TotK really makes Switch feel dated

[Pemalite]

haxxiy said:

Edit - or, at least, BOTW on the Wii U (a game done with a CPU that ultimately comes from the GameCube and late 90s PowerPC archs). Makes me wonder if that will be detrimental to the game since parents will look and think it's just BOTW again and they've already paid for that.

The WiiU whilst based on the Gamecube CPU... It's very much in a different league entirely.

Normally over time developers get better at leveraging a platforms strengths and weaknesses to present better visuals...

So it goes to show that, while the Switch is significantly more efficient than the WiiU and significantly more powerful, that Breath of the Wild was already pushing the Switch hardware fairly hard, so the improvements we get in Tears of the Kingdom is pretty moderate at best.

It's also likely a testament to Nintendo's porting abilities in 2017 as well.

TheBraveGallade said:

I mean... nintendo has never really done too well when they tried to appeal to the market by sheer hardware power.

its almost always been when its the most affordable option/ has a killer feature/app while still being affordable that they won.

they barely outsold the genesis in the 16 bit war, completly bungled up the n64 and gamecube sales wise, and when they tried to one up the competition by opening the generation like 2 years early with the wii U they crashed and burned.

even more so with handhelds. gameboy had none of the flashy expensive stuff and it blew everything else out the water by being cheap and long lasting battery wise, and the 3ds struggled initially untill they dropped the price by 40% (something that the more advanced vita, already loss leading at 250, could not follow).
the only sucess i can think of where nintendo blew competition out of the water and working was the GBA, which with its superior hardware and decent price literally blew away any semblence of niche competion in the hardware space that still existed at that point.

I think people need to re-evaluate Nintendo's position in the market, for all intents and purposes they have exited the fixed home console market and are focusing on Portable consoles.

The WiiU was not a console that pushed hardware capability, essentially being almost a generation behind the Xbox One and Playstation 4 in performance, it failed for a series of reasons, rather than one or two.

The Switch however was a unique enough device which was comparatively powerful from a gaming perspective compared to it's competition. (I.E. Mostly Tablets/Phones.)
It is a handheld first however and when analysing handheld hardware, the Switch was comparatively Nintendo's highest-end hardware for many generations when compared to it's peers.

There was only a few viable SoC's that would have beaten the Switch's hardware on launch if Nintendo didn't cut back on clocks... And I would personally rather have seen Nintendo leverage Tegra X2 over Tegra X1 (Something I have said since before it launched) as it would have offered 50% more clockrate for the same TDP due to Pascals optimization on Clocks vs Maxwell.

Soundwave said:

N64 would have beaten the Playstation if it weren't for the CD-ROM issue, that's not really the N64's fault. It got shot in its foot at birth for no good reason. The more I think about Nintendo in the mid-90s, the more I think Yamauchi was smoking crack cocaine because crippling the N64 and thinking the Virtual Boy was not only a product worthy of a full blown hardware launch but that it could actually sell 3 million units in a few months (Yamauchi's projection) was totally into crazy town. 

We don't know that for sure.

Nintendo was late to the generation, Sony and Sega had a head start.

Nintendo also had several policies which did hinder more "mature" games on it's platforms during that time as well.

In saying that, the Nintendo 64 was still an amazing console and it did have some of the best games of all time, some of those games would possibly have been technically worse if they were on CD-Rom. - Mostly open world/RPG titles due to the need for streaming vs loading. (Ocarina of time?)

Soundwave said:

GameCube had a myriad of marketing and software library and timing issues on top of looking like (well) a 8 year old's lunch box which was never going to fly in the early 2000s. Giving the PS2 an 18 month headstart was also an absolute back breaker, you've already lost before you've even entered the market. 

It doesn't matter how any company approached the 6th gen, Sony had it locked down. It is what it is.

Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft just couldn't steal enough market-share, the 7th gen was when things could be shaken up and it did.

Sega launched before the PS2 but still crumbled, Microsoft had more power and an attractive box and still couldn't garner enough marketshare.

What made Nintendo stand out, was it's first party games.

KLXVER said:

I dont really agree with the game making the Switch feel old. I played Dead Island 2 on the PS4 and it took like 2 minutes to load between zones. And those zones are just a tiny fraction of the size of TotK. Yet in TotK it takes seconds to load in this giant world. Its very impressive. The game looks just as good as BotW imo. In fact I would say BotW made the Switch look more outdated than this game.

Keep in mind that the Playstation 4 relies on mechanical spinning storage, the Switch is all solid state.

Random reads/writes are always going to favor the Switch.

Hiku said:

I think there was a recent thread asking about the viability of having Switch games be powered up when docked.
I think that would be an interesting solution for Switch 2. On top of DLSS technology.

Breath of the Wild is actually using AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution technology as it's hardware agnostic, it works by rendering the game at a lower resolution and using an open-sourced spatial upscaling algorithm (Lanczos).

It would probably have been in Nintendo's best interest in using FSR2 rather than 1.

But DLSS isn't a requirement for good upscaling/reconstruction, lots of alternatives are out there these days, just nVidia is a step ahead with it's latest DLSS.

Soundwave said:

There will almost definitely be a 4K version for the next Switch console, if it really bothers you that much you can wait ... and spend the $70 then (lol).

Or if you've legally purchased the game, I don't think anyone is going to bemoan you if you choose to play the game on a PC emulator at a higher resolution. Go ahead, knock yourself out. 

Probably be a Breath of the Wild+Tears of the Kingdom remastered.

SvennoJ said:

The graphical fidelity is fine, the output is not though. Maybe it looks better on the Switch OLED, but on my 4K HDR tv it looks washed out and blurry, next to a lot of judder when panning the camera. It kinda feels like Nintendo doesn't care about tvs anymore at all.

I don't need more polygons nor 4K textures, I need a stable sharp picture that doesn't have me wondering what's wrong with my glasses :p So maybe give the option to dial the detail down to get stable 1080p30 output when docked. At least 1080p scales well on 4K screens and 30fps is perfectly fine for 3rd person action adventure.

My wife and kid are currently playing Ratchet and Clank again after playing Snipperclips on the Switch. Can't get them to play Zelda either lol. I'm gonna play some Humanity on PSVR2, easier to see what I'm doing.

I tend not to use my Switch in Handheld... But I am gaming it on my PC monitor which is a pretty average 32" 1440P/144hz panel and it looks soft.

Haven't tried it on my 85" 4k TV yet.

Game looks "fine". - It's definitely got a noisy/pixelated presentation.

But it's a Nintendo game as well, you can't expect super sharp visuals.