Nintendo Switch Announced, Powered By NVIDIA Tegra

[andrei_me]

If battery life is a issue, it should at least have a USB connect to be able to charge using powerbanks/portable chargers, like the ones from RAVPower

[kaprikawn]

The question for me is what Tegra. I have a Nexus 7 2012 sat around here somewhere with a Tegra 3, and it's not exactly anything special. I have no doubt it's better than that, but the question is how much better.

Yes, the Switch won't also be hampered by Android, running in a virtual machine and all that. But I'm hoping it's at least as powerful as the Pixel C which is fairly good (for that class of hardware anyway).

[kaprikawn]

I'm just guessing but I find it unlikely that a handheld would beat a home console of the same/previous generation (though the PSP supposedly could have beaten the PS2 if its CPU was not under-clocked). And yet, the video seems to show the switch as a merge of both, so I wonder.

Why not? The Vita was comparable to a handheld PS3 (see Uncharted), the Shield is significantly more powerful than a 360 (see the Doom 3 port). Relatively recent powerful handhelds/tablets routinely hand in performance of the preceding generation of consoles.

[TheLexMachine]

The question for me is what Tegra. I have a Nexus 7 2012 sat around here somewhere with a Tegra 3, and it's not exactly anything special. I have no doubt it's better than that, but the question is how much better.

Yes, the Switch won't also be hampered by Android, running in a virtual machine and all that. But I'm hoping it's at least as powerful as the Pixel C which is fairly good (for that class of hardware anyway).

Tegra, when done right and paired with enough RAM and proper storage, is pretty powerful. That being said, Nvidia's use of Tegra in devices has been pretty miserable thus far, because of the low-end configurations of the designs. If this new Nintendo uses HBM with the latest Tegra CPU, which it might, it could be a very solid console/portable.

[bug77]

Right, so now not even low level, cross platform APIs aren't good enough for consoles, they still need special APIs. This is totally not about platform lock-in.

[bug77]

*wishing he could edit the double negation above

[LinAGKar]

Lock-in is what consoles are all about.

[M@yeulC]

Wait, what? They got a Skyrim port on their vulkan-like, custom ARM architecture, custom operating system, and... not us ? :'(

That is completely unfair.

Anyway, good luck with your lock in, you're locked out of my home, anyway.

[Ronshere]

It has to be powerful. Here are the posted specs for Skyrim Remastered
I think the base unit that the console plugs into houses the mobo and cpu.

Skyrim Special Edition - PC System Requirements
October 10 - gstaffBethesda
System Specs

Minimum

Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit Version)
Intel i5-750/AMD Phenom II X4-945.
8GB of ram.
12 GB free HDD space
NVIDIA GTX 470 1GB /AMD HD 7870 2GB

Recommended

Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit Version)
Intel i5-2400/AMD FX-8320.
8GB of ram.
12 GB free HDD space
NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB /AMD R9 290 4GB

[riklaunim]

I wonder how that Skyrim version was made. Did they port their "old" Fallout 4 / Skyrim Remaster engine to Linux and ARM? Do they use OpenGL (more likely for legacy code) or did they put more time into it and have also future plans for that console and used like Vulkan rewrite?

Or maybe that Tegra chip isn't ARM based and is somewhat Windows related?