Will the Switch ever get a Direct competitor?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

2. The bigger the resolution the higher the data consumption. With a PS4 equivalent you could already count close to 15-20GB instead of the 5GB for Switch hardware.

False.
The resolution... As in rendering output resolution doesn't increase or decrease game sizes one single piece. It's an arbitrary setting... It's everything else like textures and audio that blow out game sizes, not the resolution itself.

Streaming wise... A Higher Resolution stream can be smaller in size than a lower resolution stream... Bitrates are a thing... I.E. You can have a higher bitrate, lower resolution stream.
Plus encoding method. h.265 is extremely efficient... More so than older methods.

@bolded: But that's just locally. You don't stream textures after all, you stream images. And in that regard, the bigger the image the more data it consumes per unit of time.

I know HEVC (h.265 for those who don't know what it is) is efficient. But is used for streaming by Sony? I don't expect Sony to output native h.265, especially not considering the age of the service (if it would use Playstation Now). MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) or even VP9 is much more likely there.

Also, as far as I know HEVC is pretty heavy on the hardware in higher resolutions. Full HD should be fine with mobile hardware, bit it took an Ivy Bridge i7 running at full speed to get 29fps in 4K resolution in 2014. That being said, I think for a handheld 1080p would suffice, but if you want to stream to an UHD TV this might become a limitation - although modern chips have hardware decoders for HVEC, so that problem may be gone by now.

Also, looking at the open-souce, royalty-free successor of VP9, AV1, my 20mbit expectation for 1080p60fps seems largely correct here (level 4.1).