Nintendo Switch Thread - Page 127

On February 14 2019 17:58 Laurens wrote:


Yeah nothing comes close to how beautiful that world was. And then you can fly around that world in massive mechs?!? Loved it.

Great direct imo. Hyped for Link's Awakening remake. It was my first ever Zelda game so this is pure nostalgia. Fire Emblem looks decent, Astral Chain could be good. And aren't we getting the new Pokemon game in 2019 too? Another good year for Switch?

On February 16 2019 07:44 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Man, I feel so stupid for not just buying a switch on release.

I'm looking at buying one second hand, and they're hardly selling below MSRP, and all the games are still 75% of MSRP. Holds its value better than Apple products lol.

Ugh, I'll probably go out and just spend 800-1000CAD just getting everything I want this weekend.

On February 16 2019 07:54 Gahlo wrote:

Nintendo is terrible when it comes to waiting out prices. Their systems rarely drop and the games, especially first party, basically never. Because of this, sellers that have half a brain don't have to worry about getting rid of it for a sizeable loss.

On February 17 2019 13:53 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Weee, I went ahead and bought the switch. For anyone buying in Canada, around once a month or so, Shoppers Drug Mart has 20x PC Optimum Points days, which means you get 30% the value in points for what you purchased. The points can be redeemed at Superstore or Shopper's Drug Mart (which everyone in Canada should be using one of), so it's essentially 30% off. Smart way to get 30% off any game, anyway.

So far it's been amazing, just loaded up some Mario Kart, and everything is so polished. I'm so happy, like a little kid again haha.

On February 17 2019 19:08 KobraKay wrote:


I was going to do the same this Christmas but then the rumours of a new switch version killed it for me :/ not going to pull the trigger if in a couple of months my system will be outdated (the same happened with the 3ds XL I bought….spent so much time waiting to see if I would buy or not because the "NX" would probably come soon and "kill" the 3ds line….that when I bought it the Switch was announced T_T)

On February 18 2019 04:39 FiWiFaKi wrote:


The Wii U was the flagship for 5 years, and the Wii was for 6 years, every other single Nintendo console has at least a 5 year gap in between.

There will likely be a cheaper varient, probably more portable and some features missing... The thing that would interest me more is a more powerful version, which could come, but I wouldn't expect any big upgrades. The battery is 4300mAh, with the switch weighing 300g vs the Samsung Note 9 weighing 200g and a 4000mAh battery. I mean if they really wanted to, they could probably push the battery to 6000mAh in a similar package, but the cost would increase a fair bit.

The run time of the switch is fairly short as is, drawing around 8W during standard gaming mode, and 4300mAh*3.7V = 16Wh, so 2 hours of battery life. A decent USB PD standard power bank with the maximum legal airplane limit of 100Wh (26800mAh), and an efficiency of 60% results in 4 complete charges of the Switch. That's exactly 10 hours of play time of portable play time. I don't think the switch can afford to increase it's power usage anymore, in undocked mode anyway.

In docked mode the switch uses around 12W, which is around 10% of the PS4 and Xbox one during gaming. The switch already achieves around 0.8 Tflops of FP16, which for relative simple games that Nintendo makes is excellent. That is not too shabby, compared to the 1.3 and 1.8 of the XB1 and PS4 (that's FP32, but Nintendo games can run 90%+ of their instructions in FP16). Xbox one X has 6TFlops, but this is straight up a modern PC gaming GPU with gaming GPU requirements. 150W for 6TFlops of FP32 vs 10W for 0.4TFlops, it's pretty on par. For reference the best consumer GPU is 13.4Tflops for a $1000 price point (and that's just for the GPU, not the whole APU).

Some people seem to have this idea that Switch cheaped out on the hardware, but they straight up went with literally the best hardware on the market for its use case (2 years before switch release so everything could be designed for it). At this point, we could see a fairly minor 50% performance improvement in performance if the switch went with a Tegra x2, since it's a 16nm process rather than 20nm, with some small architectural improvements. Unless they actually go the Xavier route (maybe 80% performance increase with same power, and in docked mode it's tough to say, it could even be 3x the performance, but they'd need a better cooling solution, so more sound, heat, and cost) and then the Switch price tag will go up quite a bit. I don't think Nintendo or customers values that performance bump. There's no way Nintendo would switch to Qualcomm for a hardware refresh, so that's out of the question.

I also think that the switch will definitely stay 720p, running 720p games on a 1080p display is a big no-no. The rational person in me says we might see a 40% performance increase, with all same resolutions, just patching up the frame rates in certain applications, a 15-20% battery improvement, and a marginally better screen and larger screen with smaller bezels.

Anyway, very long drawn out post, sorry. All this to say is that I don't think the technological jump for any revision will be massive if we do see it. And that's if we see it, I think there's a good chance it stays how it is, and emphasis will be on a lower cost version.