Would you return to and buy a Nintendo Home only console?

[Pemalite]

Cerebralbore101 said:

Pemalite said:

When I say it's at a "Premium" on consoles... I am pointing at the total amount of memory available, not the financial aspect.

Even the Playstation 5 Pro which is over $1,200 AUD has only 16GB of total RAM when a comparable PC would be having 32GB-48GB - System+GPU Ram.

Switch 2.0 would likely target 1080P, it's what mobile chips are targeting these days, anything more is a waste of resources.

What game reasonably makes use of 32 GB of ram? Isn't 32GB of ram just for non-gaming stuff? Shouldn't 16 GB be plenty for 90% of games?

Keep in mind that PC has multiple memory pools. - GPU's tend to have 8-16GB of video Ram.

And system memory of 16GB is considered essential and 32GB is preferred these days...
But a specific game is Hogwarts legacy which is happy to chew on 10GB Graphics memory and 22GB system memory... And it's once you start dialing those effects up, throwing on DLSS, Frame gen and Ray tracing that the amount of Ram you need increases substantially.

EricHiggin said:

If Switch 2 only had a pool of 8-12GB, then DLSS would have to take from that pool which the games themselves would typically need on their own. In order for DLSS to be really meaningful and offer the best improvements it can, it would need more RAM on top of that.

Absolutely.

EricHiggin said:

If PS5, Pro, and Series X, only have 16GB of RAM, its unlikely that a hybrid like Switch 2 would have that much. RAM is expensive, and in general the more RAM you have the more power you're going to use as well, which then also means less battery life, or a battery with a higher capacity which will cost more, plus added weight.

Keep in mind the types of Ram these platforms are using. The faster your Ram, the more expensive it generally is.
GDDR6 is going to be more expensive than LPDDR5X.

As for battery life... It's actually more expensive on battery if a developer needs to stream data from disk to overcome Ram limits as you need to fire up the disk controllers, the NAND and traverse across the entire systems silicon -while- keeping the Ram powered. - Even the CPU gets involved on a few of those steps.

It's more energy efficient to be able to cache everything into Ram.

EricHiggin said:

The less RAM the Switch 2 has, the less of an improvement DLSS will be able to make. Nin has a lot to juggle when it comes to designing the Switch 2 so it hits just the right performance, price, weight, etc.

Absolutely, it's a balance.

At the moment PC handhelds are fine with 16GB of Ram, but they aren't pushing high-end AAA PC settings at 4k, which also all need Ram... But they are starting to feel limiting at 16GB which is why many handhelds today are pushing towards 32GB of LPDDR.

LegitHyperbole said:

I'm really surprised by the results. Would people rate this site as hardcore Nintendo? Could the results be because people would follow Nintendo through any changes?

At any rate like Eric and other siad Nintendo aren't separating from Hybrid as they've structured the company towards it. The best that could be hoped for is a Switch TV.

This site due to it's target audience is going to have a higher demographic towards enthusiasts which will skew things.

I think the missed opportunity for Nintendo was to have one single internal hardware platform, many hardware devices, one set of software that works across them all in order to have hardware that is appealing to many markets.
They sort-of got half way there with the Switch Lite which was mobile only... But no fixed console.