Dulfite said:
Soundwave said:
It will be interesting to see how it shakes out because the thing about the Switch is if you double the GPU/CPU spec lets say and double the memory bandwidth ... the system basically jumps ahead a generation. That's really not the case for a New 3DS or even a PS4 Pro.
The Switch is kind of in an interesting spot where it's most comfortable being a Wii U+ tier machine but because the feature set of the chip is relatively modern it can stretch itself to handle ports of even PS4/XB1 games like Witcher 3 and DOOM Eternal, it's just a fairly big pain in the ass to do it.
But you even double that headroom and add in DLSS ... all of the sudden the entire PS4/XB1 library I have to think becomes reasonably doable to bring over, so that is going to be interesting to see how it pans out.
It's like going on a long road trip in a car that is meant to seat 4-5 with 7 people ... sure you can do it, but you probably don't want to. But a Switch Pro with better specs and DLSS? Suddenly it's more like making that trip with only 4 people, that's entirely reasonable even for a long trip.
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Sure, doable, but developers think about not just cost of development but also how much they will make off the game. A ps4 port for the pro only would mean only (best case) a 40-50 million install base (if literally everyone only bought pros starting this holiday and the lite/original were not bought anymore). Then they have to predict how much of that install base will buy the game. Most current Switch owners won't upgrade: I suspect 2/3 - 3/4 of Switch 1 lifetime sales won't be the Pro.
It may be a pain in the butt and expensive, but there is far more money to be made porting games to Switch original build. So then it comes down to whether or not they want to have a standard and pro version of the game. I just don't see a pro version only game being as financially lucrative.
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I think we're kind of in unchartered waters here. This is the first hardware really under Furukawa and he may well have a different hardware philosophy from Iwata (Kimishima kinda doesn't count as he was just an interim guy) just as the Iwata era was quite different from the Yamauchi era hardware wise. DLSS and OLED are much more premium types of features than one would expect out of Nintendo.
Smaller scale games may not get a port, but if the Switch Pro/Super/Ultra/Whatever is 2-3x the existing Switch, I could see a Square-Enix having interest in porting say a Final Fantasy VII Remake because they would sell a fair amount.
The other thing is the Mariko (red box) Switches actually probably could be overclocked if Nintendo really wanted to, so you could have a situation where a "Pro" game runs at say 500 GFLOP undocked (this will work even on Mariko models, but the battery life will drop to 2 1/2-3 1/2 hours like the OG Switch) but has 1 TFLOP docked as an example (4K DLSS).
That would run not only on Switch Pro models but Switch Red box (Mariko) models, suddenly that's a lot more than just 30-40 million users. Maybe even for the Lite you could even clock higher since it has the same 16nm Mariko chip, but Nintendo could have a message telling Lite users that this is a Pro performance title and a battery pack is recommended.