Nintendo Switch / Nintendo Switch Lite (Official Thread)

[Joust Williams]

When the lowest common denominator is a piece of crap CPU, it kind of does. If the game runs on both, who's going to play on the portable? Why would people spend the time porting it or doing QA? Are they expecting to sell 60 dollar portable software? Does 60 get me both versions and 40 (which is still too high in 2016) get me the portable only?

[cigsthecat]

Let's all tell the guy that does this for a living how his industry works.

[Diff-chan]

The difference would be no greater than a low end PC and a super high end pc. Or possibly even the One and the Scorpio. Isn't that going to have damn near 5 teraflop difference in GPU.

Yea and go look at how the minimum settings on some of these games look... it's not good.

[Joust Williams]

And that's it right there, unless the NX is some woefully underpowered POS, the gulf is just too wide to use the PC example.

[MechDeus]

There are still some Japanese developers making things for more than just handhelds. I guess I can't speak of first hand experience in the Japanese development houses, but its pretty standard practice across the board to build models, textures, all that stuff at higher resolutions than you plan on using. If you're target resolution for a texture is 1024x1024 you don't make it at 1024x1024, you make it at least double that. You gain a sharpness from making it at a higher res and cutting it down that just wouldn't be there if you start at your target res. Same with modelling, most stuff is made with way more polys than will be in the in game engine. Most stuff is modelled with really high poly counts and then retopologized to the target res.

Yes, I know. I've known for about 20 years how they design those assets for games. I used to take modelling and programming classes. I no longer do any of those things but I get the basics.

But again, I don't believe at all that's what Iwata was saying. It sounded to me like he just wanted the teams to work on games without setting limitations for themselves and then decide during development whether it would end up being a better fit for the handheld or the console. If it happened to work on both, great, but it's not the goal.

Yea and go look at how the minimum settings on some of these games look... it's not good.

3DS Skyrim is looking great these days.



Just kidding, that looks way too good for a 3DS game.

[RoleTroll]

With the WiiU Nintendo gave us a console with two screens: a larger screen primarily for gameplay and a smaller handheld touchscreen with the game controls on either side of it. That's the same way the 2/3DS is set up. Combine that with comments about a unified console/handheld development with NX....

[kedawa]

You'd have to ignore the fact that the new Zelda game seems to have scrapped any notion of two-screen gameplay.

[Space Pirate Roberts]

Didn't they say there were second screen features they weren't revealing yet?

[Shin Johnpv]

Yea and go look at how the minimum settings on some of these games look... it's not good.

It's a handheld its not going to match the console. No one is saying that. It's going to look worse than the console.

What part of this aren't you guys getting. Did you think I was saying it was going to look just as good? I never said that. If they've gone about this smart, they're probably using the same chip families between the two systems. It'd be like having an Nvidia 210 in one system, and a 1080 in the other (i'm not saying that's what is in the NX just using the difference as an example). Same chip family just vastly different power levels. The game realizes which system it's on and adjusts accordingly.

And that's it right there, unless the NX is some woefully underpowered POS, the gulf is just too wide to use the PC example.

No it's not. We literally just shipped a product that runs on a system with a 3 or 4 tflop GPU and a newer CPU, it also shipped on laptops with no GPU, like 1/4th the ram, and a fucking i3. Obviously the desktop product runs better and looks better, but the laptop one looks about as good as it can based on the specs.

This shit isn't magical or difficult or any of that crap. It's literally done every single day.

Yes, I know. I've known for about 20 years how they design those assets for games. I used to take modelling and programming classes. I no longer do any of those things but I get the basics.

So what don't you get here then. If you understand the basics then you understand how much more efficient it is to make assets at a high resolution and cut them down for the target platform. Seriously in this day and age of game development it's what everyone outside of mobile and some Japanese devs are doing.

But again, I don't believe at all that's what Iwata was saying. It sounded to me like he just wanted the teams to work on games without setting limitations for themselves and then decide during development whether it would end up being a better fit for the handheld or the console. If it happened to work on both, great, but it's not the goal.

Ok that's fine we can agree to disagree on where they are going with things. His statements are some what open for interpretation. My comments were more about if they went with flash storage medium for the NX. If they did there is NO REASON that they couldn't release one SKU that worked on both the handheld and console. The hook would tell it which features to use (like amount of lights, ambient occlusion, resolution of textures, res of models etc etc) without having to dev for the LCD. Specially since that's not how development goes any more.

I'm just saying that this is totally possible. Not that they're doing this for sure, but it's totally feasible, and there is no reason to assume that games are going to be deved for the LCD.

Let's all tell the guy that does this for a living how his industry works.

I'm used to it here.

[Diff-chan]

I am saying that if there is a massive discrepancy between what your NX handheld and your NX console can get, it's not going to be a good product.

The console and handheld versions have to look relatively the same.

And we're in a world where portable devices often have higher resolutions than TVs, so Nintendo can't even necessarily lean on lower res to help them out.