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Soundwave on 04 March 2015
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curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

I think people will be surprised at how powerful the next Nintendo handheld is. That's just a guess, but the next Nintendo handheld is not really part of the GB-GBA-DS-3DS family IMO.

It's a new family bloodline -- the Fusion line.

The Fusion concept doesn't work if the Fusion handheld can't run the "big boy" games. That means it had to run Mario Galaxy 3. Not Mario Mini-Galaxy Land. Not Zelda w/Retro 2D Graphics. It has to be able to run the real deal 3D Zelda. It has to run the same versions of Mario Kart and Smash Bros. that the console variant has, not watered down/scaled down versions.

Sure the resolution can be lower, some effects can be turned down, AA/texture filtering can be scaled back, but the entire purpose of a Fusion concept is defeated the moment your dev teams have to make two totally different versions of a 3D Mario because the handheld simply can't run any reasonable port of the home version. 

See my Tegra Nvidia X1 chip thread ... mobile tech is getting to some pretty amazing places.

Nvidia is releasing a home microconsole in May that has a processor more powerful than the Wii U, that eats less energy than a Wii U (comparable to an iPad), has more RAM than a Wii U and is sold at $200, at a hefty profit at that.

Times they are a changing folkes. Mobile tech is very, very different than it was even 6 years ago when Nintendo was finalizing the 3DS hardware.

The thing is though, to produce a portable that spits out Wii U grade graphics or better, at 720p, would require Nintendo to invest in high end hardware for the first time in, what, 15 years? It's just hard to see them going all out when they haven't for two generations. And there's also battery life to consider, and Nintendo's penchant for making things needlessly expensive with non-standard parts.

Depends on the game ... my little Samsung tablet that's a bargain basement piece of sub $200 piece of tech can run games at 720p just fine. It won't run Far Cry 3 at 720p obviously but Sim City or Clash of Clans? Sure. Even a dated iPhone 5s chip, something Nintendo could have for peanuts could drive a 720p display with graphics considerably better than the Vita. 

Just because you have a 720p display doesn't mean every game has to run at 720p. I'm going to guess most people here have a 1080p TV ... well they've been playing sub-1080p games on their TVs for ages (shudders at the Wii era). When you play a Virtual Console game on 3DS from your DS you're running games at a lower resolution than the native screen. Ditto for GBA/SNES games on the Wii U tablet that look just fine. 

The 3D display on the 3DS is what's a huge battery/performance hog. Remove that and you can get a cheaper HD screen that's easy on battery life. No one cares about 3D these day anyways (you might want to write an actual story for Avatar 2, Mr. Cameron), and for those who do there's always a possibility to release a 3D version later (why not, Nintendo releases 3-4 different revisions of each handheld anyway, might as well have one that's tangiably different).