But,  not an expert,  I believe in the past the Nintendo systems main difficulty when trying to port was either Nintendo did not share all the tools or the systems were just not strong enough.

So if Nintendo shares all the tools that they have, like they did with RARE, and the system has some punch...do you think they will finally get some companies back? Add in the Switch's success, like the Wii before it and is that a no brainer for companies to come on board, or still some issues?

Not sure to be honest.  I still think the cost of carts will keep some third party developers away or they do digital only.  

Yeah compared to Switch where third party support didn't really kick into high gear until it's 3rd year, (hard to blame them after Wii U) the successor should get a ton of support right out of the gate.

I wonder which will be the system's first "impossible port" will be, its equivalent to Doom 2016 on Switch, that first game that goes "see, you can bring AAA PS5 games to Switch 2." 

Yeah.  The more I think about it the more games pop in mind that didn't see light on the switch.  Armored Core 6, Tiny Tina, MGS5, Nioh, Tales series, Dragon Age.

Given Rog, Deck, Legion, Claw run most everything, I don't think there is a game today that would surprise if developers got working on the S2.  If it works well is a personal opnion.  

For me I wonder more about future games.  Games that I beleive would be hard to port include Avowed, Snake Eater, GTA6, MH Wilds and Space Marines 2.  

Not sure to be honest.  I still think the cost of carts will keep some third party developers away or they do digital only.  

The switch already had this issue.  Many carts didn't include the full game, there were large portions that needed to be downloaded.

How 3rd party deals with carts is going to be curious.  

Edit

I forget the exact user name (Bumlight or something) brings up a good point.  Perhaps reducing texture quality to keep file size down is an option.  Not only would it save file size but help with memory bandwidth limitations as well.  

Based on numerous leaks the absolute maximum memory bandwidth is 112 gb/s which is a bottleneck.  And it will make porting Black Myth, GTA6, Snake Eater and Avowed difficult and time consuming.  

No worries if you disagree.  But it is a derailment because nobody wants to see us go back and forth on every page.

My logic is sound, logical and on topic.  You can be mad all day,  but I'm not wrong.  Sadly you know it.  

Switch 2 RDR2 port day one, and GTA V please

No need to point out what Ray Tracing is to me Perm - I did it back on Amiga 500 in 80s. ;)

I was making distinction between what is currently called Ray Tracing vs Path tracing in modern games - Cyberpunk 2077 being good example of it - RT is fine, but nothing to write home about compared to rasterized only (so, IMO, for most part, kinda waste of GPU resources) - PT, on the other hand, is something much better in most cases, while hitting GPU a lot harder than RT - but it's really worth it, IMO.

I honestly don't know anything about how difficult is to translate CPU code from X86 to ARM - but from the amount of games on Switch, that are also on Steam, I'm guessing it's not THAT difficult.

Sure, it's always easier to have the same code and just turn the sliders down. And then there's CoDs on Wii, and especially Star Wars: Force Unleashed on Wii, which had another studio making it from the ground up - it's projection of ROI that will decide in the end (CoDs and SW:FU sold really good).

You cannot assert that your statements are "fact" based on "leaks and rumors". - They are unsubstantiated. - Leaks often end up being wrong.
Remember when the Switch had the endless NX leaks and it was going to be Radeon powered? Yeah. Exactly.

As for the bandwidth issue itself... 112GB/s is fine.
It's not a console that is chasing 1440P like the Series S... It's not a console that is chasing 2160P/4k like the Xbox One X/Playstation 4 Pro/Playstation 5/Xbox Series X.
It's a console that will likely try and obtain 1080P and if it does end up failing that target... Tegra does have DLSS which is the best form of frame reconstruction in the entire industry.

The real-world bandwidth of a modern Tegra would be roughly inline with the Playstation 4 once you start to account for Delta Colour Compression... The DCC jump to Pascal gave an extra 20% and the jump to Volta is another 20% and Ampere takes that further again... So 112GB/s would be around 150GB/s - 160GB/s or more.

Larger and faster caches, increased registers... Did you not ever wonder how the Switch was able to get Playstation 5 ports like Hogwarts Legacy despite having Ram bandwidth equivalent to a Playstation 3? It's about architectural efficiency over raw numbers. Delta Colour Compression allowed the Switch to punch above it's weight, even though it's DCC is not as advanced as current nVidia DCC implementations.

And then we can compare it to other handhelds like the Asus Rog Ally with 120GB/s which is running current console ports like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Forbidden West and more.


I think you may just be surprised on what you can do with "just" 112GB/s and the current spate of AMD powered handhelds which are factually less efficient than nVidia's hardware and are turning in some amazing results.

112GB/s is not going to be the issue you think it is when current handhelds are doing just fine with that bandwidth.

It will not hold back ports.

The irony is... The current Switch can run GTA5. That game has spanned 3x console generations remember.

Noted.

It's not hard. We need to remember that despite x86 being CISC on the exterior, it's actually RISC on the interior, so code can translate very easily.
And with Billions of ARM devices on the planet, there are significant tools to aid in development and porting.

Binary translation exists as well, which historically allowed Intel X86 Atom chips in phones/tablets to execute ARM compiled code, it came at a slight performance hit, but it was an impressive achievement... I think I recall nVidia going down that road at some point, not sure if they abandoned that.

Transmeta is another one that comes to mind with their code morphing technology.

Lol, OK chrkiller.

But yeah, when I brought up DLSS in a post a couple of pages ago, and how I think that's the benefit of it that no one talks about when it comes to the Switch. It could be the difference between a publisher greenlighting a game for a physical release, because the devs can now fit what would have been a 32GB+ game onto a 32GB cart. Or someone who hasn't/doesn't want to invest a ton of money into storage making it easier justifying the digital purchase of a retail-sized game that's 20GB thanks to DLSS when it would have been 50GB without it.

Remember when Monolith included texture packs in the eShop for Xenoblade Chronicles X? After that, I thought we'd see that as a practice a bit more, but to my knowledge, no other game on a Nintendo console has really done it since. I don't see why not though. I'd like to have the option to choose between smaller but uglier game or larger but prettier game. I'd also like to see more of what the Uncharted games do and present each language pack as its own optional download so that you aren't wasting unnecessary gigs worth of space on languages you'll never need.

I hope devs will be advised to use DLSS in both Docked and portable modes!