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Soundwave on 04 September 2016
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thismeintiel said:
Soundwave said:

Actually *for a portable device* a Parker based Tegra (X2?) is a fucking beast of a chip. It's bleeding edge. 

That's like 16x better than a Vita and next to a 3DS ... lol, it's like going from an NES to a Playstation. 

And 720p for a 6-inch device is still a pretty damn good PPI, it's almost on par with a $1000 iPad Pro for PPI. 

Having a screen resolution over 720p would be ultimately a waste of resources for a gaming-centric device, you'll get a very nice image quality at 720p on thte go at 6-inches provided Nintendo doesn't use an ass quality display and you save on battery life which is more important at that point. 

I think the idea of attaching it to a home dock which can increase power would be a very smart way of closing the power gap for home use, my worry there is Nintendo will get lazy and say "well this is good enough" ... this would be a great way for Nintendo to compromise and offer people who want higher end visuals at home a bone. That would be a true "hybrid" device IMO, but we'll see if they do that or not. 

I have a 5.2" 1080p phone.  Before I had a 5.5" 720p one.  I am never going back to 720p.  Sure, it's not god awful, but you can tell the difference.  And once you've seen that difference, you don't want to go back.  It's just nice not seeing the pixels that make up the image.  A 6.2" 720p screen would be worse.

As far as the Tegra goes, I'm still skeptical that that is what's in it.  Going AMD would most likely be cheaper, and Nintendo likes cheap.  The other manufacturers have also had problems with Nvidia, which is why everybody went with AMD this gen.  I just don't see them switching.  AMD also said they had 3 wins this year.  One would launch this year, most likely Neo, and the other 2 next year.  If we assume Scorpio is one, who is the other?  I would think the NX.  Unless Sony really is trying to put out another PSP after the success of the PS4, but I just don't see that happening.

Personally, I think the dock will end up just being a easy way to hook up the console to the TV and charge it.  I don't think they are going to put extra HW inside it to boost the power by a little.  It just seems like it would increase the price incredibly.  And this thing needs to stay cheap if Nintendo wants it to sell.

Soundwave said:

The downside to that is a lot of Nintendo IP would likely get shelved forever. 

Nintendo wouldn't bother to make a game like Punch-Out or Pilotwings or Kid Icarus ... they make these types of games now because they have to support an entire platform. Probably something like Splatoon likely wouldn't get made either. 

As a third party they'd just become like EA and all these other shitty companies and just pump out Mario Kart, Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, and nothing but every 1-2 years because that's all that would sell and they're under no obligation to diversify their library as they have no platform to really support. 

Look at how much more diverse and great Sega's software was when they had to support the Dreamcast versus what it became as a third party.

I highly doubt that.  As long as they sell decently, Nintendo will make more of them.  Hell, if they are given support from ND or SM, like Sony often does for devs getting to know their HW, they might actually pump these games out much quicker than they have been doing.  Unless you think Nintendo is as "evil" as EA and their consoles are the only thing holding back that evil.

And Sega's lack of diversity had A LOT more to do with their financial woes than it did their lack of supporting a console.  Nintendo doesn't face that same fate.

AMD doesn't have a mobile processor comparable to what Nvidia is doing. Nintendo's head of the technology and system architecture is also a former Nvidia employee. That and apparently Nvidia was very, very close to the 3DS contract with an older Tegra chip apparently but their chip ran too hot 5-6 years ago. 

AMD is out. Besides they themselves said they had three semi-custom design wins for gaming, we know now two of them were to Microsoft (they congratulated MS on XB1 S and XB Scorpio being new semi-custom designs) and we know the other one is PS4 Neo. So Nintnedo is out on AMD. They probably got a sweet, sweet deal on that Tegra chip because Nvidia has struggled to find vendors for it ... it's too powerful/hot for a smartphone and too powerful for a tablet too, Nvidia is only able to sell them to self-driving cars and those are really years away from selling in big volume. 

A high resolution screen is nice, but it's pointless if the chip can't render at that resolution. Running games natively at 1080P ... even the XB1 and PS4 struggle at that resolution, a mobile chip would get so hot you'd be able to cook an egg on it if you pressed it to run a high level of visuals. Also I doubt you'll be reading a lot of eBooks or browsing a ton of websites on the NX, things where screen resolution matters moreso on a small device. 

As for the multiplat thing, I don't see a ton of diversity on the PS4/XB1 ecosystem as far as what actually sells either. IMO if Nintendo goes third party then their priorities change because who gives a shit about making a Punch-Out or Wave Race or F-Zero or even a Splatoon. Your responsibilities as a third party are strictly to yourself as a company, not towards building a broad userbase. And even so, I don't even think it's a lock many of Nintendo's franchises would do great on Sony/MS' fan bases ... we can see the most popular games on those platforms are violent shooters, crime games, violent mideval hack n' slash games, and Hollywood wannabe action games, and sports or racing simulators ... none of these are genres that Nintendo does well in. 

I wouldn't mind if maybe they allowed NX software to run on Nvidia-approved PC set ups, or if the supplemental compute unit allowed you to use a Nvidia GPU straight up (a PC one) for people who really want that. Maybe they can work more with Nvidia because Nvidia seemed interested in building a software ecosystem of some type.