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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the docked mode is grating at times. You've got these great mechanics and beautiful world but constant input lag. Very frustrating. I'd prefer to be able to sit down and play on a TV at a higher resolution, but it's a worse experience. It effectively makes it a mobile game.

It's 2017! 1080p or 60fps should be the minimum. To be fair that's not doable at $300 on a mobile gpu, but as a console that's rough.

re: screen + dock = scratches:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/5xc6gw/using_the_...

Some really odd design choices. v2 should be nice, though.

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I've played Zelda on Switch docked for 10 hours and have not yet once experienced input lag. It occasionally hits seemingly 20-25fps with a lot of enemies and environmental grass and such for a few seconds but that has absolutely not sullied my experience of playing one of the most thoughtful and enjoyable games of all time.

Glad you've had a great experience and I agree it's a great game.

Perhaps input lag is the wrong term or you just aren't looking but even just walking out into the starting area framerates start to drop and the game becomes noticeably slower. Try it in undocked mode and it's very obvious.

If you are used to playing at higher framerates (which isn't uncommon seeing as other big console exclusives are 60fps usually at 1080p) it's a real difference.

Even ignoring the underwhelming performance, it seems ridiculous that you can't just choose to run in 720p mode when docked. I'd rather have my TV upscale the content than have the game be close to unplayable due to lag... the engine is clearly capable of rendering to a 720p framebuffer since it does that when not docked, just add an option to let me do that when docked...

Can't you set to 720p in screen settings?

I suspect it would still render to 900, then downscale to 720

> It's 2017! 1080p or 60fps should be the minimum. To be fair that's not doable at $300 on a mobile gpu, but as a console that's rough.

It is possible on a $300 device, it's just that the Switch has lots of other design considerations (modularity, hardware controller costs) that drive the cost substantially up. You can definitely make a simple $300 tablet with good 3D performance, and indeed that's exactly what the Nvidia Shield is.

What makes you say it's not doable on a $300 mobile GPU? There are phones out that cost $300 that have better performance than the Switch.

Also it's really down to the software. They could have targeted 1080p resolution with 60fps with the new Zelda but they would have had to make sacrifices on draw distance, effects, texture resolution, poly count, etc.

That's my point, though. They clearly can't make a game with the features of BotW - draw distance, effects, etc without major compromises.

Not personally aware of any games as full-formed as BotW that are running on $300 mobile sets. Though this could just be poorly optimized, which makes it more disappointing.

I don't think anyone has cracked making an open world game on a phone. But just from raw hardware specs perspective there are phones with more performance than the Switch.

Depressing. I was going to wait till much later to even consider purchasing this. But I definitely won't be until that's addressed.

Why isn't the screen glass?!

> Why isn't the screen glass?!

Durability when handled roughly by children?

I dunno. My ~3 year old neice has her own aging, hand-me-down iPad that she mistreats like it was any other $5 toy and it's been going strong for maybe 2 years.

And yet somehow I see adults everywhere with cracked screens :p

It could be the stronger glass Apple is using is too expensive for the price point Nintendo is aiming at

Cracked screens happen when you drop it, and kids just don't have enough height on them to generate the forces needed.

Also adults think nothing of putting huge padded cases on kids' iPads. I can't be bothered with a case for my phone.

I bought the Wii U version instead of a Switch because of the complaints I heard about the docked game.

Played it tonight. Very very nice, my kids love it.

I'll buy a Switch in a year once there's more games and they have the kinks worked out. If I feel like playing Breath again, I'll get it second hand.

I've been hoping they'll drastically lower the Wii U price so I can pick it up that way :)

So far I'm loving it, it's like a kid-friendly, slightly simpler Skyrim.

Though so far the atmosphere isn't as deep as the Zelda games have done in the past.

Though I thought Skyward Sword was just annoying so this is a relief.

You can get refurbs and second hand Wii U's for pretty cheap.

Hmm the best I've seen is $200 which seems a bit much for a now previous console model with limited title support and low end hardware. I'll wait until I see it for $99 I think.

I bought a $199 Wii U refurb direct from Nintendo about a year and a half ago. Surely you can find a cheaper Wii U on craigslist or something..

In case anyone wants to see a comparison of Zelda between the two platforms, someone has already posted a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yFON2UON3k

To my untrained eyes, the Wii U version seems perfectly fine.

> v2 should be nice

Has there ever been a v2 of a nintendo console?

GBA sp, new 3ds. It's not unheard of.

GBA has three generations (stock, SP and micro), 3DS had 2 or 3, depending on if you count the XL. Wii had two (original and mini). Other then the New 3DS, none of these have been system hardware, but given that the Switch is built on a tegra chip, I can see it getting upgraded with full backwards compatibility at some point.

Not to mention

Hell I don't even count the GBA Micro, considering it couldn't run GB games despite having a Z80, simply because they dropped 5-volt support. That's not a refresh, that's just taking a dremel to the thing!

Well if you count the Switch as a portable, they've done at least one revision/refresh of almost every generation: Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Light, GBA SP, Game Boy Micro, DS Lite, DSi, 3DS XL, 2DS, new 3DS. They've actually really gone to town on revisions lately with handhelds.

TV consoles are a different story. The NES and SNES had later variants, and there's the afterthought Wii Mini, and that's all I can think of.

They don't revise their home consoles much, but they do revise their handhelds. So... probably. This console seems so flawed and badly designed it kinda needs one, quickly.

Gameboy > Gameboy Pocket Gameboy Advance > Gameboy Advance SP > Gameboy Micro DS > DS Lite > DSi 3DS > New 3DS

Some of these revisions even had their own sub-revisions or regional variants like the Gameboy Lite. The Gameboy Color is the only one I can think of they didn't revise significantly, but you could argue that the Color itself was a huge revision of the Gameboy Pocket with a Colour screen.

They've done at least one revision of most of them, usually with significant cosmetic differences and less features. There was the top loading NES, the SNES Mini, the GameCube was revised and the digital output port was removed, and for the Wii there was the version with the GameCube ports removed and the Wii Mini with all the remaining ports removed.

The NES 2:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v-c-XkVH82w/maxresdefault.jpg

Depends how you define v2. If you define it as a revision to the original version then -

The DSi was an upgrade to the DS but not a whole new console generation.

The Wii Mini was a downgrade (seriously) to the Wii to make it cheaper/smaller.

The New 3DS was an upgrade to the 3DS similar to the DS->DSi upgrade.

Plus all of the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance models which you could argue were often more revisions with some new features but still compatible than a totally new product.

Such as the Gameboy SP and then Micro which were totally new designs for the Gameboy Advance with a better screen but otherwise the same console.

There were two versions of the NES and the SNES, one for Japan, the other US/EU. Technically the same insides but a different version none the less.

okay, I never went to the nintendo portables, so I was shockingly oblivious about these. I define v2 as both "set of games you can play on it is identical to the first one", and "not a retro notalgia remake". But even by that standard, wikipedia tells me you gave a lot of good examples. I can only hope the switch makes the list, because I'm not interested in spending significant game time with a handheld tablet, but I also need enough distance to flirt with their limitations.

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