Soundwave said:
I have my doubts about this, going to Lovelace would've required a significantly more expensive node process. It looks like they adapted things from Lovelace as is as the x-ray shots of the chip have commonalities with Lovelace, but they likely got a significantly better deal from Samsung. 8 inch OLED display with 120 Hz VRR ... no chance the price would be under $600 in that case. Nintendo has a right to make money off the hardware too, they are not a charity case obligated to sell things at a loss or net cost. They don't have 30 different divisions where gaming is like just a fun hobby for them, this is still primarily their only business. They're not a Google or Microsoft or Meta making 100 billion in net profit every year. Making 1 movie every 3-4 years that are co-financed by other media conglomerates doesn't change that. They make one hardware line that generally has to carry them for 6-8 years, they are well within logical business practises to expect a profit be made from the hardware itself, especially with software development costs being 10x higher than they were 15-20 years ago and games take 2-3x longer to make (which means fewer 1st/2nd party games each hardware cycle from the past). Even Sony is not subsidizing or opting to take losses on hardware anymore, Microsoft is on the way out, Meta is taking heat for losing so much money on VR. |
No one said that Nintendo *had* to go with an OLED panel and lose money.
Nintendo just needed a better panel than the cheapest garbage IPS panel they could absolutely find.
A quality VA panel can give you inky blacks, low input lag and VRR... And a bonus of zero IPS glow... And they are cheap.
Everyone expects an updated OLED revision at some point for a higher price, most of us who hate the current display will buy that and ditch the launch Switch 2 console and it's issues.
sc94597 said:
It would cost more, but not "significantly" more. Lovelace is a generation old in 2025 and TSMC 5N is starting to age as well. +$20 per die sounds about right, especially given the higher yields, and then add another $15-$20 for the extra 4GB of ram. Nintendo could still make a slight profit, especially considering that the Switch 2 already seems to cost only about $350 to manufacture and the $450 price-point seems to be a tariff buffer. The cost of a Lovelace chip in 2025 is probably very similar to their Ampere chip in early-mid 2024, which seems to be the original projected release window. |
The other aspect is the shit-storm Microsoft and Sony have had to go through over the last 5 years, with crappy constant price rises on consoles and accessories.
Having a buffer in order to "smooth" that over to account for rising prices on components is a sound move, they won't draw the negativity of tech-outlets everywhere and tarnish the brand.
As for the SoC... I think the 8nm chip is fine for the most part, more is always better... However the real bottleneck is the CPU and the lack of RAM over the long term.
And Nintendo like I said it would before the unveiling... Would reserve a hefty chunk of the current RAM for the OS/Background tasks, which they did... 16GB should have been the targeted amount so developers had 13GB to play with to let the console breathe.
But we need to remember that Samsung 8nm node is actually a slightly enhanced 10nm, it's old and archaic by modern standards.
Going from 8nm to a REAL 7nm would have brought significant improvements in power and performance and would have not cost much more, but I think Samsung wanted to win contracts as it's older fabs are underutilized, so likely made an offer to Nintendo that they couldn't refuse.
A fab not being used is a fab that isn't profitable in the end... And Samsung needs contracts to justify fab improvements on it's nodes.
Add on the fact that nVidia charges companies for changes to chips, sticking with the tried-and-true Samsung 8nm fab that nVidia used when they taped out the design made economical sense for Nintendo.
| curl-6 said: Switch even has an advantage against Series S in that it has 1GB more RAM available for games, leading games like Cyberpunk, Street Fighter, and Wild Hearts to have a texture advantage on Nintendo's hybrid. |
Switch 2 actually has multiple hardware advantages over the Series S.
RDNA 2 vs Ampere is a pretty lob-sided battle, nVidia on any given year has a significant architectural and feature-set advantage over AMD...
Nintendo lucked out as that helped close the gap between the current consoles and the Switch 2.
If AMD's GPU's weren't significantly behind, the landscape would probably look very different.
Thankfully that's not the case and Nintendo is in a fantastic position to receive ports this generation.
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