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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents. That in itself wasn't surprising, but the interesting point they talked about is that the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy because modern gaming PC hardware is much smoother and higher resolution than the stock Switch.

It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.

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> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past, it feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.

It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.

For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.

I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.

People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device. Even if a new console would be twice as fast they still would be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.

More recently the comparison I've been hearing is against things like the Steam Deck, which are a little more fair.

> It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.

Of course, but there have been plenty of games released for the Switch that could seemingly do with a bit more oomph from the hardware, TotK being the current example.

I've just been playing TotK for a few hours and was so engrossed by all the little details that make the game world feel alive the frame rate didn't bother me at all. It's perfectly fine if you just want to experience the game.

> People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device.

I mean, the SoC on the switch was long in the tooth at launch. It's almost exactly the same hardware as in the tegra shield that came out two years prior, but Nintendo clocks it down to 1Ghz, about half the speed of the shield.

There's some legitimate complaints that it's a dog slow system because of that. For instance this new Zelda is frame locked to 20fps in some areas apparently.

The Switch combines lower powered A57 (a soc from..2012 on a 20nm process) with a Maxwell GPU (9+ years old at this point)

Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.

That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds.

I would instantly buy this, we would be looking at mobile machines more powerful than a PS4 Pro which is imho more than enough for the type of console.

Nintendo doesn't even need to build it on the latest state of the art TSMC process, even the 5nm should be enough.

> I would instantly buy this

Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games? I don't see it. Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.

By your logic, why move past the Wii U or Wii or any console before it?

The machine I descrive is already quite underpowered compared to Nintendo's competition by magnitude of orders.

This limits my enjoyment of Nintendo games and I prefer emulators.

Anyway hardware limits are already apparent and yes some games aren't as enjoyable due to very low stuttering performance.

> By your logic, why move past the Wii U or Wii or any console before it?

They said "underpowered", not "outdated" or "ridiculously weaker"

A lot of games get limited to 30 fps (and even dip lower) on the switch which makes them unplayable for me. I don't care about graphics at all, I'd rather play in some extremely low poly/low texture mode at 60 fps (ideally higher) than at 30 fps.

If they released a new version with a 120hz display that could actually run games at 120hz, I'd be ecstatic. I don't even mind the 720p resolution, it's fine on such a small screen in my opinion.

That's not really an issue for the stakeholders. Zelda is probably the only game that has this problem. Most hits - Mario Kart, Smash, Splatoon - run at 60FPS.

On the other hand, the 5th and 7th best selling Switch games (Pokemon SS and SV) were notorious for being unable to maintain 15fps. A lot of the workarounds made the game legitimately awful looking (downscaling shadows on the fly for demanding scenes, very reduced draw distances, slowing down and synchronizing background animations to slideshow speeds during battle).

It seems like the Switch is unable to have more than a handful of moderately complex animated objects at a time. It's a problem for Pokemon because they wanted to show a lot of different Pokemon doing different things, it's a problem in Breath of the Wild with just too many trees, and it's certainly a problem with all the Dynasty Warrior clones because the whole appeal of those games is hack and slashing through a big hordes of enemies.

To be fair, the last two Pokemon games were atrociously optimized cash grabs.

They look like Gamecube games honestly, and are generally not impressive from a technical standpoint.

I don't necessarily disagree with the overall point, but BotW and Dynasty Warrior clones are probably a better argument over all.

What makes them unplayable that a doubling of framerate would fix?

For most people there is a threshold somewhere around 50 fps that is the distinction between choppy and smooth enough.

Have you played games at 30 and 60 FPS ? I'm not one of those competitive 120+Hz gamers but try setting your desktop refresh rate to 30Hz - you can see mouse trailing and text delay while typing.

30FPS for an interactive experience is really bad. And them saying some regions are locked to 20 FPS - holly shit that's a slideshow.

I used to game on budget PCs when I was a kid, I rarely got to play at 60 FPS, but going down to 30 was just "OK I'm not playing that".

Yes. After like 30 seconds it's barely noticeable unless the animation/physics are tied to the framerate. Some genres benefit from it but I'm not sure Zelda really needs it. Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS on N64, not in SOME demanding scenes, everywhere. And it's still a beloved, fantastic game.

I also regularly play games capped at 30 FPS because it greatly increases battery life in the Steam Deck in a lot of titles and not everything really needs it.

The problem with "SOME demanding scenes" is that inconsistent frametimes are much more noticeable and irritating than a lower, but consistent framerate.

BOTW feels bad in certain areas because rapidly switching from 30->20 causes noticeable stuttering. Even once it settles you're likely to be aware of animations and interactions behaving differently.

>Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS on N64, not in SOME demanding scenes, everywhere.

And I used to find a lot of old games immersive - but I can't play them nowdays.

Things don't exist in a vacuum and my experience is impacted by what other experiences I've had to compare it to. There's a threshold in graphics/voice acting/etc. that just makes the games I spent weeks on as a kid not interesting at all (even for the sake of nostalgia).

I used to work on 800x600 CRT monitor with 256 colors and today I get a headache when I have to work on a low pixel density cheap LCD.

> Have you played games at 30 and 60 FPS?

Yes, I make games as a hobby and have done both. I agree with the other commenter about fluctuation in framerate being a bad experience. If I make no changes beyond setting fps from 60 to 30, you can tell the difference in smooth scrolling, etc. However, a consistent 30fps can be just fine as an interactive experience with some thought put into it.

I see this kind of comment on Eurogamer all the time and don’t understand it. 60fps is so much better in every case. I can’t think of a single example of a game that isn’t materially improved as an experience by going from 30 to 60. The effect is far more striking than extra graphical effects. This isn’t cinema where 24fps looks “cinematic” - it’s just plain worse.

It’s 2023. No one is asking for 120fps as a mainstream baseline. 60 is such a sweet spot. It’s time for us to admit that 30 was a compromise for a certain console era that was defined by CPU limitation. If we don’t call bullshit, publishers will keep pumping this stuff out. Look at this week’s disastrous Redfall launch. 30fps on a 12tflop, 8-core Series X. Insanity.

A consistent 30FPS experience really isn't that bad in a lot of games. I'd much rather developers push game design with stuff like big open worlds and cool physics stuff like logs from the tree you just cut roll down the hill than a no risks locked 60 FPS static environment. Poor optimization like what is seen in Redfall or Pokemon Scarlet/Violet is an entirely different problem.

And we're talking about a game running on a 6 year old handheld! Not a CPU beast.

Yeah I’ve been playing TotK with my son all afternoon and I think they’ve done a great job with it - it looks and runs much better than BotW. Pretty remarkable technical achievement I reckon, given the well-known limitations of that machine.

But my point was about where we go from here, in 2023. I’d be disappointed if I couldn’t play this - or a remaster of this, or perhaps its sequel - at 60fps on a next-gen Switch successor, whenever that arrives.

I think there's two separate issues. The first which is your main complaint is the poor performance on modern systems of games. Totally agree, it's a combo of laziness, customer acceptance, and schedule/priorities that leads to it. I'm right with you on the frustration.

Tying into that is why I don't do a blanket 60fps in all cases, which is respecting the player's resources. If I was making a tetris clone, where the block falls at a set step every x milliseconds, all I'm doing is wasting their battery with double the frames.

It's not the framerate itself that bothers me, it's when the framerate drops on demanding scenes. I'd rather have a consistent 30fps than a game constantly fluctuating between 30-60. But even a consistent 30fps is kinda a dream for the Switch, there's plenty of titles where it regularly dips down to 10fps with inconsistent frame time.

Plus the other benefit to faster hardware is decreased loading times. The Switch has a lot of very long loading screens (and elaborate animations/cutscenes to mask background loading) and the PS5 with near instant loading very much increases the fun, because more time is spent playing vs waiting on a loading screen.

> Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.

Correction, Nintendo has more specifically thrived on cheap hardware, which is often correlated with 'underpowered' but does not mean the same necessarily. The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.

> Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games?

These are not the only (though they are important) factors to consider. With a portable platform, battery life, size, weight, heat, all matter much more than with a stationary console. A 2x more powerful Switch with the same power envelope as the original would be able to play games for longer using the same battery due to being more efficient. If you're playing a significantly demanding game, that might mean the difference between only being able to do short sessions on battery, and being able to play for a satisfying amount of time. Or it might mean that you can play it with the screen at a higher brightness, and thus make the game accessible in more environments.

And if the games are have performance issues, having more powerful hardware can make those problems less frequent and more bearable. You can argue that gamedevs need to do a better job, but that doesn't eliminate reality where most people just want to play the game and don't particularly care about the specifics of how to get the best experience.

Nintendo calls it “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology”[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...

> The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.

I'm not sure why you mention the controller or how to measure its power, but the console itself was definitely underpowered compared to PS3 or X360. Heck, it was comparable to 6th rather than 7th gen.

That's my point exactly - you can't measure it's power, yet that one feature made the Wii sell like hotcakes, and caused both Microsoft and Sony to try making their own versions.

Yes, a game that runs smoothly is more fun to play.

Nintendo has always thrived _despite_ underpowered hardware.

Always is a bit strong isn't it? Prior to the Wii their consoles tended to be similar to their contemporaries in processing power.

I certainly experienced areas in BOTW which took a heavy FPS hit and it sounds like TOTK is similar. Such an FPS drop does take me out of the game so if the console was powerful enough to avoid that then you could argue it would allow more fun games

> Always is a bit strong isn't it? Prior to the Wii their consoles tended to be similar to their contemporaries in processing power.

Yup, you could say Nintendo always thrived on underpowered (compared to competition) hardware.

  NES was twice less powerful than SMS;
  GameBoy didn't even have a color display;
  SNES vs SMD similarity as NES vs SMS;
  GBC was weaker than Neo Geo Pocket or WonderSwan;
  GBA didn't have competition (although, if we count N-Gage...);
  Wii had hardware from previous generation;
  NDS was way worse in raw numbers that PSP;
  3DS analogically with PS Vita;
  Switch isn't even comparable to PS4/X1, let alone PS5/XSX;

What all of those Nintendo consoles have in common? Being their the most successful.

Whereas when Nintendo focused more on being on par in hardware power during 5th gen. (N64) and 6th gen. (GameCube), they didn't sold nearly as much as other generations.

The exception to the pattern are Virtual Boy and Wii U. The former was poorly designed then sacrificed as "filler"; the later flopped due to bad marketing (and naming) + poor decision on betting on "casuals".

In conclusion: as we can see, there is a clear trend, not a rule, but a trend nevertheless.

The SNES wasn't at all underpowered compared to the SEGA Mega Drive. In fact, it was better in many ways.

Indeed, it had way less computational power, but other aspects were better. I should have worded it more clearly.

While their older consoles weren't as far away from modern stuff as the Switch, Nintendo wasn't often the more powerful console. Well-designed with good developer buy-in and incredibly strong first party titles, but not really pushing the envelope in terms of raw performance.

The GameCube was the weakest hardware-wise between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and ~~Dreamcast~~ edit: guess not the Dreamcast, but definitely behind Xbox and PS2. ~~The Nintendo 64 was weaker than the PlayStation or Sega Saturn~~ edit: was wrong here, N64 was definitely the stronger console of this generation.The Super Nintendo had less computing capacity than the Mega Drive/Genesis.

Even when it came to handhelds, the GameBoy was often much weaker hardware. Compare the GameBoy to the Lynx on a spec sheet and it's clear which is better. Actually hold and play both of them and you can see why Atari doesn't exist anymore. The Game Gear was practically the current gen home console in a handheld form and could even get a TV tuner attachment before the GameBoy Color was even announced. Later, the Genesis Nomad was a full blown Genesis console in handheld form. Good games, cheaper hardware, better pocketability led to Nintendo dominating that market despite usually having the weakest hardware around.

> The GameCube was the weakest hardware-wise between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Dreamcast.

It might have been weak, but definitely was comparable (sometimes even stronger) in power to PS2 and definitely not weaker than Dreamcast [0].

> The Nintendo 64 was weaker than the PlayStation or Sega Saturn.

What? No, no, no. PlayStation was definitely weaker. N64 was crippled down by using cartridges instead of CD.

---

Despite the raw power, both N64 and GC were crushed by PS1 and PS2 in sales.

[0]: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/cmsc411/website/proj01/main/co...

Gamecube was much stronger than the Dreamcast, and generally sat between the PS2 and X-Box in terms of performance.

Yes.

Older consoles could get away with much more. There's a Dynasty Warriors style Zelda game on switch called "Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity"[0]. It struggles with the hardware to the point that the choppiness of the frame rate makes the gameplay thoroughly unenjoyable. Even Breath of the wild is infamously laggy in certain areas.

[0] https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/Hyrul...

60fps in action game does make it more fun to play

>Why? Will it make the games more fun to play?

Yes. Movement in an action game feels inherently better at 60fps than at 30fps. Metroid Zero Mission (2004), and Metroid Dread (2021) both feel extremely crisp and precise compared to Metroid: Samus Returns (2017) which runs at 30fps.

The biggest complaint that Bloodborne gets, outside of not being available on PC, is that it's locked to 30 fps.

I can't think of a single reason where a game at 60fps would be more fun at 30fps.

I'm confused because the last sentence seems to directly contradict the rest of the post.

Mind clarifying?

Might've worded it poorly. Just meant that a game running at 60fps is always better than that same game running at 30fps. In the worst case scenario, they're the same game.

Not always better. A 30 fps game that you can play twice or three times as long before having to recharge the battery may be better.

Depends, some might be willing to make that trade. I think most consoles are making that option of performance or visuals these days. As an option, letting the user choose seems to be more the norm these days.

If i'm playing plugged in I would want better visuals (as the switch allows with the dock) the primary reason being more power available.

> Why? Will it make the games more fun to play?

I played Zelda: Breath of the wild through on switch. It was one of the launch titles, and it was fantastic. The slow loading times were the #1 complaint I had about the game. They really broke the immersive experience. Whenever I died, teleported between zones or entered & left shrines the loading time was long enough that I fell briefly out of the zone while playing.

I assume loading times haven't gotten any better for Tears of the kingdom, given the hardware hasn't changed. I'd probably buy the new zelda game instantly but when I think back to breath of the wild, my strongest visual memory is that black and red loading screen.

IIRC load times were improved in a later update (although that update came too late, imo)

Something to note is Nintendo makes profits on their hardware where as the other two (Microsoft & Sony) typically take a loss on their hardware, until about midway point of the console's life.

I believe the other two make up the loss on the hardware with licensing rights on the software side of things.

https://www.gamesradar.com/unlike-playstation-and-nintendo-x...

I liked playing their AAA ports like the witcher 3 on the go. A more powerfull console would make such ports easier, so I would hope to see more of them.

It rather have a switch than can play nintendo games plus some AAA games, than a steamdeck or something like it.

i would rather have a larger catalog of games that are like the 2d metroid game or the remake of links awakening. games that remind me of playing my gameboy but without the limitations of the gameboy hardware nor the limitations of user interface and game design from that time.

This isn't a matter of "rather" - nothing is stopping developers from making those very same games on a more powerful system.

yeah of course it's not either or, but if i had to choose, i would prefer a larger catalog of those kinds of games. but also i find the nintendo store to be confusing. i basically find games elsewhere then search for them there. none of the recommendations are very useful. so maybe that catalog is there i just dont find it.

>Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.

They've been working on successor for 4+ years now. That's how long new console cycles are now. PS5 dev cycle stated 2 years after PS4 released.

I mean, that might be gaming industry standard, but they should be able to do better than that given that the Switch is essentially just a fairly standard ARM SoC-based tablet, with some joycons attached. Phone and tablet manufacturers are constantly pushing new skews.

The games are what sells, not the hardware.

People who bought a Switch many years ago are still willing to buy new games. They may not all be willing to replace it so soon however if Nintendo release pretty much the same but with better resolution and framerate and the release of a new one would probably mean the stop of new release on the current gen.

All they have to do to keep me and my kids as customers through the next gen is commit to back compat with our Switch library and build something that can run their big-budget first party titles like Zelda at 720p60 handheld / 1080p60 docked. So sort of 2.5x what we’ve got now. Spend the rest of the TDP budget on pushing out the battery life. Hardware upscaling for bonus points only. Job done.

This is Nintendo though so I expect nothing.

I 100% agree. This is what I was hoping they would maybe surprise-announce just before TotK's release, but my hopes were too high. I'm excited to play it, but $70 for a game with PS3-era visuals at 30fps while everything else has modern visuals at 60-120fps with various techniques is a tragedy.

30fps, lol. Its goes down much below that, sadly.

Yea, they also added a 20fps limiter in certain cases when the hardware is pushed to its limits. Super unfortunate, and honestly, I'd be hard pressed to believe that it helps.

Nonetheless, the game performs loads better than BotW ever did. Quite a feat for such old metal.

There is a big problem with any switch upgrade plan: Current GPU architectures are too different to the original Maxwell GPU arch, so it is impossible for Nintendo to make a better console that is hardware compatible to the switch. The games themselves include low level GPU driver stuff, so they won't run in any other GPU architecture without an emulation layer.

In the past, Nintendo either forgone backwards compatibility completely (Nes->SNes->N64->GC, Wiiu->Switch), or specially built their upgraded consoles to have a low level hardware compatibility mode were it behaves 100% like the old console (Gamecube->Wii, Wii->WiiU, several handlheld upgrades). Today it doesn't make business sense for Nintendo to build a new console without backwards compatibility, and it is impossible technically to build one with low level compatibility. So they are left with the only option of a incompatible console with some partial emulation, which must be a much bigger step that kneecaps the existing switch once announced, so they will take only after the switch starts its decline.

Would it be possible to just put an entire Switch in the Switch 2? (see: PS3)

Is that how the wii u ran wii games? The 3ds also showed the old ds interface to configure ds games. I’m not sure if either one actually just dropped a second soc in there though

> Is that how the wii u ran wii games?

More or less. The Wii U is architecturally very similar to the Wii, just with a higher clockspeed, a couple of extra cores, more RAM and a better GPU; the Wii in turn is just an overclocked overspecced GameCube. It's possible, through a homebrew application, to load and run GameCube games directly on the WiiU.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'd highly recommend the architecture of consoles series of blog posts[1][2].

[1]: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles [2]: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wiiu/

That is an option I haven't considered. It would be possible, but a bit pricy. I don't think Nintendo would go this route because they like their hardware cheap, but I don't completely rule out either. Yes, if they go this route, will be much later in the Switch lifetime. They would wait until the Switch sales start showing the end of its life before pulling such a radical upgrade.

no due the the chip they use (more legal complications then anything else)

But also it should not be needed at all. The switch has a older but somewhat "normal/standard" graphics API (and also support actually standard Graphics APIs, especially indi games and similar likely use that one).

My guess is that due to various factors Nintendo decided that it is _financially_ the best decision to extend the Switch lifetime and maybe skip the "follow up console" instead only bringing out the OLED Switch (or change the design of the follow up console).

If you crawl back up to the top level of this thread, it's someone pointing out that emulating it on PC is a lot nicer. Nintendo only needs enough emulation to match the Switch 1's performance on their new hardware; anything they get over its original performance is gravy. Plus they have the option of zipping into the games they really care about and putting in special cases for the most performance-intensive stuff.

The Steam Deck, AIUI, more or less at least matches the Switch 1 in emulation. Haven't done anything with it myself.

I don't think emulation is even remotely impossible, and every year it gets easier for them.

Emulation is a lot nicer when it works, but it doesn't most of the time (most games have glitches, and a significant number don't work at all). It is OK for a third party emulator to not offer a perfect experience, not OK for Nintendo itself. It is impossible (not-viable) for Nintendo to create a perfect Switch emulator that works for all titles, that you can just plug a Switch cartridge on the new console and it will guarantee it will work without glitches, there is just too many corner cases.

To sum up, it is impossible for them to make a hardware compatible console, impossible to make a 100% compatible emulator, so the only option is to market it as a completely new console (not backwards compatible by default), then have a small curated list of backwards compatible titles (either thru their "virtual console", or something like Microsoft did going from the original XBox to the 360, where you could put the original game and it would download a patch for the new console, only compatible with a limited list of games). But this limited backwards-compatibility options would create a big break in the Switch lifetime, so not something to be undertaken while the console is still going strong.

I am sorry but I don't buy this. If switch can be 100% emulated on x86 hardware if given enough computing power (and in fact greatly improved with all that residual power unused), it can be run anywhere fast enough. Ie latest Snapdragon must be more than 10x faster in raw cpu power, not even going into graphics. And once you have your hands directly on hardware you can cut a lot of processing middlemen layers. Heck there could be some 'compatibility' chip just for this, literally nobody cares.

People obviously want this and would pay for this.

Its a really strange company, able to produce amazing software but horrible, terrible outdated hardware (ie joycon durability saga) that they stubbornly consider OK in 2023. Its not so much graphics details themselves, they have chosen graphic style well in this case, but ie overall responsiveness of device, FPS etc. We are talking about very well optimized phone thats 10 years old. More and more not so much up to current standards, ie low PFS puts too much strain on eyes.

How come when I upgrade my graphics card on a PC I don't need to upgrade the binary?

When compiling for Nvidia chips there's only one target. I believe all Nvidia chips despite different architectures use the same underlying assembly language. So a cuda binary should work everywhere.

It's not gpu architecture here. Nvidia makes sure that the API to that architecture remains constant. The differences that are happening are high level architectures. Consoles aren't like PCs that follow the same overall architecture. They are usually massively different each generation, with different central chips different board layouts, etc. Etc. Sony use to get really creative with this... I remember the cell architecture was extremely innovative at the time.

However I believe for the most recent generations of playstation and for all Xboxes those consoles have closely followed the PC architecture. Nintendo consoles have yet to do this though, each console is massively different from the PC and each other with the exception of GameCube and Wii u which were largely similar.

> How come when I upgrade my graphics card on a PC I don't need to upgrade the binary?

> When compiling for Nvidia chips there's only one target. I believe all Nvidia chips despite different architectures use the same underlying assembly language. So a cuda binary should work everywhere.

Because on the PC, Nvidia only exposes high level targets for the shaders. Even PTX, the assembly you might be familiar with combined with cuda, isn't actually the device's asm, but instead it gets compiled down to the device's asm using a full compiler. It's poorly named and more a compiler IR than an asm.

Makes sense thanks for clarifying.

There is one problem with your argument.

Emulated Switch games run fluently on a Steam Deck.....

In difference to previous Nindendo consoles the graphics API of the switch is very similar to "normal" PC/Console graphics APIs. Sure somewhat older ones but you can run many "switch old" PC games on modern hardware, if there are problems they often come from areas like DRM. But most switch games don't have DRM additional to what the switch provides...

I mean this similarity is one of the major reasons why there are so many 3rd party games from smaller studios one the Switch. (Through due to the switch hardware being incredibly slow for modern standards this is increasingly no longer the case as it requires small studios to better optimize their games, and while many of this optimizations are not switch specific at all they still are costly for a small studio).

Through there are some problems, one is that there was no (usable) successor for the chip they used.

My guess is:

They originally wanted to bring out a bit faster "switch pro" but due to a combination of there being no (usable) successor to the chip they have in the Switch and COVID and chip shortage and the CPU market stalling wrt. improvements (when the decision was made), and crypto mining making Nvidea not care about making a Chip for Nintendo they decided to skip it and bring out instead just the OLED upgrade. I.e. they skipped the next console directly went to developing the follow up maybe with the hope of bringing it out a year or so earlier.

But now on one hand the generational improvements in the CPU marked stopped stalling on the other hand maybe their follow up has delays due to technical challenges.

But in the end it's probably a financially good decision to just stretch out the life of the Switch. The only risk is that people will stop buying the switch or switch games because it being so slow that it isn't fun anymore. But given that people will still buy the new Zelda and the amount of money they made with the Switch and saved by cutting the development of the hypothetical direct successor that rally doesn't matter to them. It still sucks for the gamer anyway.

MVG on YouTube did a great video on this exact problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH03ht2fVqI&pp=ygUKbXZnIHN3a...

yes and at the same time many much more underpowered 8 and 16-bit emulation consoles still sell like hot cakes.

Nintendo cares about battery life above most other concerns. The Game Boy was not the most capable handheld when it was released. It was severely underpowered compared to the hardware that was out there. Atari released the Lynx a few months later. Sega release the Game Gear the following year, which was essentially a portable Master System.

However, the Game Boy ran forever on 4 AA batteries. Which is part of the reason why the original Game Boy has outsold every other non-Nintendo handheld gaming system except the original PSP, combined.

Switching to an ARM SoC and off the (basically dying) POWER architecture was a smart move on Nintendo's part, in order to take advantage of industry economies of scale, etc.

However it also potentially makes them vulnerable to being on the upgrade treadmill that e.g. phone manufacturers have to be on. Expectations and pressure will be there to be on the "next" SoC platform.

But more so it makes them less "unique" and "bespoke" and it becomes very hard to differentiate the Switch from any mass market phone or tablet. It's basically that, but with Nintendo's own OS instead of Android, and along with that their highly sandboxed environment.

Not saying you are not correct in the details, but Nintendo has long proven they don’t need to have cutting edge hardware to do quite well selling games people enjoy. See Gameboy, SNES and N64.

> People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device.

Not really. If you can get better performance emulating a newly released game on the Steam Deck, then the complaints have merit. (See Pokemon Scarlet and Violet for instance.)

There always will be faster hardware, that's beside the point. Games that are designed for their target hardware should not have problems.

Scarlet and Violet was as much an optimisation problem as a hardware problem.

I don't expect PS5 level performance, but Steam Deck level performance should be the bare minimum.

Rather, I wish it'd have closer to PS5 performance while docked. Mobile performance is totally understandable given the battery/heat limitations. Even smartphones have been thermally limited for performance for the last couple years.

What I'd like to see is a much stronger CPU/GPU that gets severely undervolted/underclocked while on mobile (or the big cores in it's big.LITTLE design being way bigger), but a dock that comes with fans that force feeds air in to allow the hardware to run significantly faster when docked. Expandable SSD storage on the dock would be excellent as well.

That would be counterproductive. Game DEVs would optimize for docked mode primarily and it would clash with the usage of the customers. Many users like the Switch for its portability. My kids only dock the switch when they want to play dance games.

They already have to optimize for docked/undocked modes separately anyway since it's rendering different resolutions using different hardware speeds depending on whether it's docked or not. There's already a mobile optimized hardware with the Switch Lite too, is it really that much of a stretch to make a dock-optimized version?

Besides, the Steam Deck has shown that even very demanding high end games designed without any consideration for mobile hardware can be sufficiently scaled down to run on mobile hardware (and mobile hardware has gotten powerful enough where the tradeoffs are tolerable).

On the other hand, the Steam Deck goes the other way with docking. It doesn't improve quality at all.

People have been asking for a docked-only/screen-less version of the Switch since it was announced, but I don't think that market is big enough to sustain itself (or would be particularly happy with the result.

> People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device.

Valve has proven that you can get extremely high performance on a mobile device with the Steam Deck.

Personally, I'd be happy enough if the Nintendo Store didn't take half a minute to load assets.

>People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device. Even if a new console would be twice as fast they still would be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.

Sure it is. But that's not what AAA titles are, most of them run at locked 30 that sometimes drop to 20 and in action game that will be noticeable.

People are complaining beacuse the "console sellers", the biggest budget titles are struggling and just play better on emulation

No one with even an inkling of what that feat would require is asking for that.

Many would be happy just to get 60fps across the board for their flagship titles like Zelda. That doesn’t require anything like “PS5-level performance”, and is an entirely reasonable ask given the current Switch is on 9 year-old silicon.

> PS5 level performance on a mobile device

PS5-level performance on a six year old mobile device, no less. It's showing its age now, but it's still a fun little device and has a few absolute bangers. BotW and Super Mario Odyssey alone are nearly worth picking one up.

For me it's simply seeing that Nintendo is the only console manufacturer using nvidia hardware. A new version of the console, 2x more powerful, on Ampere/Lovelace hardware would be absolutely revolutionary for this console space. With it they could rely on DLSS2/3 to increase performance from 720p30 -> 1440p60.

> I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.

This could result in fragmentation: some games could only run smoothly on the new version.

I pretty like the idea of using old hardware and to require game dev to adapt to this.

It's happened before[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Nintendo_3DS

The piracy point is moot. If you go on torrent websites, you'll find repacks of Nintendo games with prepackaged and set up emulators. It can't really get worse than that.

I've a really good pc under my TV that I pretty much only use for emulation. So I'm not anti emulation by any means (it's allowed me to put all my real hardware in a cupboard and not have a big mess of wires in my living room)! But what these videos never show is that emulation is a pain in the ass. There's always a nagging feeling that game isn't quite right. I end up spending more time tweaking settings than playing the game. If I get stuck I end up wondering if there's a bug in the emulator.

I don't own a switch but I'd much prefer to play a fully tested game the way the developers intended. My pc could run it no problem (rtx 3070 etc), but if I ever do play it, it will be on a switch.

Anyway your point is a bit differen, that Nintendo could make money on this etc.

Out of curiosity, what is your setup? I'm guessing windows 10/11, hdmi plugged into your TV? I have a windows box in my home office but and an Nvidia shield attached to my TV but it has always been a pain to play games via steam link. I mean, it's doable, I just figure there's a way to make it as convenient as console gaming and I'm missing something.

PC, windows 10, ryzen 3600, 16gig ram. A few mayflash controller adapters: snes,gamecube, n64, ps1. Also use a usb Saturn pad for six button fighters etc. And god help me I've ordered a sinden light gun!

Breath of the Wild (Wii U version) on PC is the ideal way to play the game. Gyro is kind of a pain to set up, but 1080p 60fps more than makes up for it. I highly recommend it, even if it’s a second play through. It’s a beautiful and elegant game.

I’ve heard TotK is still pretty glitchy under Switch emulation, but I expect it’ll be resolved in less than a year or two. Yuzu and Ryujinx have a healthy competition between the two of them.

Why is Wii u version the better version to emulate?

I'll try this out

Absolutely, the worst feeling of being stuck on a puzzle is not knowing whether you simply haven't solved the puzzle, or a bug has caused this door to not open and having to run online to check.

Nintendo are way too control-freak for this, not to mention fearful of piracy and emulation. They don't want that money.

Like it or not apparently Switch piracy is a thing so this doesn't really change much for their current situation. But it does give people who want to do things the right way an avenue to do so.

I kind of think of it like high end CAD software and such that ships a physical dongle in order to use the software--Nintendo can sell hardware to help ensure it's legitimate use of their emulation software.

Yes exactly, this idea that piracy is lost sales has always been rubbish. The people who go out of their way to pirate always will.

Does it work on an M1 Max yet?

> Yes exactly, this idea that piracy is lost sales has always been rubbish

That's beside the point. What matters is that Nintendo believes that piracy must be opposed at all costs. It's not about sales, it's not about money, it's not about logic, I don't think it's even about the actual law. It's about attacking piracy, as an end unto itself.

Businesses don't attack piracy because of law but because of losses.

Besides,as another post mentions, Switch piracy is probably very limited. So it doesn't cost much to Nintendo to maintain pressure on piracy.

And after all, even if they don't do it for the law, they can do it thanks to the law. It's their right (and I'm a free software zealot :-)).

> Businesses don't attack piracy because of law but because of losses.

> Besides,as another post mentions, Switch piracy is probably very limited.

Switch piracy is very limited, but they pursue it aggressively because of the losses it causes them? Besides, that's already bunk; every time someone actually puts together a study it turns out that piracy is good for sales.

> And after all, even if they don't do it for the law, they can do it thanks to the law. It's their right

Well no; when I say that I don't think it's even about the law, I meant that their idea of what is and isn't okay seems to be more aggressive than the actual law. Contrast:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190329045404/https://www.ninte...

> Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?

> Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230428020356/https://www.copyr...

> 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs55

> (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

[...]

> (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

Now I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I struggle to read that as anything but Nintendo very confidently refusing to consider that a person could copy a game for any reason other than illegal piracy, while the actual law appears to allow for backups. Further up the same page they likewise are overwhelmingly confident that emulators only exist for illegal purposes, because nobody could ever want to play a legitimately-purchased game on anything except for original hardware.

> Switch piracy is very limited, but they pursue it aggressively because of the losses it causes them? Besides, that's already bunk; every time someone actually puts together a study it turns out that piracy is good for sales.

They don't lose much because some difficulty is maintained by them pursuing it aggressively.

Once piracy become as easy or easier as buying the games, yes it becomes a problem for them.

The same way Napster became a problem at some point for the music industry. Before Napster, getting music for free was about copy cds or cassette tapes from friends or library, a rather slow and limited process, or wait for the tunes to pass in the radio and hit the record button quickly to record it in a cassette at a lower quality than CD. And you didn't have the full deal (with cover and lyrics and stuffs that mattered at the time). When it became easier to just look for music in Napster's builtin search engine and start playing it even before the tune was downloaded completely it became a huge problem as it was a much seamless process than both the original illegal and the legal way which involved either to go to a store and hope the right disc was available or go to one of the very few music online music shop available at the time, enter your credit card details (something very few people were still comfortable with) and wait for the disc to be delivered. I think there were already a few digital marketplace available but you usually had to wait for the full download to be completed, the UI wasn't as easy and you couldn't just browse another user shared library to discover new stuff and get suggestions.

this doesn't make sense. take it to it's logical conclusion and say there's a site that allows anyone to pirate with minimal friction with one click. Still think piracy isn't lost sales?

> say there's a site that allows anyone to pirate with minimal friction with one click. Still think piracy isn't lost sales?

Say that this site is user-funded and actually buys a copy for every click. Still think piracy is lost sales?

“What if reality were different in a way that I’ve concocted specifically for the purposes of this discussion?” is a fun game!

Sure piracy isn't necessarily a lost sale, but would there be more sales if people could not pirate the game, as with say a ps5 game? Especially in the case of rather widespread piracy in the weeks preceding release where even normal platform users may pirate because it's the only way to play. To what degree I couldn't tell you, it's most certainly not a 1 to 1 like the companies would like to argue, but there's almost certainly at least some amount of loss.

That’s not how Nintendo would view it though. The GP is absolutely correct that this would be seen as inviting people to leave Nintendos ecosystem. The only way this would work for Nintendo Would be if the “dongle” cost as much as a Switch, but then who’d want to pay that much for an emulator?

It’s also worth noting that Nintendo don’t have an issue with emulation per se, several of their commercial products are based on emulation. But I’m every instance where they support emulation it has been looked into their hardware ecosystem and the “emulation” word is never spoken publicly.

It changes the situation deeply. Switch piracy is not easy. You need to get an emulator, get a key dump for a Switch, torrent the game, setup everything. For a console you need physical modification or some tinkering shorting pins if you have a first gen console.

That’s a high bar to cross for Nintendo main market which remains families. Plus at this point the Switch is mostly a money printing machine between the old hardware and the store.

If you’re pirating you would probably also pirate the keys and you wouldn’t need to do the console exploit (as far as I understand it anyway)

That’s not at all equivalent to just plugging a box sold by Nintendo however which was the point I was making. Pirating is an involved process. The fact it exists doesn’t at all make a business case as the parent comment was implying especially considering that PC gaming is already a niche market.

It is really not that much of an involved process. Reading a wiki page and downloading a few files from the first hit of a Google result is probably similar effort to setting up whatever potential product you have in mind.

You can never stop motivated people from dumping the memory of hardware they own and making it easier for everyone else.

Piracy can never be stopped and they waste a lot of effort trying.

They should optimize for being lower friction than privacy, like Steam.

They are successfully competing with piracy, but not by being lower friction but by being more reliable and trustworthy.

Nintendo are highly focussed on a market where the person making the buying decision isn't the person playing the game.

Buy your 11-year-old son a Switch for Xmas and you know that a) it will work out of the box b) there will be a several family-friendly games with name recognition for any child that age (Mario, Pokemon, Zelda) and c) no one in his class will have a more expensive version or one that works better.

Contrast this with trying to get something to work on a PC with a 'switch emulator dongle'. You have to plug it in yourself, you will end up spending more than you planned in the computer store because each component comes with sucker upgrades, and game choices will be much wider and trickier. Then the game which looks great on your son's friend's machine will play like sh*t and you'll feel guilty for having cheaped out, without necessarily knowing what the operative constraint is.

It would be pointless: piracy already happens so dongle stops nothing ,and dongle costs extra.

Just make PC ports like everyone else, it's free money (compared to risk of making new game) at this point

The dongles for high end CAD software don't work either. Iranian, Russian, and Chinese pirates are very very good at cracking them (and some even provide support contracts and bugfixes). It's an interesting side effect of sanctions. If you get a proxy in Iran, you can find cracks and even cracked updates and custom bugfixes of basically any CAD software you want.

Also Nintendo's whole philosophy is all about doing more with less. They make money on every device by not putting out overly engineered / performant systems. So they have always been lagging in terms of cutting edge hardware, but they make up for it by focusing on joyful content.

I would argue Nintendo has their priorities straight.

Joe Schmoe doesn't know and doesn't care about hardware. Ohled? Gigglehearts? Flame rates? WTF are you talking about, he'll say to you.

What Joe Schmoe does know and does care about is whether the game he's playing is fun. This is where Nintendo focuses their energy.

Joe Schmoe and me both

There is a reason why Hollywood doesn't put technical people in charge of it's films.

A successful film director needs to prove their ability to deliver powerful experiences on next-to- no budget at all before anyone puts them in charge of a $150 million dollar blockbuster.

I wouldn't say that's always been the case. Both the N64 and Gamecube featured relatively cutting edge tech during their time. Of course, those two are their weakest selling home consoles, so they've definitely shifted their strategy afterwards.

But for two generations, they did try and keep up with their contemporaries.

> those two are their weakest selling home consoles

Wii U would like a word.

Oh wow I just checked wikipedia, and I knew it did poorly, but did not know the Switch has outsold it by 10x (!!)

What a turnaround!

(My Wii U is collecting dust, though I did enjoy it)

Heads up, there was an issue a couple of months back of Wii U NANDs corrupting after being unused for a few years. Might be worth turning it on and off

It was phenomenally bad marketing, at least how I recall it.

As a huge Nintendo fan who loved his GameCube and Wii and didn't really care that it was just my 'nintendo machine', because I had an Xbox and a pc alongside it.

Somehow I completely missed the WiiU and always assumed it was a peripheral for console that I was already a bit meh about. it fit right in with their other 'accessories' that I never cared about.

Eventually I bought one with a whole bunch of games second-hand...

Switch has sold 120 million units, it has to date outsold the ps5 and then lapped it 3 more times. Oddly, BOTW has only sold 30 million copies.

Like, what did the other 90 million people buy a Switch for? There's nothing else on the console that's worth the trouble, at least up until a few hours ago.

Super Mario Odyssey? Super Mario Maker 2? Super Mario 3D World? Super Mario Party? Smash Bros? Super Mario Kart? (You know there’s this huge Mario movie that made a billion…) Bayonetta? Metroid Dread? Metroid Prime?

Nintendo kills it with first party exclusives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...

My sister in law got a switch just to play animal crossing. There are several other titles out there that people will buy the switch just to play that one title. And the switch (especially the switch lite) is cheap enough for people to do it.

They made some stupid decisions back then. N64 was cartridge based and didn't play CDs like its competitors.

The PS2 was the cheapest DVD player that also could play games, but GC could not play DVDs - its games were released on weird mini-DVDs that could store only ~1.4 GB.

What you call 'control freak' is just the culture of a company focussed on creating a curated experience which is a combination of software, hardware and user experience. Anything not fitting in that vision diminishes that experience and they will do anything to prevent that. Of course, they also like to get paid for their work ;)

> just the culture of a company focussed on creating a curated experience

Core product on core platform struggles to reach playable FPS at launch. A "curated experience" is waaaay different than this.

According to Digital Foundry [0], the game is a perfectly stable 30fps the vast majority of the time

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLlZBwN_-C4

"30fps the vast majority of the time" in 2023 is just laughable.

The standard in 2023 is "broken at launch" and "sub 30 FPS in latest hardware".

It's not in my opinion though. I have a Gaming PC and a Switch. My gaming PC has a 6900XT and so I expect to be playing every game at 1440p @ 60FPS at a bear minimum - some games come out and surprisingly have trouble with that.

The Switch is old hardware that was under-powered on release, therefore, I expect that I'm not going to be getting 60FPS.

Basically, it's down to expectations. The Switch is absolutely great at what it does, and I appreciate it for that reason alone. My expectations are greatly different compared to a gaming PC/PS5/etc.

My biggest gripes with Nintendo is the god awful way they handle people using their IP to make YouTube videos, etc.

But with your pc you can play at 1080p ultra and have 60+ fps, on the switch you can't

> My gaming PC has a 6900XT and so I expect to be playing every game at 1440p @ 60FPS at a bear minimum - some games come out and surprisingly have trouble with that.

You can't even compare an open market in which small teams have to cope with the myriad of possible configurations, ofthen lacking the technical skills for optimizing their software down to the bit with the supposedly top product of a trillion dollar company writing software for their own devices - and failing to make it decent.

Not when you add "on a complete system costing less than $300" to that sentence.

and "from 2017"

Sorry but I think this is exaggerated. For Zelda BotW there was sometimes a low framerate when playing on second screen with 1080p in a very limited amount of regular game situations - and it was still okay.

I really think Nintendo's games are a curated experience compared to everything else I know and have played with maybe very very few exceptions.

Yo have clearly never played the latest pokemon on the switch. Frame drops and overall poor performance all over the world

More like old people stuck in their ways

I think it would make more sense for Nintendo to make a more powerful console on a compatible platform that isn't handheld, kind of like the Sega Master System/Game Gear or Sega Mega Drive/Nomad consoles.

So you can enjoy the same titles on the go as you can on the TV, and you could still use the Switch on the TV, but there would be an alternative for people who want a more high fidelity, fluid experience on a TV or a monitor.

It doesn't even have to be that much more powerful. Even when sticking to the same vendor, a 2018 Nvidia ARM chip had roughly 3-4x the CPU power and 10x the GPU power of the Switch, in a 15-60W power budget. This would be fine for a console that's always plugged into the power mains.

Going to more midrange vendors like Rockchip or Mediatek, or - and this is a long shot - striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips would probably yield a lower cost device but still net a 4-5x increase in gaming performance.

Emulation has proven that the games are not tied so tightly to their hardware platform for switching to a more modern architecture while maintaining compatibility to be an issue. Even without first-party involvement people have been running Switch games on mobile Android devices with a good processor.

> striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips

The fantasy world where they do a deal with Apple for M2 SOCs (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)

> (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)

This is a crazy idea but... it might end up becoming reality. I don't see Nintendo selling any time soon though, it's been very independent for a very long time, to the point where it was huge when they released some things for smartphones (pokemon go, super mario jump, etc).

That said, Apple's been trying some things with gaming (they pushed gaming as one of the use cases for the Apple TV), but then I realize they already have one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world with the iphone.

Apple seems very uninterested in gaming on Mac.

You just gave me chills. That would 100% be the thing that would push me to piracy so I never give Nintendo money again.

Making a deal like that would probably cause the singularity, and Japan would never let Nintendo be bought by an American company.

That sounds more like a nightmare to me.

It would be incredibly cool if they ported their games (even just ones more than 10 years old) to PC, but they clearly want to double/triple/quadruple dip on retro game purchases from console to console so that would never really work. I have really grown sour on Nintendo over the years but that would do a lot to win me back, personally.

Yeah Bayonetta on pc was pretty good as a case in point.

The best way to play Breath Of The Wild, is at 4k 60fps on Cemu (the WiiU emulator).

Can also play at ultrawide 21:9 if you have a monitor like that.

This. It works very well on Cemu, except for the parts where you need gyro input.

I have katamari reroll on the switch and the steam deck and I vastly prefer the experience on the steam deck. It loads the levels faster, has a smoother experience, and it’s easier to do the acceleration of the ball with the steam decks analog switches or extra buttons on the back.

The game is nowhere near tears of the kingdom level and the experience is better. So I understand why people want a better switch

> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games

Games that are more locked down and walled than Apple products, that run 30fps on the oldest hardware possible in 2023, made by a company that actively alienates its own fanbase with aggressive copyright claims over the silliest things?

No thanks. Really, you can keep them out of the PC market.

It seems the fault is less with Nintendo than with parts of the "fan base" which defend piracy. I bet much, much fewer people would play Zelda on an emulator if they a) had to pay for it and b) had to wait until it comes out.

It’s Nintendo. Plenty of people have a hard time doing reviews on YouTube

But hasn't this always been the case? Like computers are always more powerful than consoles, but the draw of consoles being a "turns on and just works" system - minus blowing-into-the-cartridge-on-the-original-nes

We are talking playing a current generation console game on emulator with better framerate and resolution than on the original console, at release. So no, it has not always been the case

Well, it's long been the case that a $400 console has lower specs than a $1200+ gaming PC, even in the year the console is released. And that the performance gap gets even wider as the console gets towards the end of its lifecycle.

Part of the criticism here is that the $340 Switch is getting outperformed by emulation on the $399 Steam Deck.

I'm pretty sure it has always been the case that a PC emulator could outperform a several years old gaming handheld. At least if enough interest was there for someone to write the emulator.

It just feels different since the switch is a “home console” technically instead of a pure “portable”

I'd say that something which is portable is a "portable" even if you can plug it into a TV. It is strongly power constrained. It is just bigger than old portable consoles. (I actually don't know why they were always so small before the Switch. Perhaps large screens were too expensive. Or everyone thought of them as having to fit inside a pocket.)

For the last few generations Nintendo has been happy to be slightly behind Playstation and Xbox in terms of graphics so that they can be the lower-cost alternative.

And based on unit sales, that strategy seems to be doing pretty well.

Yeah, and parents love it too for that reason. People really seem to underestimate the market for children (and parents / family gifting and indulging said children), not just with gaming but also with e.g. youtube.

To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.

Well I’m not a parent and switch is perfect for me. Would I want 4k? Ray tracing? Yeah sure, but it’s nowhere near a deal breaker. As long as it runs smooth I care orders of magnitude more about gameplay. Botw gave me so much joy, simply because it’s an amazingly well made game.

In my experience, graphics upgrades feel amazing at first, but if it’s a good game, you mostly forget about it after just a few minutes. But yes, sometimes you have very scenic environments, like in RDR2, but even then I feel like it’s 90% making good composition, color, lighting, and 10% is the actual GPU doing real time lighting etc. At least to me, this obsession with cutting edge graphics is just an expensive hobby of moving goal posts. I’m the same with TVs, I care much more about the movie or show than the TV specs.

IDK, mobile games don't tend to have a spending cap. On most PC/console releases the most you can spend on a game is few hundred for the game and all the DLC bought day 1 and usually goes down as time goes on. Mobile games will have one gem bundle or whatever that costs more than the complete package of a PC/console title. So you can easily get whales spending thousands on one game. The financials tell me mobile games are better at extracting money from their audience or a subset rather but that's kind of how they feel to play! Everything is geared towards extracting money.

Optimizing for microtransactions isn't free either! The devs increase discomfort and grind to encourage paying extra, making games worse for effectively all players-- in time or money.

> To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.

Mobile gaming makes money because companies put slot machines into people's pockets. Actual games are a drop in the ocean.

It's not really a lower-cost alternative due to cartridge prices and no sales.

I chose Steam Deck instead of the Switch. Yes the SD is more expensive, but it already supports most of my existing Steam library and I can buy new games on sale.

On the Switch? The Nintendo eshop has new sales running every week.

Do their first party games also get those discounts? Another thing is that I can play games that I bought 15 years ago on my Steam Deck. Nothing like that is possible on the Switch. Even if you owned, say, Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U - you have to rebuy it again on the Switch.

I think it's a really smart strategy. They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

It seems like Nintendo picked up on what makes video games so fun early on while a lot of studios struggle with it even today: The gameplay comes first and it has to be fun. Art/style comes next, then way down the list is graphics. Graphics are the only thing about a video game that get worse with time. If you focus on making fun games that have a distinct style, they will remain fun forever. Importantly to a corporation, they also remain sellable forever.

Nobody talks about crysis 1 anymore, but people definitely talk about wind waker.

Totally agree. And Zelda is maybe the best example of this? The graphic style of the two recent games are distinctive and effective but are a long way from realistic by modern standards.

> They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

I would argue that they're thriving in spite of it.

Great gameplay and great art/graphics are not mutually exclusive. They're not even going to be handled by the same teams.

Playing Switch games emulated on the Steam Deck is pretty common. The power of the Deck does give you better performance, no doubt. The trade off is that the battery life is significantly worse than a Switch.

They can't control the experience you will get on your PC. PCs vary so you could get a bad experience and blame it on Nintendo.

> I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents.

https colon slashslash thepiratebay DOT org slash description.php?id=68303898 (slightly broken for inadvertent link click)

And https://github.com/Abd-007/Switch-Emulators-Guide/blob/main/... for a howto install Ryujinx/Yuzu Switch emulators.

But yeah, games arent my cup of tea, but I did try it. And it's BUTTER SMOOTH on real computer hardware. And yeah, we pierats had it before legit purchase. Again, pirates get the best experience and legit gets meh.

> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.

I guess they could do that, but that would cannibalize sales of their consoles. And then, what makes them any different than Steam?

The biggest benefit of a Switch is it's handheld and portable. The biggest pirate downside is that it nearly necessitates a desktop with significantly better equipment. I've heard some work being done with the Steam handheld.. but subpar at best.

> The biggest pirate downside is that it nearly necessitates a desktop with significantly better equipment

For me personally, the biggest downside is that I don’t feel good about myself when I take things I know I don’t have the right to take. YMMV.

In that case I would consider buying a copy on switch, even if you don't own a switch. if you buy the copy and then decide to play it on your PC instead of Switch then you don't really have any reason to feel guilty. This is similar to buying a BluRay and then ripping it to watch it on your personal Plex or Jellyfin server because you prefer that method instead of using a BluRay player.

I understand and share your ethical dilemma. The goal is to support the creators of the work. If you do that, then there is no reason to feel guilty because you enjoy their work in a different way.

>For me personally, the biggest downside is that I don’t feel good about myself when I take things I know I don’t have the right to take. YMMV.

Once I put in enough work to both have some spare money in the bank and to empathize with the people who made the software and music I could so easily "just download", I had this transitionary period where, if I possessed a copy of something available commercially without having paid for it, and found that I enjoyed it enough to keep using it, I would buy a legitimate copy. For music, if I really liked it, I'd buy, for example, the deluxe vinyl edition - hopefully kicking some extra money over.

With software (including games, though it's rare that I play games) I'm now at the point where I won't give it a second thought, and will just pay for it. I bought an iPad app on sale, years before I had an iPad, knowing that one of these days I'd pick one up - it worked out.

Laws don’t determine rights. You’re infringing on copyright, not stealing something. And we all know IP laws are horrendously broken. And I’d argue that your rights from an ethical perspective are extremely broad and you can basically do whatever you want with intellectual property as long as you’re not harming the actual creators (not owners).

I would argue that taking something I’m supposed to pay for makes me feel bad about myself.

First, I'm not "taking". I'm copying. And the person providing a copy is 'giving'. And nowhere is anyone deprived of any physical thing, save an ethereal possibility of buying this game. Then again, I have no switch and no intent to buy one. In this case, it was curiosity.

And frankly, I don't feel one bit bad, copying AND providing copies free of charge. I've paid enough to content, media, and game companies, and screwed over on rentals that were sold as sales.

But you do you.

Totally understandable and I'd encourage you to not do anything that makes you feel bad.

You can separate them out and get best of both worlds. Buy a copy from ninetendo and give it to some kid who wouldnt have been able to have it otherwise and play the pirated version for the technically superior experience. No need to wring your pearls on this one.

Many of us (myself included) have still bought the retail release, even if I plan to play "elsewhere".

Personally I wouldn't feel good giving money to Nintendo, or supporting their business practices. YMMV.

Or sell a Nintendo "emulator" of their own for PC. Just for Nintendo releases like Zelda, MarioKart, etc. They wouldn't even need to produce any hardware in that case. I'd be first in line to purchase such a piece of software.

I tried one of the popular Switch emulators, and they work great. But, I'd rather just pay Nintendo, and not have to fiddle with it. Really does seem like an opportunity for them.

A great example of this is Sony with Playstation exclusives.

In the past few years, they have broken their longstanding rule and made PC ports of many of their previously exclusive Playstation titles to play on PC. This includes Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us.

In the most recent earnings call, Sony said that these titles sales on PC have dramatically outperformed expectations and that they will be putting additional effort towards PC ports in the future as a way to supplement Playstation sales.

Microsoft has figured out the same thing, by not really making Xbox exclusives anymore. Granted, they were always much more closely tied between PC and Xbox than companies like Sony were, but they quickly embraced this "play everywhere" mentality many years ago, and released a Ultimate Gamepass which basically lets you play the same games (with some exceptions) on PC or Xbox and even switch between the two with cloud saves.

Point being, other publishers have discovered that locking yourself down to a single hardware device is not good. PCs are the most universally owned and flexible hardware devices out there and have the biggest market. I'd love for Nintendo to do the same thing. But knowing Nintendo, they will never do such a thing. They are a very stubborn company. They often do not act in their own self-interest (market share, revenue) in order to control things like hardware or create false scarcity.

Like Apple, Nintendo is a hardware company that makes software, not a software company.

They’d never do this in a million years.

Nintendo is extremely resistant to change and compromise, there is probably zero chance they will do it. Remember that, even as they make excellent games, they reject a lot of modern aspects of gaming. Like they used to ban Twitch streams and YouTube let's plays of their games.

> Nintendo is extremely resistant to change and compromise

Are you sure? The company the brought us…

- Color TV-Game

- Game Boy

- Nintendo 64

- GameCube

- Nintendo DS

- Wii

- many, many others [0]

… is resistant to change? They have always been at the forefront of hardware innovation/experimentation, I'm sure they wouldn't be against it.

I'd suggest listening to the 2-part Acquired podcast episodes about Nintendo [1] if you haven't already.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_video_game_consoles

[1]: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo-the-console-wars

I play a lot of emulation (of older titles mostly), and i really like the cheats functionality. I'm not 15yo anymore, I don't have the time to grind, but I really like the adventure part of a game... so playing a game with some kind of invincibility is great for me.

I understand the concept of games needing to be "hard" in some parts, and that making your grind to get stronger to win is a thing... but sometimes I just want to mess around and play through the story, and games like zelda ones (and GTA series and many others) are one of those.

Sadly, cheats have turned into microtransactions (be it crystals, gems or amiibos).

It might just be a gigantic support burden for them: They then would have to care about thousands of hardware configurations, and people complaining "doesn't work on my PC". It's probably not worth it. Also the market for it is likely small. Most Switch users seem children, casual games, families, etc. Those usually just want to buy hardware which "just works", compared to enthusiasts who actually want to fiddle around with tons of settings.

The PC version also let you mod the game. The weapon durability mod (removing the extremely quick destruction of your favourite equipment in the normal game) was excellent.

The day 1 patch makes this a Locked 30 fps game without frame drops except when using ultra hand. It’s the first AAA release in months to run this smooth.

It definitely still dips regularly in heavy areas. It doesn't impact the experience the way it did before, imo, but saying that it doesn't would be disingenuous.

You're right about it being the only acceptable AAA release this year though.

Only 30 fps?

The game itself is hard coded to run at 30 fps. There is a 60 fps patch for emulated versions, but using it makes the FMV movies run at double speed due to the game's hard coded 30 fps.

Don’t use smooth in the same context as 30fps. 120hz+ is smooth

I doubt Nintendo would be willing to open up like that, but who knows. Nowadays there are barely any exclusive games on Xbox and Playstation. Most games are made available in every platform.

Maybe Nintendo will buckle under the $$$ figure they could earn by making their games available on other platforms.

On the other hand, Nintendo could make a killing releasing a "Switch 2" with beefier hardware and backwards compatibility.

I think Nintendo wouldn't want to do this because it would make their primary platform (the Switch) feel second-rate by comparison.

Nintendo makes very confusing business decisions very often. They seem to succeed despite all their business decisions, largely due to having IP that people love, and people are constantly thinking about how great they could be.

> the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy

Neophyte question here, but what's the 3d engine used for this game? can you just change a parameter to make the game more realistic if the hardware supports it?

It's a custom engine by nintendo, also seems to be user by other games like super mario odyssey.

Changing graphics settings would be accomplished using patches, more or less the same idea as making cheats in older games. Find the value somewhere in their code that corresponds to render distance and change that, as an example.

Emulators for older systems can do more impressive things. Graphics pipelines tend to be a certain shape and use certain data types, so once you're already emulating at the GPU level you can do things like upscale old textures (works great on cell-shaded games like megaman legends). For 2d games you can use a dedicated pixel art scaling algorithm.

Pretty much all 3D games can output at a higher resolution than the original hardware allowed, just due to how the hardware is set up. You're game isn't responsible for deciding the output resolution, the GPU is, essentially. Changes aspect ratios is much harder and often requires patching the games themselves to make it work properly.

Other common patches are things like higher FPS. By default the new zelda game plays at 20fps, but there are patches to play them at 30 and 60 fps for a smoother experience. Those are once again actually reverse engineering and patching the game files though.

You can already connect switch controllers to a PC and play any switch title, legally, on your PC right now.

I have legally purchased all my switch games but I make backups and play on PC sometimes just because it is a better experience.

This doesn't seem unambiguously legal - it seems like the backup part is the legally grey bit.

The legally grey bit is that there's no method to make a usable backup without circumventing the DRM.

You can play it at 120 Hz, 4K, ultrasmooth, what have you, when you buy the next gen Nintendo console for 350+ eur/$. Not using a small cheap box... Knowing Nintendo.

I stopped my BOTW playthrough recently after seeing game being rendered in 4K RTX. I'm usually not a stickler for visuals, but swith is getting a bit too dated.

Sega tried something along those lines - with proper PC hardware you could play Saturn games... I don't think it worked out for them.

That would cannibalize their switch sales no?

I doubt there's much, if any profit margin on the consoles themselves. I think it's pretty typical for consoles of all brands to be sold at a loss in order to capture customers for their ecosystem where they will buy games and other media which have very healthy margins.

Nintendo's biggest concern is probably controlling the experience. While it might not be a marvel of gaming technology on the Switch, it is consistent. Allowing it to run on any old computer hardware means a lot of it will be poorly optimized as a rule. non-technical people will likely have no idea what that means; to them it will just be a shitty gaming experience and they will then associate that experience with Nintendo. Technical people will probably not even bother and they'll just emulate it for free instead of paying $70 for a game that isn't going to have any official support on their platform. There's really no upside for Nintendo in this plan.

Sure, but they probably make the majority of their profit on sales of games.

Nintendo has never been about High Res or State of the art graphics at all

Is Switch emulation on PC that good? Maybe I should try it if so. I imagined it would be fairly janky due to the difficulty of emulating currentish hardware, and only old consoles could be emulated with good performance.

It's excellent for some popular games, decent at many others, and garbage at some.

That's good enough, thanks!

I already bought the game from Nintendo, but stumbled on this thread this morning. I'd be willing to play it on an emulator instead of my switch if the performance was better, but some quick skimming online isn't convincing me.

To wit, the consensus opinion on reddit is that BOTW is still a buggy mess on the main switch emulators, Yuzu & Ryujinx, and that people should play the Wii U version via the CEMU emulator instead. If BotW isn't a polished experience many years after release, I'm pessimistic about TotK being a good experience so soon after release. You can skim the bug reports on the emulator sites; there's lots of stuttering and invisible walls and all other kinds of jank.

I think I'll stick to playing it on my switch :-)

I've been playing the leaked version of TotK at 4K 60 fps for several days, and with only extremely minor visual bugs (example: when switching abilities, the background turns black rather than out-of-focus). It's honestly less janky than many AAA PC games.

Huh, that's very encouraging, thanks! Which emulator have you been using, out of curiosity?

I've been using Yuzu with a couple of patches (that I think have now been merged) with Vulkan, which can be touchy with hardware, but runs fine on my machine other than minor visual glitches. The game runs nearly flawlessly and with apparently great compatibility with Ryujinx, but is dramatically slower (~20-25 fps compared to 50-60 fps with Yuzu).

Ah, thanks!

The below video would not be the typical experience but it should what it's possible when you throw hardware at it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fscwp3RkEvM

How can they compare with something that hasn’t been released?

It might be true, but at the same time it feels disingenuous to compare unreleased games on switch to a pirated PC. “Much more enjoyable” can’t be a thing until you compare, right?

You can compare all the other releases, including Breath of the Wild, why should this release be any different? Especially when the emulator keeps improving and PC hardware keeps getting better

Specifically because they said the experience is better without knowing the other unreleased version they’re comparing it to. Bringing up other releases is irrelevant.

Presumably they can run the pirated version on actual hardware as well (via custom firmware etc.), and therefore compare?

You were downvoted but you are right. The podcast was released last week, but the game came with a day-1 patch to improve the performance on Switch which they would not have been able to try.

Obviously it will never compete with emulation on a PC, but it runs just fine on Switch. 99.9% of players are not going to think "wow, this would be much more enjoyable on a PC!" The gaming podcast crowd is not exactly representative.

I've tried this and I have a monster machine. The experience is overall better on the switch. Not everything has been emulated correctly and the frame rate is still higher on the switch overall.

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