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RUMOR: NX more powerful than PS4, Splatoon/Mario Maker ports in development

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I'm sure this has been asked, so sorry if a repeat.

If NX is more powerful across the board than PS4 doesn't it mean, given Nintendo always seem to do compact consoles, that to achieve this it would have to be a 14nm chip/APU?

I can't see 28nm/small box/more power than PS4 going together. Some have said 14nm is a no go this year for a console because of the volume needed.

14nm is a stretch unless they are way ahead of the game

not impossible just inprobable at this stage
 

Principate

Saint Titanfall
I understand why they would do it, but I would prefer no ports aside from Zelda.

E3 can't come soon enough.

Well the Wii U is dead as in they cease production this year, those games tend to have long legs, they might as well port them if for nothing else than the continued health of those games.
 

Schnozberry

Member
I'm sure this has been asked, so sorry if a repeat.

If NX is more powerful across the board than PS4 doesn't it mean, given Nintendo always seem to do compact consoles, that to achieve this it would have to be a 14nm chip/APU?

I can't see 28nm/small box/more power than PS4 going together. Some have said 14nm is a no go this year for a console because of the volume needed.

AMD is several generations of hardware removed from the PS4 in terms of CPU and GPU on 28nm right now. 14nm would be ideal, but not required to get better performance than PS4.
 

Davey Cakes

Member
Mario Maker has to happen, but then I worry they will wait longer for a new Mario game if true.
The wait for a new 2D Mario, maybe.

I consider that a good thing. SMM is a pretty good way for people to play with their imaginations in the context of classic and new Mario games. Even as someone who loved NSMBU, I think 2D Mario is otherwise stale and needs a really fresh take for its next generation. It can wait.

Wouldn't mind a new 3D Mario within the next year or two though. There's less fatigue in that series.
 

killroy87

Member
I will gladly accept a port of Splatoon and Mario Maker. Dying with the Wii U would be criminal to both of those games, they deserve long, long legs. Smash Bros I personally care less about, as I never play online, but the same argument could be made from the fans.
 

SRV

Member
I'm getting really hyped. Every new piece of news/rumours I see just makes me more impatient for the reveal.

The reveal direct or E3 can't come soon enough for me right now.

Edit: Would really be happy with the Splatoon/MM ports. Got rid of my Wii U before their releases.
 
Probably not.

It's the same reason VR requires a graphics downgrade, because you have to render the scene twice just to get to the 3D part of VR, (and then you need to do it at 90hz minimum to not cause sickness - but the double render already hits you for a lot)

With 4K, a 1080p native game needs to render 4 times as much to the screen. That's a lot. That's even more than you have to push to VR in total. It's technically possible, but not likely in a market where Nintendo aims for 300$ price points.


There's also the fact that in terms of adoption, it's still

720p/1080i >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 1080p >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 4k 30fps >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 4k 60fps capable sets.

Even ESPN, the driver of most HD TV sales, still masters broadcasts in 720p because it's the majority of the market. 1080i comes along for the ride since you get 1080i "for free" out of a 720p source since 1080i is technically 540p, so most TV shows are broadcast in 1080i at most.

I find it hard to believe 720p/1080i sets outnumber 1080p sets, just curious where you get that number from. I'm also not entirely convinced broadcasters use 720p because it is "the majority of the market."
 

Hoo-doo

Banned
It's not magical thinking to believe that this will solve some of Nintendo's problems. The Wii U was a big swing and a miss from Nintendo because the concept was already outdated the moment it released and porting games over to it was not only complicated, but the hardware was anemic on top of it.

NX is already rumored to be a much more developer friendly system than Wii U, and now we've heard from numerous sources that it's powerful enough to get ports from major publishers. If Nintendo's differentiating features on NX are forward thinking enough that people immediately find them novel and useful, it would be a complete 180 degree turn from the Wii U's major failures.

Literally one of the biggest bullet points of the Wii-U that fans kept hammering on pre-release was that it was going to be so damn easy for it to get ports because of it's modern architecture. That too was based on tons of rumor and speculation at that time.

So why are we starting this cycle anew? Porting is never going to be a click of the button. Not then, not now.
 

ViolentP

Member
There is no gimmick

How can you be so sure?

My guess:

1. A combined platform across NX devices that would allow for synced cloud saves, as well as digital and physical (cartridge) crossbuy.

2. The use of SCDs in streaming and/or boosting power from the home console to lower end devices, such as the portable unit.

3. Multi-screen local multiplayer using more than one gamepad/portable device.

4. Free-from displays that allow for more options to implement UI elements on the controller, which could be either a gamepad/portable unit or something more similar to the Wii U pro.

Frankly, these seem like positive technologies. The likes of which I am not used to from a Nintendo console. I hope it's true. I'm just waiting for the news that all this tech has to be worn like pants.
 

sout

Neo Member
I don't know what I want out of a new Nintendo console.

Maybe they could do like a shitty old rock band thing where they go "back to basics"
like "we're so tired of all the overproduction, here's a box that plays third party games and also Nintendo games and the controller's basically a Dualshock."

can't say I expect that at all though.
 

-Horizon-

Member
Literally one of the biggest bullet points of the Wii-U that fans kept hammering on pre-release was that it was going to be so damn easy for it to get ports because of it's modern architecture. That too was based on tons of rumor and speculation at that time.

So why are we starting this cycle anew? Porting is never going to be a click of the button. Not then, not now.

I mean we can all just assume that the console is gonna be terribad and spout some doom and gloom. That's the easiest thing we can do and just have this thread closed right now since nintendo will never learn because they're so insular in their japanese ideas.
But where's the fun in that?
 

Schnozberry

Member
Literally one of the biggest bullet points of the Wii-U that fans kept hammering on pre-release was that it was going to be so damn easy for it to get ports because of it's modern architecture. That too was based on tons of rumor and speculation at that time.

So why are we starting this cycle anew? Porting is never going to be a click of the button. Not then, not now.

The Wii U launch situation was historically bad. Rumors point to Nintendo learning from this, which is a positive sign. We've heard from third parties and Nintendo themselves over the past few years that the tool chain for the Wii U wasn't mature enough to get peak performance from the system until over a year after launch. Prior to launch there were no manuals in languages other than Japanese.

You'd have to try pretty hard to screw things up worse.
 
Rösti;200872566 said:
And less than 14 days until Nintendo's FY 2015 Fiscal Year Earnings Release/News conference. Briefing tentatively scheduled for April 28.


Hmm very interesting, I didn't realise it was so soon.

I hope they give details of some sort on NX...I'm starving for official confirmation
 
I don't know what I want out of a new Nintendo console.

Maybe they could do like a shitty old rock band thing where they go "back to basics"
like "we're so tired of all the overproduction, here's a box that plays third party games and also Nintendo games and the controller's basically a Dualshock."

can't say I expect that at all though.

This is my dream scenario though I'm not expecting it nor do I think it's necessarily best for business.
 
Wouldn't it make more financial sense to stick that on PS4?

Or at least make it multi-plat.
Handhelds are still the biggest market for Mh, especially in Japan. If they can release MH5 on the new portable and an HD version with cross play I think that would probably work out best for what they're trying to do
 

Thraktor

Member
For people theorising that Nintendo may release their Wii U games in 4K on NX, keep in mind that it's not simply a matter of whether the GPU had the raw computational grunt necessary. In fact, if the OP is correct then the ALU performance (i.e. Gflops) shouldn't be an issue for 4K Wii U remasters. What would be a major bottleneck, though, is memory bandwidth. The considerable majority of memory bandwidth in a console is consumed by framebuffer accesses, so if you increase the size of your framebuffer four-fold, you'll want to have close to four times the memory bandwidth available to accommodate it.

The Wii U's eDRAM pool, which developers use to store the framebuffer, reportedly has 70GB/s of bandwidth. So, for Smash Bros, which runs at 1080p/60fps, you would have to assume that that 70GB/s is pretty much fully saturated, as the game's pushing twice as many pixels as most Wii U titles. Hence, if Nintendo wanted to release a 4K version of Smash Bros on NX, they'd want to ensure they had at least four times the framebuffer bandwidth the Wii U had, 280GB/s, plus enough bandwidth for non-framebuffer memory access (i.e. texture reads, etc.). For reference, that's more bandwidth than a GTX 980.

Now, modern AMD GPUs (from GCN 1.2 onwards) have color buffer compression, which provides for more efficient bandwidth usage than Wii U would have had. They claim a 40% overall reduction in bandwidth usage, so you'd be looking at 168GB/s plus non-buffer accesses, so probably over 200GB/s in all. That's quite a big jump over PS4 (which has about 140GB/s usable bandwidth), but just about doable with GDDR5X, if Nintendo want to spend the money on it.

Smash Bros would be the least of Nintendo's worries, though. Almost all of their other games (Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, Mario 3D World, etc.) are rendered at 720p, and assuming any of them comes close to saturating Wii U's 70GB/s of eDRAM bandwidth (not impossible with deferred shading used in a number of those games), then the bandwidth required to run them at 4K starts to become a bit ridiculous. Nintendo would need 378GB/s of framebuffer bandwidth (taking into account color buffer compression and not including non-buffer memory access) to be comfortably able to run these games at 4K.

Now, from a purely theoretical perspective, that's not actually impossible for a late 2016 console to achieve. Either 4096-bit HBM or 384-bit GDDR5X would be able to achieve the necessary bandwidth, both of which would be available to Nintendo within the necessary timeframe. Nintendo have spent money on exotic memory before (1T-SRAM, eDRAM, FCRAM, etc.), so maybe they decide they want to go with HBM for NX, but in order to spend the money on HBM they'd have to spend less on other components, most notably the SoC containing the CPU & GPU. Effectively, Nintendo would have to design a console that is less capable at 1080p in order to accommodate a small number of 4K games.

Given that Nintendo's most successful recent console was a bet against higher resolutions, it would be bizarre for them to suddenly decide that their best course of action is to go gung-ho into the world of 4K. Now, it's not impossible that a small number of 2D or indie games may be able to run at 4K on NX, a PS4-level machine would certainly be able to accommodate that (in fact I'd be confident in saying that Rayman Legends probably would have run at 4K on PS4 had Sony allowed games to output at that resolution), but Wii U games in 4K are an exceedingly unlikely proposition.
 

FyreWulff

Member
I find it hard to believe 720p/1080i sets outnumber 1080p sets, just curious where you get that number from. I'm also not entirely convinced broadcasters use 720p because it is "the majority of the market."

Internal telemetry I had access to where it was something like 60% of our users were on 720p. the last 40% was split between 480p, 1080i, and 1080p, in that order of size.

Heck, i can even show you the Steam stats:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

1080p at 33%. Every resolution above 1080p barely adds up to a couple %.

edit: I'm not saying 1080p isn't increasing and gaining a majority, but it's not the runaway favorite at the moment either. Broadcasters are generally a fairly good litmus test of market adoption of display tech, historically, and sports are the main drivers of new TVs.
 

BuggyMike

Member
And unless Nintendo gamers actually start buying third party games instead of the handful of yearly first-party Nintendo titles, that will never happen.

That alone is a way bigger issue than any power concerns.

Thats why Nintendo needs to attract more than the hardcore Nintendo fans. They keep making systems that people would only buy for their games, but if they create an ecosystem that is attractive to a wider audience they can possibly get other types of games to sell decently. Thehardcore fans are never going to buy the 3rd party games so theres no point in relying on them
 

-Horizon-

Member
The Wii U launch situation was historically bad. Rumors point to Nintendo learning from this, which is a positive sign. We've heard from third parties and Nintendo themselves over the past few years that the tool chain for the Wii U wasn't mature enough to get peak performance from the system until over a year after launch. Prior to launch there were no manuals in languages other than Japanese.

You'd have to try pretty hard to screw things up worse.

Kimishima: challenge accepted
 

Raide

Member
I don't know what I want out of a new Nintendo console.

Maybe they could do like a shitty old rock band thing where they go "back to basics"
like "we're so tired of all the overproduction, here's a box that plays third party games and also Nintendo games and the controller's basically a Dualshock."

can't say I expect that at all though.

This would be an ideal thing for me but I feel Nintendo might double-down on the controller from the Wii-U and just refine the tech. I would much rather see them drop all the Wii waggle controllers, sensor bars etc and start fresh.
 

Principate

Saint Titanfall
I don't know what I want out of a new Nintendo console.

Maybe they could do like a shitty old rock band thing where they go "back to basics"
like "we're so tired of all the overproduction, here's a box that plays third party games and also Nintendo games and the controller's basically a Dualshock."

can't say I expect that at all though.

I think that would be for the best. Gimmicks and the like are great and all, but it's basically like taking a massive gamble, your better off spreading those out with more safe iternations of simply what the consumer expects, because by their very nature their rare and the one thing Nintendo has done a poor job of gaining mindshare and a significant loyal fanbase within the console segment.
 

Hoo-doo

Banned
The Wii U launch situation was historically bad. Rumors point to Nintendo learning from this, which is a positive sign. We've heard from third parties and Nintendo themselves over the past few years that the tool chain for the Wii U wasn't mature enough to get peak performance from the system until over a year after launch. Prior to launch there were no manuals in languages other than Japanese.

You'd have to try pretty hard to screw things up worse.

Were you around for the Wii-U speculation threads? Because the parallels are unbelievable.
 
Sounds good! I mentioned in the other thread, but this is well in line with what most of the internet has heard and thinks about the system. Whatever this thing is, I can't wait to see it!
 

Vena

Member
Were you around for the Wii-U speculation threads? Because the parallels are unbelievable.

They actually aren't anymore (and never were really, as they started at completely different levels and points of expectation with WUST coming off of the massive successes of the Wii and sky-high expectations thereafter, and the NX... not at all being any of those things) because the WiiU was unraveling by this point, with information on RAM, CPU, and even GPU were starting to get thrown into question from unbelievable highs.

In this scenario we started with unbelievable lows (with most expecting X1 performance levels from early rumors), and more and more rumors point to a scenario that isn't "EA has sent back their dev kits, lol".

Also an appeal to tradition is a waste of our time.
 

Raide

Member
I think that would be for the best. Gimmicks and the like are great and all, but it's basically like taking a massive gamble, your better off spreading those out with more safe iternations of simply what the consumer expects, because by their very nature their rare and the one thing Nintendo has done a poor job of gaining mindshare and a significant loyal fanbase within the console segment.

At this rate Nintendo are better off playing it safe and seeing where the VR hype ends up. IN a few years when the VR market might be flourishing, then they can step in but if it all falls flat, they have really not invested a huge amount of time and money into it.
 

ViolentP

Member
Internal telemetry I had access to where it was something like 60% of our users were on 720p. the last 40% was split between 480p, 1080i, and 1080p, in that order of size.

Heck, i can even show you the Steam stats:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

1080p at 33%. Every resolution above 1080p barely adds up to a couple %.

edit: I'm not saying 1080p isn't increasing and gaining a majority, but it's not the runaway favorite at the moment either.

I'm always wary of that number. It just seems, off. I don't know if it's due to many people not opting in to the hardware survey or if they simply aren't aware of resolution functions, but that number for some odd reason seems low.
 
On the "suicidal" post:
The dev teams that only have experience with 3DS games can stick to making NX handheld games and up porting them to the console.
That's how they handle budgets and all that
 

MrBigBoy

Member
Rösti;200872566 said:
And less than 14 days until Nintendo's FY 2015 Fiscal Year Earnings Release/News conference. Briefing tentatively scheduled for April 28.
Any news from that patent you mentioned yesterday?
 

Eradicate

Member

Just wanted to put up the links to some of the patents I was mentioning, including the amiibo directional ones mentioned later:

Updated Wii controller patent - Claims section brings up newly added touch-sensitive panel information

Tablet connectivity patent 1

Tablet connectivity patent 2

amiibo positioning patent 1

amiibo positioning patent 2

And I know patents only mean so much, but these ones continue to interest me.

My guess:

1. A combined platform across NX devices that would allow for synced cloud saves, as well as digital and physical (cartridge) crossbuy.

2. The use of SCDs in streaming and/or boosting power from the home console to lower end devices, such as the portable unit.

3. Multi-screen local multiplayer using more than one gamepad/portable device.

4. Free-from displays that allow for more options to implement UI elements on the controller, which could be either a gamepad/portable unit or something more similar to the Wii U pro.

Nice guesses! I think they are certainly aiming for some "solid" moves just to strengthen and solidify some things (like the cloud saves). I also am thinking the free-form display(s) relate more to UI things then just staring down and playing the game on your controller (however neat that may make the hardware look...and they may do this for the supposed handheld iteration/version). They can also really make the whole "touchscreen button" thing work seamlessly if done right and placed correctly. The Wii U Pro controller with additional UI things would be really cool though!
 

Ad0ve

Banned
If all 3 consoles are at a similar level, it would be a perfect time to have a cross-play MH game and help push the mainline version back to consoles and leave the spin-off stuff to mobile.

We are talking about Capcom though...

Why would Capcom have any interest in bringing MH to consoles when they are making more and more money on handhelds, also Japan
 

Principate

Saint Titanfall
At this rate Nintendo are better off playing it safe and seeing where the VR hype ends up. IN a few years when the VR market might be flourishing, then they can step in but if it all falls flat, they have really not invested a huge amount of time and money into it.

Yeah everything points to them sitting that market out (like nintendo does with most things) and honestly they'd be right to do so. It's a very expensive and risky adventure that's already expensive. better off waiting a few years seeing how it ends up and then releasing an optional VR headset next gen.

They don't have much to gain jump right in and a lot to lose.
 
Day 1 If Zelda U and and a New Super Mario bros NX game are launch titles. And probably also call of duty ghosts 2 (?)

I'm going to be very unhappy if they don't refresh the branding and presentation for 2D Mario.

Whether that means sprites or a new 2.5D style that doesn't feel cheap compared to the 3D games, I dunno yet.
 

georly

Member
Were you around for the Wii-U speculation threads? Because the parallels are unbelievable.

They were until we started getting hardware leaks, like CPU/GPU. Then some of us began to worry.

You don't? Buy the new games. Plenty of people never got a Wii U and would like to try them out though.

Yup, the only reason you HAVE to buy them again is if you either never want to play your wii u versions again or you think the upgrade is worth it. If you never want to use your wii u version again... sell it?

I'm going to be very unhappy if they don't refresh the branding and presentation for 2D Mario.

Whether that means sprites or a new 2.5D style that doesn't feel cheap compared to the 3D games, I dunno yet.

God, yes. Let the 'new' super mario die. That was of the Wii/DS era and they dragged them kicking and screaming through the U/3DS era. NSMBU/LuigiU were good games, but I feel like they could have been better w/ a different 'style.'
 

yoonshik

Member
Kimishima said:
“That being said, I can assure you we’re not building the next version of Wii or Wii U. It’s something unique and different. It’s something where we have to move away from those platforms in order to make it something that will appeal to our consumer base.”

http://time.com/4131306/nintendo-kimishima-interview/

You would think NX being more powerful than PS4 its not that weird when you are moving away from platforms like Wii and Wii U.
 
Sony and Microsoft in shambles if true

PTHznCE.gif
 

Thraktor

Member
On the "suicidal" post:
The dev teams that only have experience with 3DS games can stick to making NX handheld games and up porting them to the console.
That's how they handle budgets and all that

I'm willing to be corrected on this, but I don't think there's any internal division within Nintendo between "handheld teams" and "console teams". The team that made Mario Kart 8 was the same as the team that made MK7, the team that made Super Mario 3D World and Captain Toad was the same as the team that made 3D Land, etc.
 
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