NX (Pre-Switch Final Reveal Thread)

Zero Revolution wrote:So weirdly enough, I've never really seen this talked about in this thread. What do you guys want to see come out of NX? What are your hopes for it?

Personally I want it to be Nintendo-unique. I always feel like games are improved and are more unique each generation with Nintendo just because they add some weird thing to the controller. I'd like to see the same thing happen with NX, even if it may not be as major as past Nintendo consoles. It also HAS to have a screen on the controller. No screen will quite honestly be a deal breaker for me unless it's compatible with the Wii U Gamepad. I've become too accustomed to it, and while some games don't really need it, it's a great addition for most.

Ok, this is my first time posting any kind of rumor, leak, or insider information, whatever you want to call it. While I believe the info to be true, things can always change at the last minute and then I look like an a**h*** who lied. I have more than one source and this post will basically contain things I've heard, conversations I've had with people in the know (other insiders, devs, writers, etc). To make this easier, I think I'll do a tiered rumor ranking, where a T1 (Tier 1) means one source told me this, T2 means two, T3 means three, and T4 means at least four sources or more told me or others the same thing. So T4 rumors have multiple sources and are likely more credible than a T1, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a T1 is false. The bolded parts will be the rumor, the text after it will be additional info mixed with some of my opinion, and the sources thoughts.

Also, while I was writing this short essay I asked my new sources about the May 9th NX reveal date, they said they'd look into it.

Remember, I'm no journalist or english major :p

T4 Rumors
The NX will be more powerful than the PS4. "By a noticeable amount". From the CPU, to GPU, to RAM. Sources don't know the clock speeds, or memory type or amount of memory. But if the CPU is 15-30% stronger than PS4 as alluded to by LCGeek, than the GPU would need to match that bump in order to not bottleneck (Nintendo hates their bottlenecks).

The Wii U Remasters. 100% confirmed Smash Bros 4 will come to NX, no word on if you can play with Wii U players.

Zelda is 100% confirmed and not really big news

Now here is where things get interesting. One source said 100% for sure Mario Maker was coming to NX. Another source said 50%. Why 50%? Well, they can confirm it's in development, Nintendo is struggling to transfer over player data and doesn't want all courses to be lost. Hell, courses are being mysteriously deleted on Wii U already lol.

The fourth remaster is Splatoon. This one was given 50% chance from two sources and 99% from one source lol. The reasons again are, Nintendo is struggling to transfer all player data and make it cross-compatible with Wii U players as well. It is in development though. They should have all he DLC included.

So, Zelda and Smash for sure, Mario Maker and Splatoon maybe. If Nintendo can't get it working they may scrap it.

Smash is rumored for launch along with Zelda (day or window wasn’t specified). Not sure on Mario Maker or Splatoon.

What's interesting about this is Splatoon and Mario Maker heavily use touch controls and motion controls. While I certainly expect the NX controller to use gyroscope and accelerometers (since even the DS4, Wii U gamepad, Wii remotes and 3DS use it) this may indicate that there will be a screen in the NX controller. None of my sources indicated troubled development of splatoon and mario maker were controls related, so either it has a screen controller or the second screen support hinted at by the reddit leaker in the OP was right and there will be some kind of optional screen controller or smartglass like features.

T2 Rumors
NDA's are tight as hell. This one is obvious. But I just wanted to add to it. While fellow posters like Rosti have indicated how heavy they are, my own sources and people I don't even know have warned me privately to watch what I post here (this was all within the last couple of hours lol). One source said they know more Nintendo hardware people than software people, yet the only leaks they've been able to get is on the software side. Not a peep from the hardware guys.

I even had people asking what the contents of my post were going to be, if names, job positions, marketing budgets (lol) were going to be posted. A lot of people got very worried, including my sources, the fear of Nintendo is real. They are cracking down. The fake leaks aren't helping either.

As someone who just started snooping for NX info and asking questions out of general curiosity for being a fan, I wasn't expecting this much info over the last two weeks or so. But, now that I am, I want to gain my sources respect and so I didn't want divulge their identity or even reveal their gender. I hope this post has gained their trust, and know that their ID's are safe and sound with me.

T1 Rumors
NX SDK's are out there right now and my sources can confirm dev's have them, so don't worry too much about when you hear stuff like nobody has a dev kit yet.
The NX is easy to port too. This is big because Nintendo consoles have usually been hard to develop or and only mastered by Nintendo's internal teams. Apparently, some dev's are having no trouble porting current gen games over. It's a quick process and dev's seem to be happy about it.

The NX architecture is under NDA but is highly speculated to be x86. I disagreed with them on this but they made some excellent points about how porting from ARM to x86 (handheld to console) and x86 to x86 (current PS4 and XB1 games to NX) is very easy, while it's a bit more tricky to go from x86 to ARM (console to handheld). It certainly matches what the reddit leaker posted.
Based off my high school programming skills and some research, it seems like x86 to ARM does require more work, x86 is 64-bit and ARM is 32-bit. But any decent compiler supports 64-bit math on ARM. The dev's mainly recompile the code into ARM, and then the integer values get changed, and fix any errors that come up, recompile again, see if it works, rinse and repeat. It's not as important or inefficient as people think, especially for larger devs. Besides, ARM is heavily supported and the more worked on architecture. So don't get too focused on if it's x86 or ARM. In the end, as long as it's not shitty PowerPC (Nintendo, please, no) it'll be fine. It won't be the reason Nintendo won't get third party ports, if anything, NX sales will.

One thing that contradicts x86, and this is an indirect source, but a coder who works specifically for Nintendo laughed off GAF's focus on x86 and how we know nothing. Please don’t go looking for them, DetectiveGAF, let them keep their job. So, that, combined with ARM likely being in the handheld, makes me believe the NX will use ARM. But like I said, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter.

Nobody knows anything about the handheld. At least, not any of my sources or their sources. Not even sure if NX refers to the handheld as well or if that has a different codename. It's speculated that it will still get some exclusive games, but won't get many console games downported (referring to the shared games library) while the console could theoretically play them all (maybe lending support to x86 and ARM inside the NX, having the handheld guts inside, but that sounds very expensive and I doubt it). The console seems to be the main focus of Nintendo right now and the New 3DS, along with the 2016 lineup of 3DS, has afforded them that luxury.

I hope you enjoy this post and it provides lots of healthy discussion. I told you it wasn't major news, but you got hyped anyways. It's my first time doing this and it was fun, and sorry if it took awhile but verification and clarity were important to me.

Remember, grain of salt.

Zero Revolution wrote:^ Yeah that's why I'm worried about this. That list is pretty much entirely made up of ports outside of Pikmin and a possible new game from Retro. While I do expect a new 3D Mario and a new IP at launch, there won't be much new available for the NX at launch which is really disappointing. Not to mention that if people didn't buy Wii U, what makes you think releasing the exact same games on the new console is going to make them want the new console? That makes no sense.

Like last time, I'm using the tiered rumors where a T1 means one source told me, T2 means two, Tier 3 means 3, and Tier 4 means four or more (there are no T4 this time). I will reiterate this, I am not the source of any of this information. I am simply passing along what I heard. It should all be taken with a grain of salt and not be taken as gospel. Don't cry and flame me if by June none of this is true.
Nirolak told me to contextualize the rumors and was a fan of the tiered system, so I did it. Please read it through and enjoy. Feel free to debate it, get mad at it, get hyped by it or whatever, just know things like these can change at any time and may never come to fruition exactly how it's worded.
T3 Rumors
The NX gimmick. I uh....was told not to post this part by some people. As usual, take it with a grain of salt (although I don't know why I would be warned if it was false) I'm not under any NDA though, and well, it could end up being false. But I was told a variation of this by three different sources. I don't believe they have a reason to lie to me. Here goes....
The NX is going to have a screen controller (whether it's optional or standard I don't know) and can be used anywhere to play your home console games. The controller itself will not have any processing capabilities, it'll essentially be a dummy vita. It'll likely have basic OS functions to access the NX console from anywhere, like a tiny cpu. Nintendo will use enhanced Wii U gamepad streaming tech, and allow the controller to be taken anywhere, connect to the NX console at home (likely through Wi-fi or personal hotspots and the NX console will likely have to be in stand-by mode). Basically, it's remote play built into the box and won't require a $200 add-on to experience it. This is likely what Kimishima meant in his interview with Sankei (http://www.sankei.com/west/news/1601...030012-n1.html) "different way to play with a dedicated machine" and the whole "new way to experience games" mantra that's been going around Nintendo PR.
Speculation: Nintendo could also sell personal hotspot usb adapters to get internet anywhere and plug either directly into the controller or a wall outlet to not drain the controller battery. The Supplementary Computing Devices may actually be portable hotspot devices with chips in it to boost the quality of the stream. (Maybe the NX will be called the Stream, a speculated final name during the WUST's).
Note: This does not mean there will not be a handheld. This isn't meant to be a replacement for the handheld as there will still be limitations and the controller won't have a full OS or the capability for physical game media (discs or cartridges). The needs of a handheld won't be fully met with this feature. It's just a nice add-on.
T2 Rumors
Luigi's Mansion 3 is in development for NX. This rumor gained popularity awhile ago from Geno but this isn't my source. This was a T1 to start but today I got another source to give some info on it. Two different sources have told me that it is in development for NX, and one source said it's being developed by Next Level Games, who is big enough to do this and Federation Force at the same time. One source said it started as a Wii U game but after the disappointing performance of the Wii U and the scheduled release date for the game being late in the console's cycle, Nintendo decided to switch development over to NX. (basically the same situation as Zelda for Wii U, but no word on if this game will also get a Wii U version). The other source said it's a pretty big deal (he didn't elaborate if he meant Nintendo is making it a big deal or his workplace is). To support this, http://www.nintendolife.com/news/201...edits_the_post
an employee stealth edited his post last year.
T1 Rumors
The NX will use a custom Polaris-like GPU. Likely will be on a FinFET 14nm fabrication node. The source told me it's on the same architecture with heavy customizations of course . It will contain the feature set of Polaris. It is "marginally better than the PS4" and theoretically could be "2x the power of PS4 GPU". I asked about PS4K being rumored to have a gpu 2x as powerful as the OG PS4 and how the theoretical performance of the NX would be and was told "Theoretically it could be close to the PS4K rumored specs". Of course, we know nothing of Polaris or the PS4K specs, but he gave that metric.
I'm going to paraphrase here, but one comment from a source about the power of NX was that "Dev's could port over a PS4 game easily and have power to spare. Even the most demanding ones". My own theory is any game that dips below 30fps on PS4 will likely stay at 30fps on NX and maybe have some enhanced effects.
One feature he highly touted, which improves performance greatly in games, especially graphically demanding ones such as AAA open world games is Primitive Discard Accelerator. A TechGAF member described it as
"designed to perform culling of triangles before they hit the geometry processor. Effectively, what this means is that it runs through the triangles (also known as primitives) as they hit the GPU and tests them to see if they're actually going to be visible on the screen or not (with a variety of tests), then throws out the triangles that aren't going to be on screen (i.e. discards them or culls them).
Now, this is a good thing, pretty much regardless of the type of game. Attempting to render triangles that aren't actually going to end up in the final image is a waste of GPU resources, and preventing that would be a pretty good thing. One of EA's Frostbite developers actually just gave a talk on this at GDC (PDF link, very technical), where they describe the software-based culling methods used in Frostbite. In their test scene, they could throw out over 75% of triangles before hitting the geometry engine, resulting in an almost 20% performance improvement. AMD have also recently released their own software-based culling solution, GeometryFX, which like Frostbite runs as software on the GPU's shader units. Hence, they're obviously interested in the problem of triangle culling, so it wouldn't be surprising if they developed a hardware unit to perform it more efficiently."
This was great to hear, but I asked if it was possible to get this feature set on 28nm GPU's since those are more established and cheaper than 14nm and there isn't a yield risk on those.
"Well, from a purely theoretical perspective, any "Polaris exclusive" feature could be adapted to a 28nm process. Work on Polaris had likely been going on for about a year or so when work on NX started, so it is in theory possible that they said to AMD "Hey, we like this primitive discard accelerator thing, can we have it on our planned 28nm chip?". The issue with this is that Nintendo would have had to fork over quite a lot of extra R&D dollars to get a functional block "back-ported" to 28nm, compared to components from existing GCN 1.2 chips, which were already ready to go for TSMC's 28nm process. The other issue is the assumption that the primitive discard accelerator is single functional block that can be just pulled wholesale out of Polaris. It could be an integral part of the geometry processor or command processor, or the manner in which it operates could depend on the newer geometry or command processors in Polaris. This would mean that you'd need to port the bulk of Polaris's improvements back to 28nm, or do a substantial amount of redesign work on the primitive discard accelerator to get it to work in a GCN 1.2-era chip (either of these would add substantially more R&D cost).
It's impossible to say how much it would cost them in the scheme of things, but it does seem like an unusual added expense over just taking existing GCN 1.2 tech, which would still be a generation ahead of the competition."
So with this quote, while it's not confirmed, it is highly likely Nintendo is using a 14nm Polaris GPU in the NX based off of the expensive nature of using PDA or any Polaris feature set and putting it on a 28nm chip.
If Nintendo does go with 14nm, it is very likely they will be taking a loss on each NX sold, but we don't know the dealings AMD have with Nintendo. Once source told me "AMD may have been desperate enough for the business to offer Nintendo, say, the first year's supply at a fixed price, to reduce Nintendo's yield risk. They may also have specifically pushed Nintendo into a 14nm Polaris-based chip, as it would allow Nintendo to also use a Polaris-based 14nm chip for the handheld. This would not only be a big business win for AMD in itself (Nintendo's handhelds typically sell a lot more than their home consoles), but it would also big a big PR win for them, by showing their ability to compete in the ultra-low TPD sector, which is a market they've made pretty much no traction in up until now."
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So 14nm is still likely in 2016 and Nintendo could still sell it at a reasonable price and not lose too much money or even break even.
tl;dr The NX GPU is using features that are debuting on the Polaris chip, and is therefore heavily speculated to be a Polaris chip, as that would work well in a handheld too and help AMD prove they can make low wattage chips with good performance for small devices. (GCN 1.3, Vulkan, Primitive Discard Accelerator, etc)
Nintendo is using Vulkan with NX. This goes hand in hand with using a Polaris-based GPU, and goes with the announcement of Nintendo joining Kronos. But the dev I spoke to about the GPU, who is porting a PS4 game to NX said Vulkan is not ready yet (as of the 2015 December SDK, should be an update in May) and they are using a variation of the PS4 API, GMNX, until Vulkan is ready. Nintendo providing some nice tools like GMNX to help devs port from PC, XBox and PS4 to NX.
Most dev kits won't be given until Nintendo formally reveals the NX. As my previous post indicated, Nintendo is none too happy with the leaks and is keeping things on lockdown. Outside of close partners and internal teams, most devs are using SDK's until the NX reveal. Not a big deal, but I was told specs are pretty much final as of now, and the May update will likely be for the final spec sheet and not target specs.
MercurySteam has a dev kit and is making an already announced game for the NX. The only announced game they have is Raiders of the Broken Planet, currently under development for PS4, XB1 and PC. This is likely it. (Take this one as a T0.5).
Final Fantasy XV on NX. My single source on this said he's heard more of his sources mention it's coming to NX. No idea when. I pressed for FFVIIR but nobody has heard about it. Gaf's very own mod Kagari hinted that Sony may have co-funded it and it may never get released outside of PS4 and PC (like Street Fighter V).
NX will likely launch at different times per region. Only heard this from one source but it does make sense if the NX does use 14nm chips, as there's a risk of not having enough of those chips ready on shelves for holiday 2016.
No regions were specified, but one would assume with the slow adoption of consoles in Japan, and the popularity of handhelds over there, the NX will launch in the west first like some past Nintendo consoles (consoles are more popular outside of Japan). Likely North America and Europe.
There are lots of NX games in development. Once source told me to post this so I won't edit it at all
"And you can quote me on this on GAF too: "I think NX software output is going to blow away Wii U. There's a LOT of games in development. I don't know if we'll see all of them at E3, since a lot of Wii U projects weren't announced until January 2013, but I'm very impressed so far with what I'm hearing."
New IP are being developed. I asked this because I noticed some complaints about how there were no leaks about new IP and NX was looking like another Mario/Zelda factory with a bunch of remasters and ports. The source said "I'm not allowed to give specifics, but that's a sure bet."

Queen Glitter Fairy wrote:I want it connectable between the NEW 3DS & what ever the NX is. If I'm forced to have to play with a controller that's like the game pad I'd like the ability to play the game using my NEW 3DS XL as same said controller since I can handle the 3DS XL a bit better then I can the honkingly huge gamepad. :p