CaptainExplosion said:
Soundwave said:
Nintendo doesn't have much control over this stuff anyway, they will eventually just have to go whatever way the broader industry goes.
My guess is they will make a Switch 2 Pro at some point this generation provided RAM/silicon prices normalize some at some point to give the Switch 2 greater momentum as perhaps their last "traditional" kind of CPU/GPU driven hardware. Switch 3 (or whatever it is) will be a more radical leap towards a neural rendering pipeline (we are talking like 2032 or 2033 or something) as that's likely where Nvidia is going. The rise of the NPU (CUDA core) driven silicon and less of the actual GPU.
Eventually I think the NPUs will be able to infer and create visuals from even lower end inputs but even the current Switch 2 can output PS5 range visuals as is, that is likely more than enough reference data already to give a bunch of generative AI tuned NPU cores a base to "upscale" from. Like I said a "Switch 3" may just be a recycled, die shrunk Switch 2 GPU that is dirt cheap by 2033 and the real upgrade is a bunch of NPU/CUDA cores that handle the real-time "filter effects" to bring the visuals up and then maybe an improvement on the CPU side.
They call this DLSS5 but really we know that's just marketing, this is really like Neural Rendering 1 or something else, likely just like the original DLSS, the second or third iteration of this technique will see large gains too, the first version of DLSS kind of sucked and then it took off with DLSS2 and 3. Eventually as the years go on, I think you can have a setup where it can take the DK model from the left side here and create a model not far off from the official CGI render on the right, it's just a matter I think of pumping your NPU compute on chip up and up.
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But that means laying off character artists and modelers. -_-
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I hate to say it, but I think in the long run Nintendo will cave.
At their heart, Nintendo loves being a company with smaller teams being able to make games quickly and affordably (this is the heart of the Famicom and Super Famicom days). I think they long for those days, I don't think they like what game development is today, they just tolerate it because they have to.
Generative AI also kind of solves the "graphics problem" for them, it will inevitably allow you to take a lower end base image and let the AI make a higher end visual result and in a way it kind of makes the graphics side of the game less important. Anyone/everyone will just have graphics that punch way above their weight class.
Unfortunately characters artists and modelers will be pared down, but the ugly truth to that is that saves Nintendo money.
I do think they will feel bad about certain elements of AI, but ultimately cave. It's not like Nintendo is a GPU supplier anyway, the writing is on the wall here, likely future "Nvidia GPUs" will become more like NPU/CUDA core driven devices anyway. Nintendo can't be some lone bastion of keeping traditional rendering going forever when none of the other major players in the industry are.
I do think they will put up a token fight at first and resist for a while, but ultimately they will cave as other big companies standardize this kind of workflow.
