Regarding the speaker grille "why:"
I'd assume the "speaker ports" are either for air flow, or the entire case works as a resonance chamber and wave guide.
Are there other reasonable options?
Nintendo Switch Teardown
171–180 of 192 posts
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#172The dock is pretty underwhelming from what I've seen. There is no protection for the screen, sliding in between two pieces of plastic. Pretty cheap, for a premium priced, and well engineered hybrid device, that will be taken in and out. Semi-relevant. Breath of Wild looks like such a fantastic game, but it's completely ridiculous that the performance is often times WORSE in the docked mode. I'm hoping this is just cr…
The dock plastic is softer than the glass so it won't scratch/wear the glass. As long as you keep it clean of other debris/grit!
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The system already does this to an extent; it runs at a much higher resolution with more GPU power when docked. But I doubt an HD dock with some sort of offloading could work without serious modifications to the hardware; the GPU bandwidth alone would complicate matters significantly.
What about external PCIe docks with full fledged GPU for laptops ? In theory if the graphic subsystem allow for something like SLI the logic could adapt dynamically... (IANAGD)
That works on computer systems because the PCI-E bus is already designed to be external. There's no need to separate it from the system bus because it's already separated in desktops.
In an ARM System on a Chip (SoC) like the Switch uses, the GPU is on the same chip as the main processor and very tightly integrated with the rest of the hardware. It's much more difficult to decouple this from the main unit. I don't doubt that USB 3.0 could handle the raw speed, but I doubt seriously it could keep up with the latency demanded by most applications.
An HD dock would almost necessitate an entire higher power SoC in the dock, and some way to synchronize the state between that and the one in the main system to pull off the system's characteristic fast-docking for which it's named. It's possible, but at that point it's less "offloading" and more "here's an actual high-power console that reads its data from the tablet."
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it's the way I understood it. "Drops frames occasionally when there are a lot of elements moving on the screen" vs "plays poorly". Disappointing, sure, but hardly a deal breaker. I guess I'll wait a bit and judge on my own.
but its the second kind, Zelda drops to 20fps in empty static scenes.
true. And it's bad that it is THE launch game that suffers from that. It's likely to be caused by a poor port. The original of the game I believe runs at 720p. Scaling it up to 900p (it doesn't even go up to 1080p) in docked mode is probably causing it issues rather than the device actually having problems working in docked mode. I feel pretty confident that patches and updates to both the device and games should work these out :)
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#175Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about external PCIe docks with full fledged GPU for laptops ? In theory if the graphic subsystem allow for something like SLI the logic could adapt dynamically... (IANAGD)
That works on computer systems because the PCI-E bus is already designed to be external. There's no need to separate it from the system bus because it's already separated in desktops. In an ARM System on a Chip (SoC) like the Switch uses, the GPU is on the same chip as the main processor and very tightly integrated with the rest of the hardware. It's much more difficult to decouple this from the main unit. I don't do…
I guess you have a point ;)
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#177Just a few quick comments on the Switch after a day of use. First, a quick digression, Nintendo seems to have gauged the launch demand pretty well. There are some other comments here regarding Target morning waits. I was 2nd on line at 6:40am in a northern NJ Target. The guy in front of me had slept in his car (!), but he seemed to be the only one that did. By 7:45 the line was 20ish people. Our Target had 25 console…
How is selling out by 9AM considered 'gauging the demand well'? What about all of the people who go at lunch of after work? I'm pretty sure they always like to sell out as a marketing ploy anyway
Selling out by 9 shows they at least didn't overproduce to a flop considering how awful the WiiU sold?
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been hoping they'll drastically lower the Wii U price so I can pick it up that way :)
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.
Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#179You are a bit underwhelmed. Got it
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Re: Nintendo Switch Teardown
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, I don't understand why the NES Classic Mini is still pretty much impossible to buy anywhere, and is 2.5-3x MSRP at third-party sellers on Amazon/Ebay. Surely by now Nintendo could've ramped production to match demand?
How do you determine demand? Something like this could be a passing fad... build millions and bam no one wants it anymore...
I'm assuming 6 months after launch they'd have a decent idea of what the demand is.