Yeah but even relative to Vita sales, people overwhelming choose the portable Vita over the home version console. 

I could see Nintendo doing this (never say never), but in said scenario, I don't see many but very hardcore Nintendo faithful feeling they need both devices. It would be less of two product lines and really just everything collapsing into the portable line in effect I feel. 

They'd be better off just making a hybrid single device in this case I think, at least then they could have the whole "it's a portable that plays games on your TV too!" differniator as an easy feature add if that's what they want to do. 

It's a tricky situation, there are definite pros to unifying but there are some cons too (though I don't think it's much of a debate, because I don't think Nintendo functionally has a choice). 

Actually an AMD Polaris GPU basically offers 2.683Tlops on 86 Watts (using AMD's own GFlop calculation method).

So AMD are capable of 31.20GFlops per watt, at 10 watts Polaris architecture can outperform PS3 or 360, it's basically at Wii U levels of performance on less than a 3rd of the total power consumption of Wii U, which is handheld territory.

Price wise full polaris is probably going to be competitive with a GTX 950, so around £130/$150 for that full 2.683TFlop GPU, a handheld version of that chip, using a fraction of the silicon of that chip will probably be under £20 per handheld for the whole SOC.

That GTX 950 price is at retail, not taking into consideration the cost to a platform holder, which is actually much lower, because Amazon makes a reasonable profit per item of stock, to Nintendo chips are going to cost less. Actually a 320GFlop AMD handheld, with a 1080p panel and everything else needed to make it all work can easily happen at $199.

Running Wii U level graphics on a handheld at a reasonable price is actually possible now, it just all depends on what kind of battery Nintendo wants to use.

Considering that NX console would probably have graphics a bit better than PS4, the handheld will likely be running the same games, just with lower resolutions and with some of the graphical bells and whistles turned off. So the handheld version of the games will actually still look better than Wii U graphics.

Polaris is still designed with fat laptops and desktop class environments in mind, I think AMD could give Nintendo more power per watt if they specifically asked for something from the ground up for a portable. 

The Apple A9X I'm fairly sure would eat the Wii U alive, and that's a portable chip in a fan-less design. PowerVR pegs it at dead with a mobile Nvidia 730M GPU, which isn't a bad little chip, it can even run PS4/XB1 only games like The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Unity well enough at 720p resolution. 

I think if Nintendo priortized it, AMD could give them a similar kind of chip (as the A9X or Nvidia's Tegra X1). 

That doesn't make much sense really. Imagine you're a handheld console owner, you don't own the home console, nor do you plan on owning it, but because you own the NX handheld you can buy all of the console games. This means you have more options.

Same would be true of the console owners, they can buy all of the games that would have been handheld exclusives.

The idea that sales of software will be reduced only works if all NX owners own all hardware. TBH if Nintendo allows NX owners to buy any NX game and run it on any piece of NX hardware they own then they automatically open up a new revenue stream.

If we take the 3DS market, that's an extra 57 million people that couldn't buy Wii U games because they only had the ability to play 3DS games, in the case of the hypethical unified NX ecosystem Nintendo has one ecosystem of handheld and console owners.

Wii U and 3DS combined (according to VG Chartz) have an install base of 70,435,281 people, that's over 70 million potential gamers who can buy software, right now Wii U gamers can't buy the games on 3DS and the 3DS gamers can't buy Wii U games. By opening up the ecosystem to include both devices Nintendo potentially increases home console software by 5.6X and they also potentially add another 21% to the sales of their handheld only games.

Even if the handheld owners of NX only bought one or 2 extra games each from the console line-up that makes it worthwhile doing this.

No Polaris is designed to be a more efficient architecture, which is why it's made on a smaller 14nm finfet scale. It's a matter of performance per watt. It's not hard to eat Wii U's processor for breakfast, because that was made using an older 40/45nm scale, which is way less efficient than PS4 and Xbox One's architecture.

This is what AMD has now, along with their Zen CPU core or maybe Puma, unless Nintendo wants to go with the older tech, like the architecture that Carrizo uses. You need to forget this Apple A9 or PowerVR stuff. Nintendo sticks with their partners, the only reason they'd move away from one is to make sure they're compatible with their competitors like Sony and Microsoft, so they probably won't use IBMs PowerPC tech any more.

Polaris is definitely competive with Tegra X1, considering that it's possible to run Xbox 360 level graphics on like 5 watts, that's full native 720p, games with visuals like Halo 4, 30FPS.

A Polaris chipset at 43 watts could basically hit Xbox One levels of graphics, that's 900p 30FPS, with all the same visual bells and whistles.

Nintendo will likely go all AMD, the only question really is whether they choose Polaris and Zen, Puma and 2014/15 GPU tech or some combination of those architectures. Hopefully they go with the newer combo, because it futureproofs them somewhat more if they're planning on releasing newer devices, with better capabilities, but keep the NX Family idea.

Polaris should be able to scale, if Nintendo requires a handheld version, then AMD just uses fewer CPU and GPU cores, along with clocking them slower. Same goes for the RAM. The console would just use more of everything and everything stays nice and compatible for developers making their games.

No porting, because of the unified OS, just lowering of graphical and resolution settings. Simples.

I think the portable NX should be the main device. Because it kinda has to be. It's time for the portable to stop being the "little brother" business wise it has the vast majority of the userbase, so if Nintendo is going to make headway with developer support the portable needs to be the centerpiece of the unified platform equation.

The NX console(s) should just be more of a secondary thing to be honest, and I know some people are going be angry at that, but I think the console should take a new position of a specialty item and it should be more flexible as a result with different console configs if need be (Euro/US gamers want a different type of console these days, that's just the reality of the situation).

Make a powerful but sensibly designed portable, basically the PS4 of portables. That's the "sun" of your universe. Then you can have different console models "orbit" around that central pillar, and the graphics can optionally scale up and the console user can pick based on their specific tastes what they want. 

Console wise Nintendo's in tough anyway, PS4 and XBox One likely will not be beaten for console userbase this gen no matter what Nintendo does. Too far of a head start now. I'd make the console an evolving line of products so they don't get badly undercut when the PS5/XB2 eventually show up. 

NX needs to radically alter Nintendo's hardware setup though IMO and embrace new ideas. If it's just the same ol', same ol', (which I understand is what some Nintendo fans want every 5 years forever and ever and ever), it's not going to do well. Nintendo needs to question every aspect of their hardware design and the modern function of said designs, what worked in 1985 and 1995 and even 2005 doesn't neccessarily mean it works now and it sure as hell is not working in 2016.

The OS is what should be the main part of the system, TBH the hardware is just the vessel in this equation. The notion that the handheld will hold back the home console is a false one, tbh and as I've said to you in our past discussions or debates developers can easily scale their games up and down to run on whatever hardware, provided it's within a certain ballpark.

The hypothetical NX console can just run a more demanding version of the same game, at a higher resolution, with better textures, geometry, maybe adjustments to shaders, etc.

As far as potential sales goes there are still a lot of gamers that are yet to buy a console. So far maybe a quarter of the potential console owners have bought one, a massive area of the market still exists for the taking and of course there are the handheld users, but it's possible that a Nintendo home console could have a sizeable chunk of those console buyers. Maybe NX console could even account for more than the 3DS level of sales this generation.

It all depends on what kinds of games Nintendo are going to make for NX, if they're going to have games that target the global 3rd party audience, along with their core established IP then the ability to also move 3rd party software could be there this gen and the 3rd party audience that are yet to go 8th gen could decide to buy NX console, instead of buying PS4 or XBox One.

Those games that haven't bought into the 8th gen are still waiting for a reason or reasons to do so, maybe they'll buy a PS4 because it has more big AAA exclusives, along with all of the 3rd party software and the smaller indie games compared to XBox One.

It's possible that with only one platform to make games for Nintendo will be able to match software line-ups with their competition pretty quickly, given the volume of games that 3DS and Wii U have had combined that seems pretty likely. This unified approach development would certainly free up resources to allow Nintendo the freedom to make more new IPs, instead of having to make multiple versions of a game for each system in a unique way.

In this equation the software becomes the focus, be it the games and the OS, hardware just allows for a flexible environment to evolve into. Focusing on the hardware isn't really needed to make this happen, because the hardware is already at a point where games can scale, you only need to look at how PC games can just add features that can run with better hardware. Provided Nintendo makes the experience pretty seamless between the two there's really no chance of this having any problems. If developers can make a game run across thousands of different hardware configurations, with different architectures and a single OS or even two, then they can easily make their games work on 2 hardware configurations and a single OS optimized for those 2 devices.

The easiest example to understand IMO is the PC ecosystem, only much less complicated and developers choose the graphical settings for the 2 platforms in it. That's what NX sounds like to me. That works and because NX is much less complicated, while also packing one architecture across both systems, it makes things even simpler.

Still when building a ball park, a ball park is a finite space, lol, so to be "within the ball park" means the portable just can't be designed like an after thought. 

The portable is what the 3rd parties really want anyway .... they know that Nintendo portables sell good numbers consistently, Nintendo consoles are likely going to be a tougher sell to developers after Wii U. So you need to hook them with the portable, and to hook them with the portable it needs to be able to actually run modern games to a large degree IMO. 

I think honestly to keep scalability easier, the main difference between the console and portable should be image quality and resolution, but I would give it enough juice to more or less run the same games otherwise. Once you get into things like compromising poly models and such a developer has to do some much work that they are effectively making two different versions, and you don't want it to be that large gulf of a gap. 

The more powerful the portable can be the easier everything works and the more developer support IMO Nintendo will be able to attract quickly.

That's why I would advocate strongly for a powerful but sensible (read: affordable) chip similar to the Apple A9X or Tegra X1. Hopefully AMD is up to snuff and can provide something similar, and I think they can (they just don't generally because their traditional vendors don't need that and PowerVR/Snapdragon dominate the mobile phone/tablet space). Something that can scale nicely 1:3 or 1:4 to modern consoles. 

The rest of it I agree with, but question everything. Once you "free" yourself of the traditional hardware setup, then many other things can be put into question too. Like why only 2 hardware configs? Why only one console config? If the NX ecosystem is the main pillar, then you are free to have many, I mean hell Nintendo already makes like 4 or 5 concurrent different versions of the 3DS system this gen alone. Lets push some of these concepts further, once Nintendo breaks the traditional hardware setup with NX if it unified, then embrace that fully. 

A ballpark can be a pretty big space TBH, when we're talking about resolutions scaling up or down. I mean 1920X1080=2,073,600 pixels (The Console), vs 640X480=307,200 (The Handheld), the handheld can be 6.75X weaker than the console, so we go from 2.683TFlops on the handheld, down to 397GFlops being needed on the handheld, you run the games basically the same as the console, just at a lower resolution.

Knock off AA or some textures and you're easily there, it's just if Nintendo wants to reduce costs further then they have that option.

The whole reduction of geometry thing is a none issue, it's no different than tweaking PC settings, essentially an automatic thing for modern game engines, just a flick of a switch when you build those features into your tech. You do the work at the beginning and iterate on them over time, but it's not a hugely time consuming thing.

Optimization is not something that you're going to get rid of, but it will be dead easy to handle for developers or even just on Nintendo's end, like how AMD releases drivers for different GPUs when a new game releases. Nintendo would only have to worry about their 2 devices or however many NX includes into it's ecosystem.

Polaris should be within the same pricepoint as a GTX 950, so around $150 at retail, for Nintendo considerably cheaper and for the handheld varient even cheaper than that, but incredibly power efficient and not hot for a small case. AMD's new stuff will definitely be cheap, especially in the handheld portion, because Nintendo will order big quantities of it for the handheld space, the console may also be ordered in big quantities if the system takes off.

That would reduce costs. AMD are the only ones that really do both handheld or big performance console, so they're a proven quantity and Nintendo has a great relationship with them. It's essentially been confirmed that AMD are the ones. The math proves they can do this, not sure why you'd have any doubts.

Anyway we've taken the thread off topic really. Prices for NX games was the topic, I think it makes sense for those costs to essentially work how they've always done, just that all games, be it previously handheld or console exclusive run on both devices or whatever devices exist in the NX family. Costs just depend on the kind of game and publisher's choices in that area.

Many of the biggest games on Vita aren't compatible with Vita TV, it doesn't even play Netflix. On top of that, it had virtually no marketing/advertising. It was also released a few years into the Vita's life and after PS4 had already released. It's really not comparable in any way.

The thing about Nintendo that's different from many other developers is that most of their realy big franchises aren't designed for handhelds or consoles specifically but rather easily playable on either form factor. The likes of Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, Mario platformers are all designed in a way that they can be played in quick, casual play sessions or in longer, more hardcore play styles and are fun to play alone or with others. That's Nintendo's strength and they should continue to push and create these types of experiences.

It's not playing handheld games on the TV or console games on the go, it's simply playing games with your choice of form factor.