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Soundwave on 11 September 2023
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sc94597 said:
Soundwave said:

Updated the title to fix the error there.

More updates today, Resetera industy insider Nate the Great has put out a podcast and has said he has also heard the Matrix Awakens demo was shown and sheds more light on the Zelda: BOTW demo:



He says The Matrix Awakens was running with ray tracing and uses no ray reconstruction. I don't really know how this is possible, but that's what he's saying. If that's the case, then I almost wonder if this has to be Lovelace architecture and not Ampere. Kopite when he first leaked the Tegra T239 said it was Lovelace but I dunno I think we just assumed Ampere? If it's Lovelace I think that means it has to be a 4nm chip because Lovelace is 4nm or lower only from what I understand. 

Lovelace did start shipping in fall 2022 (Nvidia 40 series cards), so if the Switch 2 is fall 2024, it would be a two year gap there ... it isn't actually too far off from the Tegra X1 releasing in 2015 (Maxwell 20nm process), and Switch launching in early 2017 I guess (probably not unreasonable to think Nintendo was targeting holiday 2016 and just missed it due to software not being ready). The other can of worms Lovelace opens up is it would potentially open the door to DLSS Frame Generation (I said potentially) as that is supported by Lovelace architecture which could alter performance quite a bit in a good way. 

Zelda: BOTW demo was 4K 60 fps using DLSS but the interesting quirk was all the load time was eliminated. So as I've said before I suspect Nintendo is using some faster internal storage, maybe like UFS 3.1 or 4? An internal NVMe seems like it would be too expensive ... but who knows. 

A person on reddit posted a very detailed speculation for why they think 4nm makes the most sense from both a business perspective and a technological one and for both Nintendo and Nvidia. 

https://pastebin.com/V5nTeh4h

Yeah I'm starting to think that too, especially with the Matrix demo. It's actually not far off from what the Tegra X1 Maxwell was for even early 2017 to be honest ... it was still a cutting edge chip even when it came out on the Switch. Really only the Apple A9X which was a monster processor for Apple was comparable at the time. 

When people act like the Tegra X1 was some garbage chip that Nintendo just slapped into the Switch, that's pretty misleading. The Tegra X1 was the best mobile chip period when it released in 2015, it was a monster chip. And it was still very high end by late 2016/early 2017 for the Switch. Mobile chip tech has boomed in the years since then too. You look at what Apple is doing today, their M1 Max chip gets the performance of high end PC laptops with like 30 series cards at less than 1/3 of the power consumption (incredible). 

If Sony had made a Vita 2 or PSP3 in 2017 they would not have been able to significantly outperform a Tegra X1, it's not just a "well Nintendo used this ancient tech". For the time it was a pretty big ticket processor in the mobile world. 

So I'm not sure why some people are so hung up on the idea that Nintendo could not use a higher end mobile processor for 2024. They already did exactly that in 2017. It just so happens that mobile tech has improved a lot since then and Nvidia's feature set side has improved massively from 2015 with things like RTX and DLSS. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 11 September 2023