521–530 of 551 posts
Battery life on tegra devices is abysmal I'm really wondering if the guy can get from the gate to the plane without it running out if you run full 3D graphics games like those.
Unfortunately, while it's a rather good gimmick, it seems like Nintendo is repeating its usual mistake of sacrificing gaming power for it. Releasing a device with a 720p screen in 2016 is almost as bad as releasing a device with a 400x240 screen in 2011, in my opinion.
Nintendo has a very bad habit of making devices that compete with the previous generation of its competitors' devices instead of the next one.
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> Being in my parents' cars a lot, it made sense to carry a portable game console. In the world of working people, it doesn't. In the world of non US working people, many sit in a bus/metro 2x a day, 30-60 mins each way :)
That's totally fair! I'm in the suburbs, so public transit isn't an option here, and I rarely think about it unless I'm traveling.
What would be a 15 minute commute by car takes me an hour by bus. That sounds like the perfect excuse to carry a gaming device on me. The idea of being able to block out two hours every day for playing video games makes the kid in me very happy. I'd been dragging my feet on getting a 3DS to save money (whenever I've felt "hey, I've got $200 I can drop on something", I've had something more important to spend it on), but I might give in and get a Switch. Hell, it'd probably save me money in the long run since being able to game on the bus means I'd be much less tempted to take Uber or Lyft.
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yet to be fair, the very modest gamecube had some of the best franchises around (Metroid Prime a total classic), and even the PS2 did wonders on Shadow of the Colossus. It's almost as if, when the hardware is not supreme, creativity becomes more important?
An easy way to reject that hypothesis is to consider the utter load of shovelware that Nintendo consoles attract, because top-tier studios stay away in droves.
For a second I wondered, is Nintendo building network hardware now? My worry here is that Nintendo may be making the same mistake that BlackBerry made: doubling down on hardware when they should be building out their app ecosystem on dominant mobile platforms. That said, the Switch looks cool. Really freaking cool. I just wonder if it'll be enough.
Maybe you missed the Super Mario Run announcement? https://supermariorun.com
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> Warlords on the Atari 2600 Wow, now that is a great multiplayer game. One of the few video games that my whole family played together (the other being 'Where in Time is Carmen San Diego' for the NES). Very nice to see it mentioned here! It is a huge classic.
Man, with reccomendations like that, I might just have to grab a copy and give it a go.
Functionally, it filled the niche that would be occupied by Mario Karts, Goldeneye, M.U.L.E., and Perfect Dark. 4 player head-to-head games that were simple to understand and fun to play repeatedly.
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Don't integrated units produce less heat? Do you mind expanding on this so I know what you are referring to?
They produce less heat because they are an inferior versions of a standalone GPU. It's harder to extract heat from two chips in the same space (CPU and GPU) than two separate chips, also you're limited in chip space for transistor count. (I'm assuming inferior refers to compute performance and integrated means integrated on to the same chip btw., if that's not what you meant then ignore my comment).
Isn't that entirely based on what they integrate? The market has traditionally been such that integrated units are for cost, and so are paired with cheaper GPU components. I don't know of any technical reason that integrated units use low end GPU specs, just business reasons. Any normal market pressures would be different in this case, based on the size of the order and specific needs.
> I'm assuming inferior refers to compute performance
Inferior based on maximum possible compute performance, sure. The top of the line dedicated GPU will have more leeway to work with than the top of the line integrated, but we're hardly talking about top of the line, we're talking about matching three year old hardware.
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Very unlikely that this has performance that competes with Sony and Microsoft. This is an integrated GPU on a battery-powered device with limited thermal regulation. The PS4 and Xbox One are always plugged in to AC and have plenty of space for a proper cooling system. That's OK, this time the console actually takes advantage of weaker performance to offer a better form-factor. Whether that tradeoff satisfies consumer…
Agreed. They show off Skyrim which is an xbox 360 game.
It looks like the power is somewhere between Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
The specs I saw showed it with 4 GBs of ram, which would put it clearly above Xbox 360/PS3 power and even a bit above the Wii U, which can do way better looking games than Xbox 360/PS3.
We shall see what the final specs and games look like, but what they showed off looked pretty good. It won't be PS4 Pro or Xbox One Scorpio powerful, but it's a device you can use on the go (or for second-screen gaming, which might be the killer app here).
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Well, it's coming 1.5 years late to the game, I hope the graphic power is at least on par with the original PS4.
In that form factor? Unlikely. My guess would be somewhere around PS3/360 performance, perhaps with better graphics.
With Nintendo's strong art design, there are games like Mario Kart 8 that look as good as most PS4/Xbox One games.
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And Hearthstone isn't a demanding title, the streaming works fine but any of the "native" Tegra AAA 3D games kill the drain the device before you finish a level (30min~ and honestly even under that, some games are going to flat out at like 10). Doesn't help that the device gets pretty darn hot also. Portable gaming sounds fun until you remember that batteries suck, sure they've improved much but what improved is also…
The Shield is 1900x1200, the Switch will run at 720p in mobile mode, for "performance reasons". Pretty sure they mean for battery life reasons. It will push out 1080p when docked so it's not like the GPU can't handle it.
Most other games also don't run at 1200p, and probably not even 1080p unless they are simple games.
Current consoles don't push 1080p games properly so the non-native resolution was never even in question.