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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Who will provide the NX GPU?

 

Who is making the NX GPU

nVida 187 41.19%
 
AMD 210 46.26%
 
Silicon Graphics Inc 16 3.52%
 
Sony (the power of the Cell!!!) 41 9.03%
 
Total:454
JRPGfan on 24 August 2016
JEMC said:
JRPGfan said:

hypothetical question, but a 2 Teraflop docking station for a Handheld of around 0.6 teraflops?

Seems mis matched, and probably wastefull.

If thats the case the "docking station" part would probably be like around 300$.

Ontop of the handheld thats probably going to end up 199$.

That seems like a high entry price to own a NX and be able to use it as a home console.

Such a scenario would be bad for nintendo in my opinion Conina.

I'm sure Conina will answer you and point your mistake with his post, but meanwhile I'll say something about the bolded part.

Such dock wouldn't be 300 $/€ unless Nintendo is trying to scam us. The reason for that is that Nvidia's GTX 1060 can be found from board partners for $249, and that's a ful card with the memory, power system and cooling, and the profits from both Nvidia and the board partner. Of course, Nintendo wouldn't go for the 1060 because it's too much for the handheld part with its almost 4TFlops. But then, there's the GP107 which is half the chip of that card.

So Nintendo going with a lower cost/performance chip and having a better price from Nvidia (aren't they supposedly eager to enter the console market? And wouldn't they offer Nintendo a better price than its AIB for a contract of maybe tens of million chips?), they could launch such dock for $249 and still make a nice profit.

Look at the PS4, thats only 1.84 Teraflops.

They used every trick in the book, and might be able to reach 249$.

Why would Nintendo be able to make basically a home console type docking station thats more powerfull than a PS4, for less?

Nintendo tend to make weird design choices, and arnt really as good with hardware as sony is.

I wouldnt be surprised if they made a 2 Teraflop+ docking station it turned out to be 299$.



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TheLastStarFighter on 24 August 2016
Conina said:
TheLastStarFighter said:

It could be a mid-tear, 2 TFLOP card or so.  It could function like the setup for cars referenced above, or like an Alienware laptop PC that shuts down the mobile card when connected to SCD at home.

So how much do you think the whole setup would cost? A fast handheld (able to play home console games with reduced settings) with a good display and good battery life + a docking station + a 2 Tflop GPU + enough flash memory in the handheld for a few games (which won't be small)?

Well, personally I think if the system is as been discussed - an all around home and away entertainment solution - Nintendo shouldn't be too afraid of cost.  I've always felt they should attempt to move a little "up market".  They have possibly the highest-regarded software in terms of quality, and are almost without question considered the gold standard of software execution.  There is no need for their hardware to have to be "cheap".  They just need to make it desireable.  Heck, Wii's could have sold for $500 or more in 2006.

So for the NX, I'd target a price of around $300 for the portable tablet.  It has a Tegra X2, decent flash memory and RAM for a portable.  You market it as a premium product, a system that out-performs an iPad and has wow-worthy features like the detatchable controls, motion sensing, projector etc.  A slick, cool new device.

When it comes to the dock station, I would include the secondary GPU, a hard drive, a larger pool of high quality RAM and a power supply.  I would also include a Pro-style controller.  The portable provides other guts of the system, such as WiFi, sound, etc.  The Tegra also provides CPU functions and the portable RAM could act as system memory if desireable.  Developers seem very pleased with the PS4 setup, so the goal should be to exceed this by a bit (not a lot) since it will continue to be supported for some time, allowing NX to run any software on the market should a potential developer wish to bring it there.  PS4 runs at 1.84 TFLOPs.  Here's the BOM of relevant parts for PS4 at launch in 2012:

APU: $100

RAM: $88

Power:$20

HD: $37

Mechanical: $35

Contoroller: $18

Assembly: $9

Box: $6

Total:  $313

If you were to build the NX dock looking to exceed that performace slightly - say 10-20% - you could easily do that in 2017 for under $200.  Especially when you factor in you need a GPU-only rather than an APU and the form factor would be substancially smaller and lacking an optical drive and other components.

So I would target an NX Tablet for $299, NX Dock for $199 and a combo tablet/home system for $450.  If it was designed to look cool, that $450 for a true gaming tablet and 1080p home gaming system would seem like a lot of value.

You would need to back it up with killer software too, of course, and in the first year you would want Zelda, SMG3, and a killer new IP from Retro aimed at traditional console gamers, while also having a new HD Pokemon title, special support for Pokemon Go, and couple of simple but cool new titles aimed at the NX tablet's unique abilities for AR, projection, party gaming at a table etc, that you can show to potential consumers to make them want the product.

The product would fly off shelves, and third parties would start porting their games.  Nintendo would then be offering a home and portable with good third party support.



TheLastStarFighter on 24 August 2016
JRPGfan said:
JEMC said:

I'm sure Conina will answer you and point your mistake with his post, but meanwhile I'll say something about the bolded part.

Such dock wouldn't be 300 $/€ unless Nintendo is trying to scam us. The reason for that is that Nvidia's GTX 1060 can be found from board partners for $249, and that's a ful card with the memory, power system and cooling, and the profits from both Nvidia and the board partner. Of course, Nintendo wouldn't go for the 1060 because it's too much for the handheld part with its almost 4TFlops. But then, there's the GP107 which is half the chip of that card.

So Nintendo going with a lower cost/performance chip and having a better price from Nvidia (aren't they supposedly eager to enter the console market? And wouldn't they offer Nintendo a better price than its AIB for a contract of maybe tens of million chips?), they could launch such dock for $249 and still make a nice profit.

Look at the PS4, thats only 1.84 Teraflops.

They used every trick in the book, and might be able to reach 249$.

Why would Nintendo be able to make basically a home console type docking station thats more powerfull than a PS4, for less?

Nintendo tend to make weird design choices, and arnt really as good with hardware as sony is.

I wouldnt be surprised if they made a 2 Teraflop+ docking station it turned out to be 299$.

You crazy.  Take out the optical drive, sound, wifi, etc, make the APU just a GPU, and reduce the physical size and you easily have that $249 under $200.



Soundwave on 24 August 2016
Pemalite said:
Soundwave said:

I know it's not the be all end all, but wouldn't two Tegra X2's in unison constitute about 1.25 TFLOP of performance, and if we average out that Nvidia's floating point performance is generally 30% higher, that would put the two at 1.625 TFLOPS in AMD terms. 

Maybe if they added say 24-32MB of high speed eDRAM onto the SCD version of the TX2 ... would that change things? That would kinda cancel out the XB1's memory bandwidth advantage. 

Where would it be lacking vs a XB1 in that scenario? Surely two X2 units would boost things like the poly count and fillrate?

Nope. Because there is inefficiency's being added into the system thanks to Multi-GPU technologies, they don't scale linearly.
Plus the bandwidth doesn't get combined either... It's all well and good to have insane levels of performance... But if you can't squeeze enough data through the small pipes, then you aren't going anywhere.

The numbers you are looking at are only theoretical anyway.
You can't look at a couple of gaming benchmarks (Which represents an entire chip) and quanitify it as nVidia being 30% better at floating point (Which is only a small part of a chip), when AMD can beat nVidia rather soundly in some floating point tasks. (I.E. Anything using Async Compute is AMD's domain, I.E. Anything modern and forward looking.)

Also, you need more than just flops and bandwidth to win the graphics game, if that was all that was ever needed then designing GPU's would be far easier. :P

The Xbox One also has more texturing power, it can handle larger and more textures at once than Tegra, basically all the surfaces in the game with all the little details? Like the floor, heck even the sky? Furniture? Will all look better on the Xbox One, more Nomal Maps. Everything.

There is a reason why Xbox 360 ports to Tegra X1 still looked inferior on the Tegra X1 compared to the Xbox 360, despite the Tegra X1 having almost twice the Gflops, it could keep up with shader effects and lighting and such, but fell backwards with texturing, geometry, streaming and in some cases, resolution, Anti-Aliasing and filtering.

Geometry wise, the Xbox One would beat Tegra too, Tegra is pretty relaxed on it's Polymorph engines for good reason... So the Xbox One can have more detailed models... And thanks to Tessellation, more smaller "bumpy" surfaces like small rocks and pebbles rather than flat surfaces without definition.

Tegra is also not as proficient at single and double precision floating point as Graphics Core Next either, generally. Which can impact accuracy.
It also falls behind on integers and Vertex.

The eDRAM would help eat away at the Xbox One's bandwidth advantage, but I think at that point, Nintendo would be better off throwing a couple of Gigabytes of GDDR5X memory at the problem... And even then, it's not a clear-cut winner on who is faster between the NX and Xbox One.

Werix357 said:

Wish more people read this as people are jumping to conclusions based on GFLOP's

I am constantly nagging people about it.

JEMC said:

Direct3D or DX is a propietary API from MSoft, so neither Sony nor Nintendo will use it in their development tools. That leaves us with OpenGL/Vulkan.

Also, those theories with 2xTegras have, in my eyes, one big flaw: they are assuming a 100% scaling. That's something that won't happen.

That's true.
But I took into account that Pascal is generally more efficient all around than Graphics Core Next 1.0/1.1 in the Xbox One.
It has better compression and culling which helps.

I stand by that two Tegra X2's should be roughly equivalent to the Xbox One, just forcing games to be at a lower 720P resolution and that isn't based on the flops either. :P

JEMC said:

Direct3D or DX is a propietary API from MSoft, so neither Sony nor Nintendo will use it in their development tools. That leaves us with OpenGL/Vulkan.


Sony and Nintendo will likely have both OpenGL and Vulkan. Possibly a 3rd low-level API.
There is advantages to having both OpenGL and Vulkan, despite Vulkan being the technical successor to OpenGL.

Not sure if we know how well the Tegra X1 can perform because no one really made many serious efforts for it, the Shield Console only sold a few thousand units so I can't really imagine devs made it a priority. 

Doom 3 BFG Edition on Tegra X1 runs at a full 1080P + 60 fps though, where as the PS3/360 versions run at a variable resolution below 720p even at times and have many frame rate dips. 



JEMC on 24 August 2016
JRPGfan said:
JEMC said:

I'm sure Conina will answer you and point your mistake with his post, but meanwhile I'll say something about the bolded part.

Such dock wouldn't be 300 $/€ unless Nintendo is trying to scam us. The reason for that is that Nvidia's GTX 1060 can be found from board partners for $249, and that's a ful card with the memory, power system and cooling, and the profits from both Nvidia and the board partner. Of course, Nintendo wouldn't go for the 1060 because it's too much for the handheld part with its almost 4TFlops. But then, there's the GP107 which is half the chip of that card.

So Nintendo going with a lower cost/performance chip and having a better price from Nvidia (aren't they supposedly eager to enter the console market? And wouldn't they offer Nintendo a better price than its AIB for a contract of maybe tens of million chips?), they could launch such dock for $249 and still make a nice profit.

Look at the PS4, thats only 1.84 Teraflops.

They used every trick in the book, and might be able to reach 249$.

Why would Nintendo be able to make basically a home console type docking station thats more powerfull than a PS4, for less?

Nintendo tend to make weird design choices, and arnt really as good with hardware as sony is.

I wouldnt be surprised if they made a 2 Teraflop+ docking station it turned out to be 299$.

You're missing the point: the dock wouldn't be a full console. For starters, if it's just a dock with a "power boost" hardware, it wouldn't require a CPU (a GPU would be enough) or an optical drive/card reader, nor an HDD, and the circuitry would be far more simple too.

AMD's XConnect tech, which is a way to connect a desktop GPU to a laptop via USB 3.1/Thunderbolt 3, does that, with the GPU inside the dock taking the role of the one inside the laptop. There's nothing stopping Nintendo from doing that on their own, with a Tegra X1 or X2 and a more powerful GPU on the dock that would only use the CPU part of the Tegra chip.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

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Conina on 24 August 2016
TheLastStarFighter said:
Conina said:

So how much do you think the whole setup would cost? A fast handheld (able to play home console games with reduced settings) with a good display and good battery life + a docking station + a 2 Tflop GPU + enough flash memory in the handheld for a few games (which won't be small)?

 

If you were to build the NX dock looking to exceed that performace slightly - say 10-20% - you could easily do that in 2017 for under $200.  Especially when you factor in you need a GPU-only rather than an APU and the form factor would be substancially smaller and lacking an optical drive and other components.

So I would target an NX Tablet for $299, NX Dock for $199 and a combo tablet/home system for $450.  If it was designed to look cool, that $450 for a true gaming tablet and 1080p home gaming system would seem like a lot of value.

You would need to back it up with killer software too, of course, and in the first year you would want Zelda, SMG3, and a killer new IP from Retro aimed at traditional console gamers, while also having a new HD Pokemon title, special support for Pokemon Go, and couple of simple but cool new titles aimed at the NX tablet's unique abilities for AR, projection, party gaming at a table etc, that you can show to potential consumers to make them want the product.

The product would fly off shelves, and third parties would start porting their games.  Nintendo would then be offering a home and portable with good third party support.

So people who are NOT into mobile gaming would have to invest $450 - $500 into a console which power is in the ballpark of a $250 PS4 or Xbox One? Yeah, good luck with that.



Soundwave on 24 August 2016

The Supplemental Device patent states the the SCD uses the same power supply as the base unit.

So it's unlikely it's a $200+ desktop Nvidia GPU if they ever even use this SCD patent. That would need it a second power supply for sure.

You know what wouldn't? A second little Tegra X2 chip.



TheLastStarFighter on 24 August 2016
Conina said:
TheLastStarFighter said:

 

If you were to build the NX dock looking to exceed that performace slightly - say 10-20% - you could easily do that in 2017 for under $200.  Especially when you factor in you need a GPU-only rather than an APU and the form factor would be substancially smaller and lacking an optical drive and other components.

So I would target an NX Tablet for $299, NX Dock for $199 and a combo tablet/home system for $450.  If it was designed to look cool, that $450 for a true gaming tablet and 1080p home gaming system would seem like a lot of value.

You would need to back it up with killer software too, of course, and in the first year you would want Zelda, SMG3, and a killer new IP from Retro aimed at traditional console gamers, while also having a new HD Pokemon title, special support for Pokemon Go, and couple of simple but cool new titles aimed at the NX tablet's unique abilities for AR, projection, party gaming at a table etc, that you can show to potential consumers to make them want the product.

The product would fly off shelves, and third parties would start porting their games.  Nintendo would then be offering a home and portable with good third party support.

So people who are NOT into mobile gaming would have to invest $450 - $500 into a console which power is in the ballpark of a $250 PS4 or Xbox One? Yeah, good luck with that.

I would pay $450, especially if the games are good and the online is free.  On the flip side, they could charge $50 a year for online like their competitors and charge $350 for the tablet+home.  Sound better?



TheLastStarFighter on 24 August 2016
Soundwave said:
The Supplemental Device patent states the the SCD uses the same power supply as the base unit.

So it's unlikely it's a $200+ desktop Nvidia GPU if they ever even use this SCD patent. That would need it a second power supply for sure.

You know what wouldn't? A second little Tegra X2 chip.

Honestly, that doesn't make any sense at all.  Why would one chip require the system to be plugged in twice and the other not?  They are connected to each other.



Soundwave on 24 August 2016
Conina said:
TheLastStarFighter said:

 

If you were to build the NX dock looking to exceed that performace slightly - say 10-20% - you could easily do that in 2017 for under $200.  Especially when you factor in you need a GPU-only rather than an APU and the form factor would be substancially smaller and lacking an optical drive and other components.

So I would target an NX Tablet for $299, NX Dock for $199 and a combo tablet/home system for $450.  If it was designed to look cool, that $450 for a true gaming tablet and 1080p home gaming system would seem like a lot of value.

You would need to back it up with killer software too, of course, and in the first year you would want Zelda, SMG3, and a killer new IP from Retro aimed at traditional console gamers, while also having a new HD Pokemon title, special support for Pokemon Go, and couple of simple but cool new titles aimed at the NX tablet's unique abilities for AR, projection, party gaming at a table etc, that you can show to potential consumers to make them want the product.

The product would fly off shelves, and third parties would start porting their games.  Nintendo would then be offering a home and portable with good third party support.

So people who are NOT into mobile gaming would have to invest $450 - $500 into a console which power is in the ballpark of a $250 PS4 or Xbox One? Yeah, good luck with that.

I would be happy to pay $450-$500, but likely that wouldn't work out too well for Nintendo in the end and it would price out too many kids and Nintendo can't ignore the kiddies. 

At this point I'm just hoping that they do make a SCD dock that can at least double up the hardware power. The system shouldn't have to be completely handicapped for home performance because they are stuck with using only 5-6 watts for the chip in portable mode. I hope Nintendo at least offers some flexibility here.