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Forums - Nintendo - Nvidia's Shield Console -- A Hint At Nintendo's Fusion Future?

Soundwave on 16 March 2015
fatslob-:O said:
I hope you people here know that Nvidia's asking price won't be low ...

The Nvidia Shield w/3GB RAM is $199.99. And that's almost certainly at a fair sized profit margin mark up. 

I'm not saying Nintendo would use Nvidia anyway, they almost certainly will go with AMD, but it's just an example more of what this type of technology is now capable of. 



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zorg1000 on 16 March 2015
Soundwave said:
zorg1000 said:

So do u think Nintendo's next devices will use AMD "Skybridge"? I'm no tech expert but from what I understand, it will share both an ARM & x86 architecture on a single motherboard. If that's the case, wouldn't it be really easy for such devices to recieve mobile ports along with console ports assuming that Nintendo's next devices are able to support the popular engines like Unity/Unreal 4? That alone would likely help out alot with 3rd party support on top of the stronger 1st party output Nintendo will have with a unified approach.


I don't think they will use x86 at all. But these demos show that Unreal 4 runs fine on the Tegra X1 with just ARM cores. ARM is super common these days, cheap, power efficient, and Nintendo already uses them, so they just make sense. 

I think if Nintendo goes with a little more power it will be more to get Square-Enix to give them a version of Dragon Quest XI actually. If DQ is going to PS4 they probably want Fusion to be powerful enough that it can also run DQXI (I think the series will go multiplat like Final Fantasy has). 

Beyond that though I don't think Nintendo will put too much thought into what Western devs want (for better or worse). I think their play with Fusion is that they can support it mostly on their own if need be, but they will still want (even need) to dominate in Japan. 

Aren't the AMD Skybridge chips going to be hybrid architecture ARM/x86? Or am I reading that wrong



When the herd loses its way, the shepard must kill the bull that leads them astray.

DélioPT on 16 March 2015
zorg1000 said:
DélioPT said:
Those demos were really impressive!


It would be cool to see a next-gen Codename S.T.E.A.M with Borderlands visuals


Not a fan of both, but with more power, developers can explore other artstyle options. Maybe even a STEAM meets Borderlands! :)



JustBeingReal on 16 March 2015
Soundwave said:

I'm not sure if its confirmed but it seems like the Tegra X1 running here is at 5 watts for 500+ gigaflops (I think it's 10 watts for 1 TFLOP, which is also insane) ...

If Nintendo could get a chip like that at a 5 watt envelop into a mini-tablet style handheld .... holy sh*t would that be insane.

Honestly even PS4/X1 ports at 540p might not be out of the question. A lot of Japanese devs making things like Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III could suddenly be able to make handheld versions of those games possibly.

Not saying they would go this route ... but it's a possibility. 

Tegra X1 isn't a 500GFlop machine running on 5 watts of power, the chip is rated at 400GFlop when running off of 10watts, but Flops aren't really a great way to determine performance because AMD and NVidia hardware isn't directly comparable.

20 watts would net Nvidia 800GFlops if their claims are true and a Wii U sized machine could probably be close to XBox One performance at 30 watts, if not beating it.

We're still probably a few years away from hitting the 100GFlop per watt level of performance, at 10nm maybe Nvidia can get close, like 90GFlops per watt, but we're not there yet.

 

Personally I think Nintendo will stay with AMD and announce their next console at either E3 2016 or 2017, for release a year later and whatever is the most cost effective solution they'll probably go with that. Judging by the fact Nintendo didn't even pick the most efficient process available too them for Wii U (they went 40/45nm instead of 28nm, which was pretty mature even in 2012) it's fair to think that they probably won't pick the most up to date hardware from an efficiency perspective even in 2016 or 2017.

It's probably way too early to even speculate at this point.



fatslob-:O on 16 March 2015
Soundwave said:

The Nvidia Shield w/3GB RAM is $199.99. And that's almost certainly at a fair sized profit margin mark up. 

I'm not saying Nintendo would use Nvidia anyway, they almost certainly will go with AMD, but it's just an example more of what this type of technology is now capable of. 

Those 3GB of RAM are likely the crappy LPDDR3/4 modules or the worthless DDR3/4, go GDDR5 or go bust ... 

Plus multi-socketed rendering has some issues too like stutter, scalability, or other problems ... 

TBH, I would look at some of Intel's offerings if I were Nintendo. A dual core Haswell CPU with an oversized Intel HD gen 7.5 would do just wonders for Nintendo's aim. They'd also get some nifty features like conservative rasterization and raster ordered views ...



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fatslob-:O on 16 March 2015
zorg1000 said:

Aren't the AMD Skybridge chips going to be hybrid architecture ARM/x86? Or am I reading that wrong

Yes they are but I don't think Nintendo has a need for such ... 

They'd be just better off with AMD Zen + Pirate Islands ...



Soundwave on 16 March 2015
fatslob-:O said:
Soundwave said:

The Nvidia Shield w/3GB RAM is $199.99. And that's almost certainly at a fair sized profit margin mark up. 

I'm not saying Nintendo would use Nvidia anyway, they almost certainly will go with AMD, but it's just an example more of what this type of technology is now capable of. 

Those 3GB of RAM are likely the crappy LPDDR3/4 modules or the worthless DDR3/4, go GDDR5 or go bust ... 

Plus multi-socketed rendering has some issues too like stutter, scalability, or other problems ... 

TBH, I would look at some of Intel's offerings if I were Nintendo. A dual core Haswell CPU with an oversized Intel HD gen 7.5 would do just wonders for Nintendo's aim. They'd also get some nifty features like conservative rasterization and raster ordered views ...


None of that stuff would work in a handheld. So I don't see it being an option for Nintendo, they will likely want to use the same/similar components for both hardware. 

Not only will it allow for easier porting but it will allow them to command lower prices on said components because they'll be ordering so many of them (for both the home and portable versions). 



fatslob-:O on 16 March 2015
Soundwave said:


None of that stuff would work in a handheld. So I don't see it being an option for Nintendo, they will likely want to use the same/similar components for both hardware. 

Like they did for the Gamecube-GBA and WII-DS ? 

Soundwave said:


Not only will it allow for easier porting but it will allow them to command lower prices on said components because they'll be ordering so many of them (for both the home and portable versions). 

This won't work ... 

There are different philosophies at work when designing hardware for both consoles and handhelds. This applies to software as well! A game that runs on a console won't necessarily run on a handheld when the minimum form of the game is still out of the leagues for the specifications of the handheld even when they both possess the same CPU and GPU architectures. 



zorg1000 on 16 March 2015
fatslob-:O said:
Soundwave said:


None of that stuff would work in a handheld. So I don't see it being an option for Nintendo, they will likely want to use the same/similar components for both hardware. 

Like they did for the Gamecube-GBA and WII-DS ? 

Soundwave said:


Not only will it allow for easier porting but it will allow them to command lower prices on said components because they'll be ordering so many of them (for both the home and portable versions). 

This won't work ... 

There are different philosophies at work when designing hardware for both consoles and handhelds. This applies to software as well! A game that runs on a console won't necessarily run on a handheld when the minimum form of the game is still out of the leagues for the specifications of the handheld even when they both possess the same CPU and GPU architectures. 

Well in previous generations, Nintendo wasn't aiming for a unified ecosystem between handhelds and consoles like Iwata has talked alot about lately.

Why do u think the console will be out of the handhelds league?



When the herd loses its way, the shepard must kill the bull that leads them astray.

fatslob-:O on 17 March 2015
zorg1000 said:

Well in previous generations, Nintendo wasn't aiming for a unified ecosystem between handhelds and consoles like Iwata has talked alot about lately.

Why do u think the console will be out of the handhelds league?

Sometimes downgrading a game won't simply be enough to get it running on a vastly weaker platform, hardware capability wise ...