Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Stats Leaked? Cortex A57, 4GB RAM, 32GB Storage, Multi-Touch.

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I'm sorry, this thread is huge! But what are we expecting for storage then? SDCards? I buy almost all of my games digitally, because prices get overblown here were I live. I didn't even think that there would be an issue with hooking an external HDD to it, but now I'm kinda worried. I wonder if SDCards will be enough?
 
I'm sorry, this thread is huge! But what are we expecting for storage then? SDCards? I buy almost all of my games digitally, because prices get overblown here were I live. I didn't even think that there would be an issue with hooking an external HDD to it, but now I'm kinda worried. I wonder if SDCards will be enough?

SD cards is the current rumor/leak
 
I'm sorry, this thread is huge! But what are we expecting for storage then? SDCards? I buy almost all of my games digitally, because prices get overblown here were I live. I didn't even think that there would be an issue with hooking an external HDD to it, but now I'm kinda worried. I wonder if SDCards will be enough?

The current rumor is microSD cards, which can go up to 256GB now I believe. Some users here have said you can back up microSD cards to hard drives or to a PC, which is a way of getting around the supposed lack of HDD support.

As of now it does look like it will be hard to go fully digital if you buy a lot of games. Who knows if they have any solution to that though... I guess we'll see in January.
 
One thing that could be a problem if they really do not require installation before playing a game is sustained read speed from cartridge (easy for Nintendo as they make them) and from SD cards. The latter is tricky as people will obviously go for the cheapest cards they can find and their performance may suck in practice or not be very dependable... how do you explain to an angry consumer that it is their fault Skyrim does not work as well as expected?

The solution would be speed checks when you add a new SD card or to force users to manage the fridge and only use the SD card as extended storage, but only allow gameplay from the internal flash storage or the official game cards.

Totally. That is going to absolutely be of concern but could be alleviated by a bundled SD card. Nintendo could ensure it hits their minimum speed. There really is no need for 300MB/s for a game. Sure it'd be nice but they could easily, given ports will come from slow IO machines like PS4/XBO, stick to level of an internal HDD and it wouldn't be unacceptable.

If they really want to keep high IO then they need to put in more internal storage (Expensive for a decent amount) or when they make cards they allow them to be written to as well and patches need to go there.
 
Genio88 said:
Switch won't get the latest COD and even if it did, that game wouldn't be 60GB(like the one i played on PC) cause resolution would be 720p at best and texture and other stuff would be downgraded and the game weight will be significantly lower than the other versions.
Rendering resolution isn't going to have a significant impact on file size. See: PS4 Pro using the exact same game data to run games at double or quadruple the resolution. It's possible they could cut max texture resolution, but that's not going to halve the size of a 60GB game or anything. If textures are cut, it will probably be for RAM reasons rather than storage.
 
Rendering resolution isn't going to have a significant impact on file size.

Its possible it could - textures are fairly large, depending on their size.
Last gen titles which were targetting 720p / 1080p tended to have 512x512 pixel textures, for a target 4k resolution those would be very blurry and would be more likely to be 2048x2048 pixel size, or even 4096x4096 pixel size.

Given a modern PBR textureset will likely comprise of a colour/diffuse, a metal/rough and a normal texture, you'd be looking at the difference in filesizes of 3 * 512x512 versus 3 * 4096x4096 - to see what that means in real terms, pick a random HQ textureset from somewhere like textures.com and compare their 4k textures with their 512px texture filesizes (or just open up an art package, paste random image into a 4096x4096 canvas, save, then resize down to 512x512 and save then compare filesizes)
 
Almost all existing Xbone and PS4 games are targeting somewhere from 720p to 1080p, and Switch should largely be the same, so to say the max texture resolution could be a quarter or an eighth in a single direction versus those versions seems exaggerated. Possibly the difference will be larger in the future as more games are designed with Pro/Scorpio/4KPC users in mind, but that doesn't do us much good for comparing to the last several years of games.

But even if we delete the textures altogether, a game that started out 60 GB is still probably not fitting on a 32 GB game card, and there's probably little reason to force it do so.
 
Almost all existing Xbone and PS4 games are targeting somewhere from 720p to 1080p, and Switch should largely be the same, so to say the max texture resolution could be a quarter or an eighth in a single direction versus those versions seems exaggerated. Possibly the difference will be larger in the future as more games are designed with Pro/Scorpio/4KPC users in mind, but that doesn't do us much good for comparing to the last several years of games.

But even if we delete the textures altogether, a game that started out 60 GB is still probably not fitting on a 32 GB game card, and there's probably little reason to force it do so.

Are textures really going to be the majority of that 60GB though? I bet uncompressed (or poorly compressed) video and audio takes up a hell of a lot of room in those type of games. Then again I don't think for a second that 32GB is any kind of limit for carts anyway.
 
Almost all existing Xbone and PS4 games are targeting somewhere from 720p to 1080p, and Switch should largely be the same, so to say the max texture resolution could be a quarter or an eighth in a single direction versus those versions seems exaggerated. Possibly the difference will be larger in the future as more games are designed with Pro/Scorpio/4KPC users in mind, but that doesn't do us much good for comparing to the last several years of games.

But even if we delete the textures altogether, a game that started out 60 GB is still probably not fitting on a 32 GB game card, and there's probably little reason to force it do so.

They jammed Resident Evil 2. A 2 CD game or 1.3 GB into a 64MB cart back in 1998. I think shrinking 60GB down to 32GB won't be that big of an issue seeing how that's only half the size. The N64 game was 20x smaller than the original PS1 game.
 
BTW, how viable is it to make a hybrid GPU that contains some of the Gamecube's DNA? I've always been wondering if the Wii U GPU is a hybrid of programmable and fixed function shader. I know rumors of the Wii U GPU having fixed function features, but they're still just rumors.

Again, having fix function for many of today's modern effects built in could mean the chip doesn't need as many GFLOPS to do the same task. Whatever that's not in the GPU, developers can write new shaders with the programmable part of the chip.

I wonder if Nvidia would do something like this. I know the Gamecube was AMD (or ArtX) so the design philosophy will be different. Is a half fixed funxction half programmable GPU viable today?
 
It's not software size, it's media capacity. And from PS3 to 4 that's flat and not changing.

Not allowing games to run from the SD would be a really awful solution, especially since game cards will probably get larger than any internal storage amount launch units will have.

The problem is with RAM and game file sizes probably dozens of times that of 3DS, what was an acceptable transfer speed for 3DS games could seem slow for Switch games. But yeah, it would be a massive step back in usability to just not let it happen.

Of course you would let it happen, but without speed checks for the SD card? How could you guarantee that a streaming game (one that does not even begin to fit RAM or that does not take a very long time to load 3.5 GB of data or so if the game did fit) would work correctly for users (without texture and geomentry loading issues all over the place)?

I can appreciate that people want storage space to keep all of their content, I appreciate that people see el cheapo SD cards promising decent speeds and like 64 GB and more for less than $20 or something, but unless you were only using it as mass storage for pictures, music, and other data you could afford to read very slowly at times (you would optimise streaming with the average sustained speed not the peak read speed), allowing this card to stream huge open world games in and out of memory would be a mistake IMHO.

If we are already in an era where any SD card, even the cheapest SD card you can buy that still has lots of space available, has a high enough sustained read speed then sure... else you are asking Nintendo and developers to optimise for unbound problem. Either forcing the game to always fit RAM size and essentially doing a giant load when the game starts (people would complain that load times are slow) or you could choose between enforcing a speed check on the SD card inserted (people would complain that Nintendo forces you to overspend on SD cards) and enforcing Wii style fridge management (people would complain about that too)... there is always the beautiful option for developers of telling them you want cart like fast loading times, much better than Xbox 360/PS3 graphics and bigger worlds, and that they need the game to run fast without any control on how fast they can load from external storage...
 
Do you know how it works on 3DS?

Working on 3DS vs working Xbox One/PS4?

The data set you are loading is massively different, NX is aiming at quite a large jump in specs/visuals. We are expecting a better looking version of Skyrim than you could experience on Xbox 360 / PS3 not a cut down version for a HW less powerful than the PS Vita. We are comparing filling and keeping filled with fresh relevant data a much much bigger memory pool (NX is rumoured to leave 3.5 GB of RAM to devs vs 128 MB and games designed to mostly fit into it or dedicate a much larger in RAM memory buffer to avoid streaming issues in the games that didn't fit).
 
With the possible speed of carts, do you guys think we will finally eliminate problems like texture pop ins? Remember the normal maps just loading a second slower in a lot of UE3 games? Actually a lot of modern engines also run into this issue. I was told that's due to the speed of the storage. I hate seeing textures pop in whenever I get close to anything. It's really annoying.
 
With the possible speed of carts, do you guys think we will finally eliminate problems like texture pop ins? Remember the normal maps just loading a second slower in a lot of UE3 games? Actually a lot of modern engines also run into this issue. I was told that's due to the speed of the storage. I hate seeing textures pop in whenever I get close to anything. It's really annoying.

It depends on how fast the cart is vs how much memory they have to fill (and also the memory bandwidth of course, but that is not a limiting factor here or hardly in any console I imagine) and how fast they have to fill it to avoid issues like texture and geometry pop-in. NX cards should be designed for good sustained minimum read speed and it is not impossible/unrealistic to beat console HDD's in speed so it is likely that comparable games could have less pop-in issues, but developers may also have to take into account users with cheap SD cards that may or may not be fast enough to match... aka either the experience could vary badly for some users who saved perhaps too much on the SD card or the games would be optimise not to rely on the peak speed of the official game cart... or they will be designed to fit into RAM instead of streaming from the card, but that also changes the design and scope of the games themselves.
 
They jammed Resident Evil 2. A 2 CD game or 1.3 GB into a 64MB cart back in 1998. I think shrinking 60GB down to 32GB won't be that big of an issue seeing how that's only half the size. The N64 game was 20x smaller than the original PS1 game.
With RE2, it was a game where the files consisted largely of pre-rendered content, and it was either take drastic measures to cut it to N64 size or not release it on N64 at all. Games with such a high proportion of static visual content aren't so common anymore, and Switch has the capacity to make extreme porting measures not really necessary anyway.

CD games of that era were pretty crazy sometimes, though. FF VII used about 1/3 of a CD for actual game data, identical on each disc. The rest was about 20 minutes of FMV per disc.
 
If we are already in an era where any SD card, even the cheapest SD card you can buy that still has lots of space available, has a high enough sustained read speed then sure... else you are asking Nintendo and developers to optimise for unbound problem.

There are already consumer electronics that specify a minimum working Class (ie speed) for compatible SD Cards to work with, so its not really an issue for existing consumer electronics sales of things like GoPro cameras.
 
CD games of that era were pretty crazy sometimes, though. FF VII used about 1/3 of a CD for actual game data, identical on each disc. The rest was about 20 minutes of FMV per disc.

Oh, I know a lot of data on the CD is repeated. It's the FMVs that took up the most space. Even if it's 1/3 the CD capacity, that's still 250MB of actual game data + however many minutes of FMVs were in RE2. There's still probably close to 1 GB of FMVs with both discs combined compressed down to 64MB.
 
No one ever talks about problems or cut content with 3rd party ports with the GCN, even though it's mini DVDs held a third of a regular DVD data; a ton of speculation before, but in reality almost no game suffered from it.
 
I just wanted to chime in about the storage issue. I thought the Switch was using FP16 instead of FP32. Wouldn't that mean that some of the data to be stored would be cut in half? Obviously not the graphics or music but the map data. Also as someone else mentioned Nintendo's amazing compression for the graphic data.
 
Thx
I just wanted to chime in about the storage issue. I thought the Switch was using FP16 instead of FP32. Wouldn't that mean that some of the data to be stored would be cut in half? Obviously not the graphics or music but the map data. Also as someone else mentioned Nintendo's amazing compression for the graphic data.

No, it doesn't use fp16 instead of fp32 it just allows 2 fp16 instructions to be done in the place of 1 fp32. (Same as PS4 pro)
Fp16 is too low precision for a lot of map data especially things like geometry transformation.

You might get things more compressed but not for that reason. Any system could store fp16 data on disc and convert it to fp32 at load time if the lack of precision was OK.
 
I just wanted to chime in about the storage issue. I thought the Switch was using FP16 instead of FP32. Wouldn't that mean that some of the data to be stored would be cut in half? Obviously not the graphics or music but the map data. Also as someone else mentioned Nintendo's amazing compression for the graphic data.

As has been mentioned in the past few pages, uncompressed audio and video is by far the biggest offender when it comes to game sizes. Half precision on some lines of code will not make a big difference in game size.
 
I just wanted to chime in about the storage issue. I thought the Switch was using FP16 instead of FP32. Wouldn't that mean that some of the data to be stored would be cut in half?

The difference between fp16 and fp32 is basically at what point a rounding error in maths calculations occurs and becomes unreliable; if you imagine fp16 is accurate to 5 decimal places, and fp32 is accurate to 10 decimal places you can see the difference (the actual numbers involved are much bigger) isn't a difference that would be stored as data, because it is most often used as the result of calculations, not as fixed data lookups.
 
That's 100% a fake, reports from sources which had almost everything right so far said it's a 720p display, and it makes lot of sense, also i really don't think there will be a 4G version at all, same for the devkit specs, all looks so wrong, it can't be true
 
Thx


No, it doesn't use fp16 instead of fp32 it just allows 2 fp16 instructions to be done in the place of 1 fp32. (Same as PS4 pro)
Fp16 is too low precision for a lot of map data especially things like geometry transformation.

You might get things more compressed but not for that reason. Any system could store fp16 data on disc and convert it to fp32 at load time if the lack of precision was OK.

As has been mentioned in the past few pages, uncompressed audio and video is by far the biggest offender when it comes to game sizes. Half precision on some lines of code will not make a big difference in game size.

The difference between fp16 and fp32 is basically at what point a rounding error in maths calculations occurs and becomes unreliable; if you imagine fp16 is accurate to 5 decimal places, and fp32 is accurate to 10 decimal places you can see the difference (the actual numbers involved are much bigger) isn't a difference that would be stored as data, because it is most often used as the result of calculations, not as fixed data lookups.

Ok, thanks for the info.
 
Are we really assuming that graph is a good predictor of the future? Nothing against Thraktor but using statistics like that is so wrong haha, there are multiple factors that could accelerate or deaccelerate the growth rate. Let's avoid using such simplistic analysis.

I'm not claiming to have performed a comprehensive statistical analysis here, just trying to refute the claim that Switch would be inherently limited by game card capacity. Obviously we shouldn't infer too much from a handful of data points, but I think it's still useful to illustrate that, barring an unprecedented drop in the growth rate of Macronix's ROM products, there's no reason to assume any problems in that area. Not only do we not have any evidence of a slowdown on Macronix's part, we actually know that their manufacturing process improvements are on track, with 32nm parts ready in time for use for Switch.

Of course you would let it happen, but without speed checks for the SD card? How could you guarantee that a streaming game (one that does not even begin to fit RAM or that does not take a very long time to load 3.5 GB of data or so if the game did fit) would work correctly for users (without texture and geomentry loading issues all over the place)?

I can appreciate that people want storage space to keep all of their content, I appreciate that people see el cheapo SD cards promising decent speeds and like 64 GB and more for less than $20 or something, but unless you were only using it as mass storage for pictures, music, and other data you could afford to read very slowly at times (you would optimise streaming with the average sustained speed not the peak read speed), allowing this card to stream huge open world games in and out of memory would be a mistake IMHO.

If we are already in an era where any SD card, even the cheapest SD card you can buy that still has lots of space available, has a high enough sustained read speed then sure... else you are asking Nintendo and developers to optimise for unbound problem. Either forcing the game to always fit RAM size and essentially doing a giant load when the game starts (people would complain that load times are slow) or you could choose between enforcing a speed check on the SD card inserted (people would complain that Nintendo forces you to overspend on SD cards) and enforcing Wii style fridge management (people would complain about that too)... there is always the beautiful option for developers of telling them you want cart like fast loading times, much better than Xbox 360/PS3 graphics and bigger worlds, and that they need the game to run fast without any control on how fast they can load from external storage...

This is why I've been arguing that Nintendo should use UFS cards, rather than MicroSD, for expandable storage. Nintendo could guarantee pretty high speeds for both game cards and internal storage if they want, potentially significantly higher than HDDs in sequential reads and orders of magnitude better latency/random reads, but that would only be of limited use if developers also have to account for off-brand $5 MicroSD cards which could be arbitrarily slow.

I can't find any info on minimum read speeds of UFS cards (Samsung claims their 256GB card can do over 500MB/s, but doesn't mention what the smaller capacities are capable of), however given that 32GB embedded UFS can achieve over 200MB/s reads, it's reasonable to believe that their card-based counterpart would at the very least be comfortably faster than HDDs. The cost of the actual UFS card slot would be relatively trivial for Nintendo, although the costs of the cards themselves for customers might not be, at least at first, but by adopting the new UFS card standard they could guarantee a far, far higher minimum for games to run off, which would potentially be very valuable from a development point of view.
 
With RE2, it was a game where the files consisted largely of pre-rendered content, and it was either take drastic measures to cut it to N64 size or not release it on N64 at all. Games with such a high proportion of static visual content aren't so common anymore, and Switch has the capacity to make extreme porting measures not really necessary anyway.

CD games of that era were pretty crazy sometimes, though. FF VII used about 1/3 of a CD for actual game data, identical on each disc. The rest was about 20 minutes of FMV per disc.

N64 version had increased resolution for models and textures, with more content and Dolby Surround sound.

It wasn't just "fit the FMVs" in there. It was an improved port besides the compressed FMVs. And the fact they fit so many FMVs in there says a lot. All in 64MB.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131556/postmortem_angel_studios_.php

http://vr-zone.com/articles/one-gamings-forgotten-technical-achievements/77665.html
 
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This is why I've been arguing that Nintendo should use UFS cards, rather than MicroSD, for expandable storage. Nintendo could guarantee pretty high speeds for both game cards and internal storage if they want, potentially significantly higher than HDDs in sequential reads and orders of magnitude better latency/random reads, but that would only be of limited use if developers also have to account for off-brand $5 MicroSD cards which could be arbitrarily slow.

Serious question, where can you buy these as a quick google pulls up nothing? If they're not available or really new won't they be so damned expensive to put them out of the picture?
 
This is why I've been arguing that Nintendo should use UFS cards, rather than MicroSD, for expandable storage. Nintendo could guarantee pretty high speeds for both game cards and internal storage if they want, potentially significantly higher than HDDs in sequential reads and orders of magnitude better latency/random reads, but that would only be of limited use if developers also have to account for off-brand $5 MicroSD cards which could be arbitrarily slow.

I can't find any info on minimum read speeds of UFS cards (Samsung claims their 256GB card can do over 500MB/s, but doesn't mention what the smaller capacities are capable of), however given that 32GB embedded UFS can achieve over 200MB/s reads, it's reasonable to believe that their card-based counterpart would at the very least be comfortably faster than HDDs. The cost of the actual UFS card slot would be relatively trivial for Nintendo, although the costs of the cards themselves for customers might not be, at least at first, but by adopting the new UFS card standard they could guarantee a far, far higher minimum for games to run off, which would potentially be very valuable from a development point of view.
I disagree with this. First, micro SD cards needed for gaming need to be fast at reading speeds, writing speed does not matter at all for gaming.

When buying 64GB or bigger micro SD cards through traditional retailers, it's actually difficult to find a horrible performing one; search on Amazon, all of them are class 10 or U1 or better; all of them will have constant read speed around 45MB/s, which is fine for gaming, many double that in real life tests, this for less than $20.

People are not stupid (unless it's election day), they look at Amazon reviews, they have been buying cards for years for their goPros, cameras, etc.

The benefits of using standard memory far outweigh the benefits of using UFS, which is not a standard right now.

According to Iwata comments, the NX is going to be an iterative console, with yearly or biyearly upgrades, so maybe in two years we will see an upgraded NX machine with a better card slot, but right now, it would be suicide to use a non standard memory card.
 
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