Yeah, it's just that easy! Of course! That's how hardware scales. Just tweak a few settings and "poof" magic optimal hardware output.

Just curious -  what is your background in hardware design and development? Because if it was as easy as you're making it out to be, the engineers at Sony would have designed the PSP and PS Vita to do exactly that. Because that's precisely what they were aiming to achieve, and I can guarantee their collective intelligence and knowledge of hardware design vastly outstrips yours. Yet they couldn't manage to do it. Nowhere close to it in fact. Now I can understand the PSP meeting that goal when Sony chose the Cell processor for the PS3. But, the PS Vita? They had to know they were going towards the x86 architecture of the PS4. They've been making x86 processors for decades! But they couldn't make one that made the PS Vita a walk in the park to port PS4 games to - trust me, I know from first hand experience how difficult of a task that actually is.

You know what shows this will work that easy? PC, just look at how highly complicated, different hardware specs can all run the same games, because developers and hardware creators support the tech in all of those different PC builds, they do not have to make ports of games for each hardware set-up, they just make sure hardware drivers are updated and take new games and program code into consideration.

This hypethetical NX family of devices would actually be night and day simpler than this, because it wouldn't have anywhere near as many hardware set-ups. Nintendo's OS designers can easily just take all hardware specs into consideration and as long as each device is within a certain ballpark of the other(s) then this would work easily. Hell it's not hardware to disable AA, Tesselation, etc when you code a game engine to allow for that, which is the case for all 3rd party developers and their engines dating back to beginning of modern PC gaming.

You think a 4K capable PC and a thousand other spec builds are getting unique ports? No, developers make a high end build of their game, that's the only one. End users choose their settings to make the game run how they like on their particular, unique PC build and the developer has built their game engine to allow for the settings to be tweaked.

The only major difference in the hypothetical NX set-up is that it's way less complicated than PC, because NX only has maybe a few different specs, but they all use the same OS and all of the tech (just like in PC) is taken into consideration by Nintendo and their OS programmers.

Sony didn't make anything like this, PSP and Vita, PS3, PS4, etc are all made in their own vacumes as far as their final OS goes, the OS of each weren't designed to run on a bunch of different devices and unify the library of games and the technical architecture wasn't really made to work seamlessly across all games for this kind of thing, proven by the fact that they all have different control inputs and the fact that developers have to port their games across them if they want to allow crossplay. Which isn't necessary in a windows or Linux, etc environment

There's nothing magical about logical math equations and analysis of real world hardware that actually exists or real examples of this very thing that I'm suggesting.

As for what I do, or what my experience is, I could say whatever I like, but the proof is in the pudding of the examples I give here. You haven't given a single example of why this couldn't work. Math and real examples disagree with you.

I feel like we've had this same discussion before, but if Nintendo can get a 500 GFLOP range portable at a reasonable price (and I think this is doable) ... they should go for it.

That's their best ticket for success in the coming generation, if they have a powerful portable it will see a lot of developer support from the get go.

The console/dock/companion/whatever other version can then just be your basic PS4+ in horsepower and they both share games, that's probably their best bet this generation. I would probably suggest a few other things but roughly I think unless they have a *miracle* controller again that they have actually product tested with real/normal people and it's blowing people's socks off ... then sure build a system around the controller. But if you don't have that, then a unified platform with a strong portable that takes advantage of the radical leaps in modern portable tech would be it.

If AMD can give Nintendo a portable chip comparable to an Apple A9X or Tegra X1, the A9X is dead even with a Nvidia 730M, and the 730M while nothing special can run PS4/XB1 only games like The Witcher III and Assassin's Creed Unity even at 720p reasonably well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJQTFk6wo0U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7o4l1NEoxs

Nintendo could bring that down even to 960x540 to make it even easier to run if need be, but the above games really aren't even optimized for this specific processor and they still look playable enough at 720p. 

I agree, the handheld part of the ecosystem will be the key for its success. If they can pull it off, japanese support will be guaranteed, and with that, enough 3rd party support for the first year or two. And because the NX handheld will be the only 9th gen handheld in Japan (I have no idea if Sony will keep the Vita around that much), it would have a relative monopoly on the best market for handhelds. That alone is a big success. Imagine if they can push a lot of JRPGs from the 7th-8th gen on a handheld, Japan would be all over that. If big JRPGs like Persona 5, Tales of X or Final Fantasy XV target mainly the japanese demographic, and the handheld is capable of running a tweak version of the game, it would be the platform of choice. The home console will benefit from those games, and it will sell fine to JRPG fans. Not enough to push the PS4 or XBone away, but enough to get decent numbers.

Western developers would only start appearing after the numbers are confirmed, and even then I don't see massive support (or even Wii-like support, mostly AA titles, old ports and shovelware).

I would have released the home console earlier and let the handheld half a year more of developement to guarantee that, but it seems the handheld will release first. I hope it's powerful enough.

I'll basically put it like this ... if they have a *portable* system that can run a game like Final Fantasy XV at 960x540 at 30 fps (a few dips here and there) ... they are in fucking business. Japanese developers are going to fall over themselves to support that thing and even a lot of the games that skip the 3DS will be there and have a good amount of Western developers will be willing to support it if it can even sell 75% of what the 3DS has.

But I think the mobile tech is here already, the A9X is powerful but even by fall 2016 that will be replaced by the A10X which is probably going to be a PowerVR GT7900 (or gulp ... even beyond that) or equivalent which is like 800 GFLOPS, when you're here, PS4/XB1 ports are not only possible but probably fairly easy and it's not like these chips are as expensive as people think. The Tegra X1 successor is likely due in the 2nd half this year too. 

I still think that, aside from the big AAA japanese games, one of the best early supporters of the NX will be the small studios than supported the Vita. Those games are made already, and there is no reason to not port them to a Nintendo handheld that will be more powerful than the Vita and will definitively have a bigger userbase (just Pokemon, MarioKart, Fire Emblem, and 3rd parties like YW and MH will guarantee that). Ports of those games might be cheap and will sell well enough to justify the cost. And without no other handheld around, they either go to mobile and compete with that market, or go to the NX early and try to sell their games before the big guys appear.

500GFlops is not needed at all, just baring in mind what PS4 can do at 1840GFlops, games like Uncharted 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn at 1080p 30FPS, now bare in mind that going down to 640X480 drops the GPU requirements to 273GFlops, that means nearly half the power requirements of your 500GFlop handheld.

Using Polaris as a base a 273GFlop GPU needs 8.75 Watts, a 500GFlop one needs 16.02 watts, so there's a huge difference. Nintendo aren't making a tablet the size of iPAD Pro or a netbook, it's doubtful they'll even make something the size of Wii U's gamepad. More likely around the same size as 3DSXL for the initial unit or Vita. Going 500GFlop also adds costs to the CPU, which is needed to drive that GPU, more silicon for both that and the GPU, more RAM, along with a more powerful battery and the case also needs to be bigger.

273GFlops on the handheld is ample to run PS4 level games at 480p resolution and the sheer jump in handheld visuals would be enormous compared to 3DS and Vita. IQ even at that resolution would be awesome, because of the DPI of a small screen.

Yea I'm fairly sure all these "fanservice" games that the Vita gets a lot of will release on the NX as well for a developer that makes a profit on 30k sales bringing it over the the NX even for another 20k sales will be massive for them and also bump the games library up.

This isn't how console video game development works. PC game development is actually a lot different than console development, and those comproimses that PC developers make to have scaling hardware settings by interfacing with APIs rather than the hardware itself means major sacrifices to performance. In doing so,  You lose the ability to optimize for specific hardware specifications, something consoles can't afford to do given the fact that the hardware is weak to begin with. You see, console developers don't program a game to interact with the operating system, or even with APIs to send instructions to the hardware. The engines are built to interact with the hardware directly. Certain portions of the hardware are "roped off" that game engines do not have access to which the OS runs on, and the engines do interact with the OS for things like controller input, camera input, achievements/trophies etc. But for the most part, engines are programmed right "on the metal". It allows you to optimize specifically for that hardware,  allowing developers to streamline commands, minimize processing times, work around bottle necks, and free up additonal resources to make other parts of the game better. It's why console games can look so much better and run so much smoother than on PCs with near identical hardware. In other words, it's a fundamental and critical part of console video game development.

Because you don't appear to know this, the rest of your argument completely falls apart because it's based on a flawed assumption. It's not less complicated for the hypothetical NX and more than PC development becoming more complicated if intel releases a new processor. It doesn't matter if you have 5 specs of 500 specs, not being able to optimize for one spec, and interfacing with an API or OS instead means you lose that performance advantage. That's why console video game developers don't do it.

Again, if it were as easy as you said, Sony could have just developed an OS or an API for the Vita knowing what the OS or API for the PS4 would be (or vice versa) and get near instant ports of PS4 games on the PSV. The hardware specs wouldn't really matter, would it? I mean it's "just" two diifferent hardware specifications" to design the OS the handle - what's the big deal, right? This is what Sony was aiming to achieve with the PSP and PSV, home console games seemlessly taken on the road and back to the console going from one device to the next. That was the vision. The hardware and OS was designed with that in mind. Why do you think Sony didn't take the approach you're suggesting? Seriously. If it's that obvious and that easy, then the engineers at Sony with decades of experience that should be more than capable of pulling it off. Why didn't they? Why did they take a different approach? And don't tell me they were "developed in a bubble" considering many of the people behind the Vita and PSP are the same people behind the PS3 and PS4. These devices were developed with the other in mind.

LOL this is exactly how video game development works. Developers make one base game, then reduce assets down for the platforms that game is coming to, this is exactly how it happens for multiplatform titles, in the case of the PC version you turn settings down to fit within your hardware. Porting only entails writing code specific to a new OS, optimization of assets and streaming them to make the game "fit" within the constraints of the lower end platforms.

Console game development is no different, of course developers engines interact with the API, it's just iterating on it's features for that particular spec becomes more focused and over time more is possible within the constraints of that one system. In the case of the hypothetical NX family you only have on architecture and a few sets of hardware, as I've shown with pure math you only need to reduce resolution, if the platforms are within a reasonable ballpark of each other (6.75X power difference, going from 1080p down to 480p), the math is infallable.

APIs are what directly interacts with the hardware, you don't just build a game engine that runs without any layer between it and the hardware, it's just very thin from a coding perspective when comparing past generations of DX or Open and as uncomplicated as possible in the case of consoles, because you haven't got umpteen different architectures, core/memory counts and clock speeds. Writing that for 2 identical architectures, but different levels of performamce and the same OS is going to be easy and very quick.

Developers literally only need to reduce resolution in the case of a 1840GFlop console and down to a 273GFlop handheld (before you start acting like I'm saying these are NX's actual specs, this is an example, to show how the math scales, nothing more) to make the game fit within the weaker platform.

The one who doesn't understand all of this isn't me. Your core mistake is thinking that developers on consoles don't use an API and another is that you think that console development is that much different to PC. For one thing games are all made on PCs from the start, so that's where everything is built, even the APIs and engines developers use to run their games.

It's always a matter of hardware, then API, then engine, then game, you never miss the API step.