Wednesday news, part two:

Bungie will increase Wellspring weapon drop rates in Destiny 2 next week
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/bungie-is-looking-into-the-brutal-grind-for-wellspring-drops-in-destiny-2/
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is outstanding, possibly the best shooter campaign of the year. But it's not without its problems, one of the big ones right now being the extreme rarity of a particular type of reward drop that's required to craft new weapons.
Update: Destiny 2 game director Joe Blackburn said in a Twitter thread that the current drop rates and unlock requirements for Wellspring Throne World weapons are "going to gate off too many players from being able to earn their exotic glaives." So, changes are coming.

It looks like Assassin's Creed's Ezio is coming to Fortnite
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/it-looks-like-assassins-creeds-ezio-is-coming-to-fortnite/
Fortnite dataminter Shiina has posted a pair of images indicating that Assassin's Creed stabsmith Ezio Auditore da Firenze is coming to Fortnite.

Ubisoft provides emergency housing and funding for employees fleeing Ukraine
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/ubisoft-provides-emergency-housing-and-funding-for-employees-fleeing-ukraine/
Ubisoft is based in France, but maintains a sizable presence in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, which is home to one of its largest studios. With the city under increasing threat from the Russian invasion that began last week, Ubisoft has revealed more about the steps it's taking to support and aid its employees and Ukrainians as a whole.

Back 4 Blood's first expansion is coming in April
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/back-4-bloods-first-expansion-is-coming-in-april/
Back 4 Blood, the Left 4 Dead-alike made by the team that made Left 4 Dead, is very good—our best co-op game of 2021, no less. And more is on the way: Developer Turtle Rock Studios announced today that the first expansion, Tunnels of Terror, will be out on April 12.

Ghostwire: Tokyo's free visual novel introduces KK and his supernatural detective squad
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/ghostwire-tokyos-free-visual-novel-introduces-kk-and-his-supernatural-detective-squad/
Tango Gameworks' action-horror game Ghostwire: Tokyo will be out later this month, and to get everyone appropriately fired up for the big day, the studio is releasing a prelude visual novel, free for everyone, called—wait for it—Ghostwire: Tokyo Prelude.

Dungeon Siege is back and has joined the metaverse, for some reason
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/dungeon-siege-is-back-and-has-joined-the-metaverse-for-some-reason/
If you've got a once-beloved but now dormant game series gathering dust, you might as well toss it into the metaverse and see what happens. That's what Square Enix has seemingly done with Dungeon Siege, which has been resurrected as a component of The Sandbox, a so-called metaverse which describes itself as "a leading decentralized gaming virtual world".

I really don't think Switch 2 should put any focus on RT, considering how games like Pokemon/Zelda are barely filling their landscapes with much to even cast shadows with. They could be using the rest of that power to make their settings look not as dead and aliased to hell .

Also the hackers sound like a dying corpse with the recent dive for crypto. They claim they are doing it for teh gamers, but really they are just doing it purely for crypto and nothing else. Dude's need to be jailed asap and get that sweet tech band for the rest of their lives (I'm deadly serious about life-time tech bans).

Well it is Nvidia hardware and we have seen the Steam Deck perform surprisingly well with some Ray Tracing titles on AMD hardware. As the Switch 2 is meant to be a platform that will last them the next 5-7 years, I think they should add in Ray Tracing for compatibility with third party games. Like Metro enhanced edition for example won't work on platforms that doesn't have some form of Ray Tracing.

Yea while on the face of it, they may want to sound like the good guys, in reality, they probably want a huge sum of cash. Assuming Nvidia doesn't cave in to their demands by this Friday, AMD and Intel should have a pretty good idea as to where Lovelace will land. While neither AMD/Intel should be looking at the actual source code because if they implement them directly into their own code, Nvidia will sue them to bits... I am sure they are looking at all these specifics and theorizing how Lovelace will perform and how to combat them.

I'd be surprised if Switch 2 had any meaningful RT support. If it's similarly powered to the Steam Deck with DLSS, a 1080p screen, and docked 4k support I'll be happy.

I think my realistic hardware hopes would be kind of like this:

CPU: 6 Core Arm CPU
GPU: 1024 Ampere Cuda cores min with DLSS/RT
Vram: 8GB LPDDR5X (1GB for OS and 7GB for games)
SSD: 256GB min with at least 500MB/s read/write
Screen: 1080p IPS panel
Battery: 40Wh
Dock: HDMI 2.1 + Ethernet Port + USB

CPU: I don't think any more CPU horse power than 6 cores is necessary. Maybe they can do also do 4 big and 4 small or 6 big or 2 small.

GPU: I highly doubt it will have 2048 as that sounds like a lot of cuda cores to fit into a small device.

Vram: Series S has 8GB of Vram LPDDR5X, the Switch certainly doesn't need more but I really hope Nintendo doesn't put less.

SSD: While 500mb/s might sound slow, we have seen based off of DFs videos on Unreal Engine that Streaming assets largely scales with resolution. As most
games will be running at 720p-1080p, not much reason to put in a faster but more expensive SSD.

Screen: Personally, I think a 720p screen is that I think it's the perfect PPI to performance sweet spot for a device like this. Based on the Steam Decks performance, it's able to be faster than a PS4 if the PS4 is running the game at 1080p while Steam Deck is running the same game at 800p/720p. But if the Steam Deck runs the game at 1080p, it's slower. OLED will also increase the cost too much and while I would like to have a 1080p screen, upscaling games from 720p to 1080p will look worse than running Native. But if the Switch 2 really has DLSS, then upscaling from 720p to 1080p should be pretty good.

Battery: The switch currently has a 4310mAh but I'd like them to increase it to 5,313mAh which is about what Steam Deck has.

Dock: Please by the love of god include the Ethernet Port at a minimum.

Either I am having a really thick (*edit* sorry, dense is the right word... and maybe also the answer to the question) day or the wording of the WccfTech article is quite confusing, and I'm not tallking only about the technical terms.

"Digging through the leaked files, several users were able to spot that the NVN2 API is designed to work with NVIDIA's Ampere GPU architecture and will feature support for both Ray Tracing & the aforementioned DLSS (2.2) technology. Now what's more interesting is that there are references to the T234/T239 SOCs which according to Kopite7kimi were going to power the new Nintendo Switch 2 console."

Ok, fine from now.

"These SOCs will be a custom Orin design and will have a codename starting with a 'D'. The two possible codenames for the SOC are either Dane or Drake though some believe that these SOCs and the codenames were only specific to the Switch Pro which has been canceled in favor of a truly next-gen Switch console."

Fine as well, but they're hinting that all that comes next may mean nothing as plans could have changed, classic leak/rumor disclaimer.

"The T234 SOC is suggested to feature 2048 Ampere GPU CUDA Cores and 12x ARM Cortex-A78AE (Hercules) 64-bit cores..."

No problems here even for a non-tech savy as myself, but

"... The T239 which will be custom-designed based on this is suggested to offer slightly different specifications. The specific GPU that the SOC will be using seems to be the Ampere GA10F and it is rumored to feature the chip is said (or rumored) to feature the same SEC8N rate as ORIN, 1024 FP32 rate, or half of Orin. The SOC will also likely carry AV1 support."

Is there something missing there, or the wording is wrong? What chip are they talking about, the GA10F or is it another?.

Also, if someone could, please, explain what SEC8N is, I'd appreciate it.

By the way, out of curiosity I checked TechPowerUp's GPU database to see if there's any Ampere GPU available with 2048 cores, just to have an idea of what that T234 could be capable of, and there's currently no GPU available, but there will be three with that core count later this year: the GeForce MX570, RTX 2050 Mobile and RTX 3050 Mobile (the difference between the later two appear to be the memory bus width, one half the other).

So yeah, I doubt that's poweful enough to give a proper RT experience, much, much less if the Switch's SoC ends having half the cores.

I wouldn't look too deep into wccftech since their writers aren't very good but rather just pay attention to the sources.

Basically what they are referring to are the guesses that Kopite made when it comes to the Switch 2's SoC:

T239 would be like the product version in the family. So the original product is called Orin T234 and Nvidia will take that as a base template and create a custom version for Nintendo and call it Orin T239.

GA10F is where it will be placed in Nvidia's GA product stack. So like a GA102 is 3090/3080 and etc. So GA10F is for Orin. They are talking about the same chip, it's just worded weirdly.

SEC8N I believe means Samsung 8nm. SEC I believe is the name of Samsung's semi-conductor division.

First of all, thank you.

I've done a bit of "research" and found the specs and block diagram of Orin (if anyone is interested, they're in this pdf, pages 5 & 6), and yeah, the T234 chip seems to have the same specs as Orin.

So yeah, maybe that T239 could be a cut down version for Nintendo. Given that Orin is designed to work with TDPs of 15, 30 and 50W, they could disable/remove 4 of the ARM cores, cut the RAM in half to 16GB and maybe lower the frequencies to get a sub 10W product to please Nintendo.

It's curious how just yesterday we got the leaked Ada and Blackwell chips and that Ada had the AD10B for a Tegra, and today we find out that the Switch won't use that but one based on Ampere... or not, as this could have changed when the rumored Switch Pro was supposedly cancelled (it's hard to cancel something you haven't confirmed to be real).

No prob.

I think the Switch pro in general turned out to be nonsense as Bloomberg who originally reported on it have continued to get various things wrong with many of their articles about various other things.

I would love for the Switch 2 to have 16GB of Vram but I get the feeling it will be limited to 8GB. The Steam Deck does have 16 but in fairness, Nintendo's OS's have always been light typically due to a lack of features.

And yea, as the hackers come out with more and more leaks, people are finding new things. Most likely, Nvidia will still make a Tegra chip based on Lovelace maybe for a Shield TV as that is over due while Nintendo will get the Ampere chip which because it's on Samsungs node as everyone else is moving to TSMC, should be pretty cheap with plenty of availability.

To be honest, I only said 16GB of RAM because it's half the quantity of the full Orin SoC, and that alone would be enough to drive powe consumption down by quite a lot, but yes, 8GB could be enough for a console that should target native 1080p on docked mode with DLSS to upscale that to 4K.