akidnamededdy
Banned
Yeah this. I love my Wii U but ain't no bringing that thing back.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
What we know so far about the Nintendo NX with sources
- Thread starter Hero of Legend
- Start date
- Status
Yeah this. I love my Wii U but ain't no bringing that thing back.
If Nintendo would have cared anymore about Wii U, it wouldn't have had the E3 and the holiday 2015 they had. NX should come to spare us of a Wii like end.
Graphics Horse
Member
Maybe the PCs running the sdk will no longer need industry leading chips to run the demos. I'm just sayin'
James Scott
Banned
Yeah, I don't think they need that much more time to get software done. Leaving the console market to dry out like they did with the Wii seems like a bigger mistake.
The recent article I read was advising against launching before the end of 2017 because the ps4 is going to sell well which is probably true but should be true in 2017 as well and waiting until the ps4 installbase is so big seems to be a mistake.
One version of NX needs to come out this year and the other first half of 2017 IMO
DrROBschiz
Member
Yeah its a bizarre sentiment but maybe they want to push more WiiU stock if they can?
Maybe there will be some massive price drops to move as much leftover inventory before the launch of the new shit
Trevelyan9999
Banned
You are basically right. Theoretical performance is what that rumored/WSJ report was indicating that term from. The Vulkan API is exactly what Nintendo wants to achieve, great balanced performance without needing all the extra power to push through bottlenecks in the CPU/GPU communication.
James Scott
Banned
I think they should just ride it out with the stock they have left.
A price drop would likely mean that they would incurr loses and for what? The thing is going to be discontinued/replaced very soon.
Probably best to keep it at its current price to make NX look cheaper and when they bring over Wii U games (which they should) it'll be new games to a new audience
Graphics Horse
Member
ot but they have run out of Wii Us in Japan. This is not a joke, check media create thread. Word is they wont get more in until the end of the month.
DrROBschiz
Member
Man Nintendo certainly APPEARS to be making all the right moves to position NX exactly where is needs to be so far
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Consoles traditionally don't have (sw-caused) bottlenecks. The great thing about Vulkan on the NX family is that an industry-standard API will be used across the NX ecosystem*. Combine that with an industry-standard compiler toolchain, and you have the most open console platform the world has seen.
* before somebody says 'but OpenGL!' - that API has way too much sw overhead in its canonical form, for historical reasons.
Jorok Goldblade
Member
If Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Mario Maker and Splatoon couldn't do it, Zelda's not going to be the game that suddenly makes people want a Wii U.
James Scott
Banned
Didn't Nintendo produce like 10 by launch which lead to those big losses? They've been selling those same units until recently I'd imagine
Graphics Horse
Member
Especially in JP, where console Zeldas are not big sellers.
Plus, if they avoid hardware specific extensions to Vulkan, they could theoretically switch GPU vendor for NX2 while maintaining backwards compatibility (although they'd have to runtime-compile shader code in this scenario).
I doubt they actually had the consoles stockpiled, although it's likely that they've been running through their initial orders with component manufacturers until very recently, which heavily limits their ability to drop the price.
Graphics Horse
Member
It was more than 10. Less than 10m I think.
I dunno, they overproduced at launch, recalled tons of 8mb ones which might have been salvaged for their refurb scheme.
Trevelyan9999
Banned
Amazing for developers and reason enough for many to be either working on their ports for NX right now, or trying to get a dev kit.
I need to go back and check but Blu, porting Open CL/GL to Vulkan, how difficult or easy would that be? I thought I saw somewhere that it would not be a problem.
My dream scenario involves a powerful NX home console getting all the hh games + its own handful of exclusives as well as increased 3rd party support. Games will still be 'made' for handheld but not exclusive. Handhelds will continue to sell based on price and portability.
Don't know if this is what Nintendo will or should do, but it's the dream :')
edit: 2nd scenario where the home console is slightly below Xbox One level to facilitate bringing all home console games to portable is okay. At least we'd still get dat shared library.
3rd scenario where many exclusives are still made for both handheld and home console...doens't really solve anything. Hope NX is powerful at least and gets some more 3rd parties on board, but tbh I'm more concerned with the Nintendo games lol.
DrROBschiz
Member
I imagine the relationship to be very close to the current PS4/Vita setup
Minus the hurdles the Vita is facing due to lack of focus by its parent company
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
I'm still reading today's specs. Luckily my home hw is well supported in the beta Vulkan drivers, so no issues there.
ed: But just as an educated preliminary guess - Vulkan and GL are quite different APIs; the only thing they have in common are the GLSL shader frontends. Combine that with the fact Vulkan might not stick with GLSL in the future, and the divergence will only widen. Vulkan (compute) and CL - things are a bit more similar there - both APIs support asynchronous job queues and event-based synchronisation is paramount in both. To put that in simpler terms, both Vulkan and openCL are fairly close to the hw, but openCL does not know about triangles, and Vulkan has more flexible resource management. Actually, openCL should be easily implementable on top of Vulkan compute as a thin wrapper.
If the NX has a Wii U third party support launch I'd probably buy them this time because
A) it'll be in 1080p
B) the PS5 and XB2 aren't around the corner
C) Nintendo achievements
D) Nintendo rewards with my Nintendo
E) I want to support the idea that party games can sell on Nintendo systems
So bring on Arkham knight GOTY edition, Fallout 4 Gold edition, Assassins Creed Syndicate for NX, etc.
The console will have everything but for those who want gaming on the go you'll have that form factor with the $40 handheld games.
A) it'll be in 1080p
B) the PS5 and XB2 aren't around the corner
C) Nintendo achievements
D) Nintendo rewards with my Nintendo
E) I want to support the idea that party games can sell on Nintendo systems
So bring on Arkham knight GOTY edition, Fallout 4 Gold edition, Assassins Creed Syndicate for NX, etc.
I share this sentiment. The handheld will still be there and get support from Nintendo but it's games will also be playable on the console for some big screen gaming. Kinda like Pokemon on the gameboy player back on the N64 lol. Felt so cool playing Pokemon blue on a huge tv.
The console will have everything but for those who want gaming on the go you'll have that form factor with the $40 handheld games.
Spyder_Monkey
Banned
No, giving the core Nintendo fans who bought the Wii U the short stick by immediately sweeping the Wii U under the rug and replacing it would make those fans become resentful of Nintendo and lose a chunk of that audience they need for the NX. Unless Nintendo has a surefire plan they need that hardcore audience to get the NX going. It would kind of be like what Sega did in the mid 90's, releasing add-on after add-on and console after console in so quick of a succession that even the big Sega fans were resentful and mistrusted Sega that even if they released good hardware, no one would bite. The thing Nintendo needs to do right now is satisfy Wii U owners (which Iwata himself said) and give that console a good send off.
I could see the logic of "The Wii U failed replace that right away" but like it or not the Wii U is their major Nintendo console right now and they have to see it through to the end of 2016 at least for the sake of their hardcore fans.
I feel like hardcore fans are the ones chomping at the bit for NX right now.
DrROBschiz
Member
Yeah.... most Nintendo fans I know feel the exact opposite
People are ready to jump ship
ShockingAlberto
Member
The send off is the remaining few games this year.
That's not to say the NX console will launch this year, but the Wii U is being put on a boat and that boat is being set on fire.
ecosse_011172
Junior Member
I don't think many people would give that much of a shit apart from some entitled whiny brats.
Spyder_Monkey
Banned
Yeah... most of the Nintendo fans I know who spent $300 on a Wii U at launch don't want their console they invested time/money into to be replaced that quick.
Funny how anecdotal evidence works.
First sign of the thread apocalypse.
The Wii U doesn't have the software to last until the end of 2017 sure, but it doesn't have the software to last till the end of 2016 either. If Splatoon didn't turn out to be a big success it wouldn't have had the software to last to the end of 2015. NX is launching off a dead home console no matter how and when you slice it. At this point making sure the system is good and there are enough launch titles is more important than making sure Nintendo has a presence again in the console space as soon as possible.
Ideally the console is launching this year, but if it comes down to rushing it to keep retail space or making sure the system is solid, the latter is probably much more preferable.
Ideally the console is launching this year, but if it comes down to rushing it to keep retail space or making sure the system is solid, the latter is probably much more preferable.
If i had the photo skills, I'd get a picture of someone jumping ship and label the ship WiiU and the sea NX. the mix of joy on peoples face as they jump off the ship + vast blue waters = pretty good spin on that statement.
I don't get this.. They pretty much got everything you'd want from Nintendo and they're still supporting the system with titles like Pokken, Zelda, Star Fox, Paper Mario (?) etc
It's not like they will magically release more high profile games outside of those already mentioned so why "extend" the life of a console you won't get much content from after those titles?
ShockingAlberto
Member
Launch was 2012.
The Xbox lasted from 2001 to 2005. Sometimes you have to call your current situation shit and move on. If it were two or three years? Yes, that'd be absurd. Four years? You can unshackle yourself.
DrROBschiz
Member
Yeah well that street goes both ways
Should we move the discussion to factual market data that doesnt support your standpoint?
It's not a matter of absolute power, but rather getting as close to the NX console as possible within the thermal and die size constraints of a handheld.
Two rules of microprocessor hardware design point to many A53s being the optimal configuration:
- A larger number of smaller cores will in general outperform a smaller number of larger cores at highly parallelisable workloads in the same die area (a straightforward corollary of Pollack's Rule).
- A larger number of lower-clocked cores will in general outperform a smaller number of higher-clocked cores at highly parallelisable workloads in the same thermal limit (a result of the convexity of power consumption wrt clock speeds).
Videogame logic is becoming increasingly parallelised (as a result of PS4/XBO and PC hardware developments), but isn't fully embarrassingly parallel, so the question becomes:
"How many hardware threads would developers practically be able to make use of?"
Take your answer to that, add a couple of threads for OS functions, and you have your optimal number of threads X (and in the case of single-threaded cores like we're discussing, cores). Then, take the highest performing cores that would provide X hardware threads in your available die area, and clock them at whatever speeds allow them to fit within your thermal limits.
I would argue that, with developers currently utilising 7 hardware threads on PS4/XBO without great issue, they should be able to make the most out of 10 threads if they were provided them, but more than that may be stretching it. Add two threads for OS duties and you have 12 threads/cores altogether. Twelve A72 cores would obviously be too large for a handheld SoC, but twelve A53 cores should be fine, taking up about 8.13mm² at 14nm [source]. Assuming 14LPP achieves a 15% reduction in power consumption over 14LPE, and the first graph on this page is accurate, then a 1W thermal limit for the CPU would allow 1GHz speeds for those 12 A53 cores. (The thermal limit could of course be lower, so for example at 700mW you'd have a clock of 800MHz).
Spyder_Monkey
Banned
I bought an OG Xbox in 2004 and was piiiiiissed when the announced the 360 a year later. Granted in hindsight the 360 had a subpar launch plus you got screwed over as an early adopter because of the red ring of death that maybe it wasn't the best idea to launch the Xbox 360 in 2005 anyway.
2016 is too soon to see a new console launch from Nintendo and if it does it's because they want it out early so chances are any quality launch support is going to be thrown out the window. Plus the average Nintendo console lasts five years on the market.
Herb Alpert
Banned
DrROBschiz
Member
Nawwww
They have clearly moved sizeable chunks of resources to NX development early on.
Still the rumors are pointing to 2017 for the console and 2016 for the handheld which I am totally cool with if true
Cant wait to ditch the 3DS
Spyder_Monkey
Banned
So you're just acting entitled and want a shiny new device ASAP? It all makes sense now I cracked the code.
DrROBschiz
Member
2016 is the year man
Make your peace with it however you need to. This change is happening with or without my entitlement issues lol
The rumor from Trev is pointing to a possible 2016 release for the console (unless the graphically intensive PS4 port they're working on is coming to NX handheld which would be a twist). Gotta cling to hope.
I guess if the home console is 2017 I'll just have to rely on Zelda hype to get me through the year.
Adam Tyner
Member
Quite a few of Nintendo's development teams have been quiet lately. There's been plenty of time for them to amass a really amazing slate of launch (and launch-adjacent) titles. That's not to say that there will be a great lineup -- at this point, who knows? -- but they've definitely had time to get their ducks in a row.
That was a nice thread an old forum of mine once had: "What is Nintendo doing?" a thread dedicated to tracking all of the Nintendo teams, looking at their previous schedules, when their last game went gold compared to release, and any little tidbits we might have heard.
Of course, launching such a thread now would presume structural continuity from the EAD groups to the current EPD setup.
IntelliHeath
As in "Heathcliff"
That's why I included "not serious" in my post.
Even being a late WiiU adopter, i still think it is time to launch NX. WiiU is a failure marketing and branding wise, and Nintendo needs to get away from the whole Wii naming and image. Us WiiU owners already have a lot of great games, i personally feel satisfied with my games (even though i still believe there is lost potential).
Bring on the next system, give a clear branding and a new image for the whole console, and hardware parity so it doesn't feel like a first-party machine.
Bring on the next system, give a clear branding and a new image for the whole console, and hardware parity so it doesn't feel like a first-party machine.
Because Nintendo launched their new hardware in between cycles. But the support has to start from somewhere. By 2017 you hope the NX is getting releases simultaneously with Xbox and PlayStation and PC.
NinjaCoachZ
Member
I feel like Nintendo's seen the writing on the wall for the Wii U for a while now--probably since late 2013-early 2014--and will have had more than enough time to prep for a late 2016 (or early 2017, worst-case scenario) launch. Console manufacturers begin at least early R&D on the next big thing very early on. That's why you were seeing GameCube references since Donkey Kong 64 in 1999.
And of course as others have said there's the question of what most of their big development studios are working on.
DrROBschiz
Member
Based on all the info we have so far they are taking NX launch VERY seriously
I would be very surprised to see a weak launch at this point
And given the new gaming ecosystems we have now... If they launch with an easy to develop platform (which already seems the case with the new structure and Vulkan news) than there will likely be HEAPS of software to mess around with and regular releases
- Status