gen Switch is completely phased out, which could be 5+ years away.
Alternatively, Nintendo could use eUFS internally, UFS cards for expansion, and a fast serial interface for the game cards (they seem to be doing the latter, at least), and allow developers to work with guaranteed read speeds of over 200MB/s and 10K IOPS (or potentially higher) regardless of whether the game's running off a card, off internal storage or off an external card. This gives developers far more latitude when it comes to the way they design their games, particularly when it comes to asset streaming and open-world games.
ShadowFox08
Member
lwilliams3
Member
As you said, it is a hybrid. It has restraints that a pure console doesn't have to deal with.
In any case, the system should still be able to handle current gen games at lower resolution and graphical settings even if it is a little south of 500 GFLOPS. Efficient tools will go a long way for Nintendo.
What about UHS-II micro SDXC cards? The card readers should be backwards compatible with microSD.
It also seems possible for card readers to be designed to work with both
UHS-I microSDXC and UFS cards:
What about UHS-II micro SDXC cards? The card readers should be backwards compatible with microSD.
It also seems possible for card readers to be designed to work with both
UHS-I microSDXC and UFS cards:
Yes, UFS card readers can be designed to work with both MicroSD and UFS cards (I'd imagine that most of the initial smartphone support will be in the form of these combo-readers). It doesn't address my issue with supporting MicroSD, though, which is that if you support MicroSD at all then that becomes the baseline games have to be developed around. A game developed on the basis of 40MB/s data streaming is unlikely to get much of a benefit when run from a 500MB/s UFS card (just as people dropping SATA III SSDs in their PS4 Pros are getting fairly meagre benefit from doing so). The benefit of using a UFS-only memory slot is that it's literally impossible for a user to buy and insert a UFS card that's less than 200MB/s or so. Developers could then work in the knowledge that they have a given guaranteed level of storage performance and design their games to take advantage of that.
TAS
Member
Just an aside but the cheap 5400 rpm drives in PS4/XB1 are very rarely hitting 100+ mbps in the real world either. As with sd cards, not all hdds are created equal and hdd speeds can be incredibly inconsisent even depending on where data's being written/read. It's not unusual for the outer edge of a 5400 to drop to 20/30 mbps for example. Modern games aren't really designed around consistent 100+ mbps streaming at all.
I really don't see microSD being an issue for Switch in this regard. You can get affordable 90 mbps cards in higher capacities from a variety of reliable manufacturers now and really the majority of mainstream consumers will probably just stick with whatever Nintendo throws in anyway.
frankie_baby
Member
Hopefully nintendo should put a warning thing up if you try to use a slow SD card
Going from my 2TB external hard drive that I have connected to my Wii U to something smaller (and everything I can think of that would be possible with Switch on the go is going to be smaller) will be painful and I'm interested to see how Nintendo is going to deal with that. Sure, the storage they come up with may be much faster, but I've been living in my digital-only bubble for far too long now (even on 3DS) to consider buying physical games or to be willing to choose which games I'm going to take with me for gaming away from the dock.
Hopefully at least for the home console mode they'll have something better than USB 2.0 available. The USB 3.0 rumours are promising, even if there's supposed to be only one 3.0 port, which would make fast copying between two discs impossible - but that's not something I'll be doing very often anyway.
Hopefully at least for the home console mode they'll have something better than USB 2.0 available. The USB 3.0 rumours are promising, even if there's supposed to be only one 3.0 port, which would make fast copying between two discs impossible - but that's not something I'll be doing very often anyway.
I think it would be really cool if Nintendo had come up with some OS-level sync between a docked HDD and the portable storage for favorite and frequent games. Nintendo should realize that folks got used to having large amounts of storage attached to their Wii U and they can't fully replicate that via cards.
Yes, that's fair, and the substantially improved random read performance of flash (even MicroSD) over HDDs would mean the real-world workloads would favour flash. I should clarify that I don't think Nintendo MicroSD would be a particular bottleneck for Switch, so long as Nintendo operates some kind of speed test/certification to ensure that only the faster cards are used (easier said that done, but they're better off doing a quick test and saying "nope, this card is too slow" when you put the card in rather than the player having to endure slow loads or streaming jankiness).
My original point was rather that Nintendo should use UFS cards, not that they have to or that I expect them to. My reasoning is that, when combined with eUFS internal storage and a fast serial game card interface, it's a relatively cheap way to give a very substantial performance improvement in an area which could be beneficial to a large group of games. You're looking at perhaps a couple of dollars to go with eUFS over eMMC, and even less than that to swap the MicroSD port out for a UFS one (it could actually be cheaper with the lack of royalties). For a far smaller cost than, say, increasing the RAM capacity, Nintendo could go from developers having a 40MB/s 1K IOPS baseline to perhaps a 200MB/s 10K IOPS baseline.
ShadowFox08
Member
According to SMD, Nico is reporting a rumor that the Nintendo Switch is powerful or more than the PS4 when docked, but not as powerful as the switch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTcn9vWBx3Q
Nico's link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EZOXAlR2tQ&t
Take with a grain of salt.. But man that Jan 12 reveal couldn't be sooner.. ;_;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTcn9vWBx3Q
Nico's link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EZOXAlR2tQ&t
Take with a grain of salt.. But man that Jan 12 reveal couldn't be sooner.. ;_;
Come again?
Pancakes R Us
Member
Wow...I highly doubt this. Remember the Wii U rumours? Hah.
Herb Alpert
Banned
We will have this rumours until launch day won't we?
People should forget this PS4 milestone.
People should forget this PS4 milestone.
Sorceror12
Member
Yay more SMD rumors.
KratosEnergyDrink
Member
Or don't post such click bait nonsense at all.
Dark Cloud
Member
The Nintendo Switch is more powerful than the PS4, but not as powerful as the Nintendo Switch?
Lmao
-shadow-
Member
So the small tablet is stronger than a (even in the slim form) pretty large arse console? Who comes up with these rumours?
Also weaker than the Switch, lol
Graphics Horse
Member
Are there any prices for UFS cards yet? Can't find anything. I'm sure Samsung would appreciate another party using UFS-requiring hardware but it might be simpler just to have some kind of speed tested microSd.
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