Gadgetory

Nintendo disappointed in the same way they always do at their presentation at the time of filming last night which was about the Nintendo switch so strictly speaking to hardware specifications as is typical for Nintendo we really didn't get a whole lot and I can't say that's too surprising unfortunately but they announced some game titles things like that they talked about some very basic hardware specifications we've taken what was shown what we could find on their website analyzed it a bit further and hopefully have a fuller picture as to what the switch will be capable of and then we've got a pre-order coming as well for some further content before getting to that this content is brought to you by Thermaltake and their core p1 tge mini ITX chassis which will be available sometime soon in the first half of this year link the description below for more information before getting to all the notes from the press conference just some anecdotal experience with trying to get a switch the Nintendo switch we're getting one for a full analysis the plan is to do some hardware capture do framerate analysis using some advanced PC hardware see if they deliver the framerate the promising which is 60fps analyse the frame data all that stuff and probably tear into the device at a more I guess intrinsically hood just completely pull it apart and see how that goes so we'll have all that on camera probably on launch day but getting the switch is not going to be trivial so if you are dying for one of these you would you probably should have already pre-ordered one I would say as we always do wait for reviews and things like that before you actually buy anything because pre-orders are a great way to get money when you may not have wanted to actually spend it if you had full information but just to give you an idea of what it's like the I have to go to a physical location to pre-order it was not really guaranteed available online anywhere and that location had 19 available seven of which were reserved for store employees so there's not going to be a lot of these things I have a feeling we're going to be seeing the same headline as we saw with the Wii which was we sold out just for a long time until then said refreshes stock so that's certainly I don't know I guess kind of a point of concern but also probably a good thing for Nintendo because they'll look good for them to investors but let's get into the hardware notes first thing to get into probably is the main device of the dock so you the device is just a handheld we've talked about it before it pulls out of the dock you can use it effectively as about a tablet size handheld gaming device kind of like a 3ds that's bigger and that has the two controllers that it's a GOG patch everyone pretty much knows that at this point and if you don't we have previous coverage that talks about it the device uses rails to mount the two controllers the Joye con controllers to the side of the switch and then the switch can mount into a dock the way it docks is by USB type-c so this is not some proprietary special connector on the bottom of the switch it just uses a straight USB type-c I guess it probably protrudes out of the bottom or has a cover or something like that we can really see it fully and it docks down in which has I would assume a male connector USB type-c ladakh that dock I think if you buy it separately if yours is damaged or something that's selling for something like $90 which is insane but they're probably the only people who are going to make it so they can get away with it so that's what the dock does it has HDMI out it has one USB type-c port used for charging data transfer things like that it has two USB 2.0 ports on the side and on the back of the dock there is another USB port but it's not specified what generation that is it does however look like USB 3 strictly because the header is blue but they can color it blue if they wanted to not actually be USB 3 so there's no guarantee on that that is what it looks like though so that's the dock the Joye cons there is an update to those that we didn't have previously there's a new mode called HD Rumble that Nintendo today frankly horrible job explaining in the presentation they basically I will try and use a clip here and explain it we can't use too much because Nintendo is they have problems with YouTube but they basically showed a switch joique on controller next to a glass of water with ice in it and said that if you hold the controller it feels like there's an ice cube inside of it and also if there's sometimes it can feel like they're two ice cubes in it that's complete Jose HD rumble my takeaway from that is that they're saying that it sounds like there's a positional rumble where if you have a rumble effect triggered by the game it can trigger to a certain point in the controller that's my takeaway there ice cubes is a way of saying multiple rumble points my controller the water I'm not sure what that represents it looks like more weight or something but or maybe I don't know I have no idea that just behind but I think it's multiple rumble points motion sensor there's a motion sensor present similar to the Wiimote motion plus there is an NFC reader if you use amiibos capture and share button like the ps4 there's an IR motion camera on the bottom right of the joy con and that can be used for a basically input detection gesture detection from if you have hand gestures and things like that it'll pick them up I'm not sure how that'll be deployed just yet there is no d-pad and I quote our video editor and then tenda created it and then pendo can take it away so there's no d-pad they created it on the NES and it is gone on the switch SL and s our buttons are available when held sideways that may not be immediately obvious it's getting some more interesting stuff though I'm going to skip a few sections of this we'll come back to them the SOC we'll get to the storage and memory is probably the most immediately while so saying that we have the most information for Nintendo uses the phrase internal memory for their 32 gigabytes basis allowance those of you know computer hardware this is not memory like we know it's not RAM they're just saying it's internal storage so there's 32 gigabytes of storage internally it is almost certainly soldered to the board and it is probably some type of well it is definitely some type of flash memory what type of flash memory hopefully we'll we'll find out when we tear it to pieces and see if it's mlc or TLC or whatever and see if there's any concerns the next point is that this is expandable you can add SDXC cards SDXC goes up to 2 terabytes that doesn't mean that all of the systems and architectures support 2 terabytes now and as a software supports it so what they support they don't specify but I'm hoping we'll be able to internally test at least 128 maybe 256 gigabytes I am going to try to get larger SD cards on loan and see if we can validate just how large you can support if Nintendo doesn't tell us beforehand which they probably won't the game cards are separate from SD card so there are two points where the cards Mountain is the device there's a proprietary form factor SD card sort of sized cards like a cartridge that mounts on the top of the switch and then normal SD cards connect to the bottom pretty straightforward there Internet connectivity we are looking at 802 dot 11ac wireless that's a good thing I don't know what their maximum throughput is but AC wireless can theoretically do something like 1.3 gigabits per second normally but not all AC devices do that some of them are limited to something like 350 megabits per second it just depends on the device and the limitations of the i/o in the system itself but that's the plan 802 11 AC Ethernet support is available when docked but you have to use a USB to rj45 adapter similar to Wii U I'm I guess I understand why they do it it's fewer things to put on the box it is kind of annoying but you could do it if you wanted to 8 switch devices so 8 min pendo switches can be connected locally probably via ad-hoc network they do not specify if it's how the frequencies and interferences may come into play with all of those different controllers and players and switch devices I would assume it's an ad hoc wireless network though to create basically a land between the 8 devices there is a paid online service this is important so the free trial will be from March to fall of 2017 we don't know what it'll cost right now and we also don't know if you will have online internet access without their paid search I don't know if that's going to provide something extra versus just normal web browsing the screen so the screen is a 6.2 inch IPS panel it is a multi-touch capacitive screen we know these things for sure what we don't know for sure is what Eurogamer via digital foundry stated earlier or what gets last year now December which was that the screen will have ten point multi-touch that has not been confirmed by Nintendo but there's no reason not to believe it at this point in time multi-touch is there though unlike Wii U it will be a 720p screen so 1280 by 720 and that will display at 60fps it can output to 1080p so if you connect the HDMI to a TV you get a 1080p output that limitation is because of the GPU clock scaling which we'll talk about in a moment the I guess what's really is it's all there to say on the screen for the most part now we'll be intercepting the frames though to see what the FPS actually is and see if they deliver on their promises because consoles do have a long history of not doing that because it's not an easy way to validate in the console itself but we have capture cards and we have the whole thing set up and ready to go the SOC so we know that it will be a custom Tegra SOC that will be either Pascal or Maxwell signs point to Maxwell right now based entirely on digital boundaries leaks I suppose that they posted in December there's we can't validate that there's not necessarily reason to disbelieve it but they were pointing to a Tegra x1 i'll make some assumptions based on that in a moment it could still be Pascal but it does seem unlikely at this time because I'm videos not said anything other than there one very ambiguous phrase the language left left a lot of room for interpretation but their phrasing on the website said something like Nvidia's highest end GPU architecture and all of the current GeForce gaming graphics cards something like that which I interpreted to mean Pascal when this was posted but I suppose if you're loose with the interpretation you could say the 980ti is still a leading GeForce graphics card so maybe they meant Mac well genzou regardless isn't a great SOC peg right uses unified memory that there's no reason that would change with a switch the GP on the cpu share the same memory pool they have direct access to the memory bus and that is possible through the GP you can explicitly interact with the memory bus they all share the same everything it's not like if you're trying to do a unified memory with a discrete GPU through the Intel memory bus where you'd have to transact actually instead through PCIe that's not going to be a problem here assuming the Tegra x1 so big assumptions here assuming the x1 we know that it's customized that probably means lower TDP and that definitely means clock rate tuning whether there's anything else in there like core account tuning there's no there's no information right now it's either going to be 20 nanometer or 16 nanometer tsmc process xx is what the x1 uses TDP on x1 originally is 15 watts but Kali will be customized on the switch because the switch claims 2 to 6 hours of battery life depending on what you're doing with best of the wild being rated at around 3 hours and I'm not really sure that's great or not yet we'll have to see the x1 also uses lpddr4 so it's low power consumption ddr4 memory on a 64-bit memory bus Tegra x1 it uses 4 arm course they are cortex a 57 cores and those are attached to the Maxwell GPU on the x1 which is a 256 core GPU again this is based on the stock x1 so Nintendo could have changed things within videos cooperation RNA 57 DistroWatch is where it does have a 2 megabyte l2 cache adaptive scalable texture compression is also natively supported by the SOC here the x1 and then according to digital foundry the GPU will be 768 mega Hertz when docked this has been out for a little while now from there leaks and that is a reduction from 1 gigahertz on the x1 proper the one that's used in Nvidia shield device the portable clock rate is looking like according to digital foundry something like Tigers take that with a grain of salt there's that could have changed if their documents that they've acquired are accurate it doesn't mean that they were final so that could change but the idea is you lose a little over half the clock rate when you are mobile how do you do this then well the big question is developers will have to code with that in mind so if they want to program to leverage the entire clock rate when you're docked that could cause problems when your portable the way to compensate for that would generally be a lot of LOD scaling kind of murdering the graphics output in favor of of performance on a lower clock rate that's a lot of work so we'll see if the developers I actually do program for both clock rates or if they end up posting because they could do this they could push their games to run at the lower clock rate even when it's docked and you just get worse graphics as a result but it would work in all circumstances and that seems at least likely for indie developers or smaller developers where they don't have the manpower to do everything the GPU assuming these clock rates will be well under 1 teraflop of compute power well under it the base Tiger x1 for reference 1 gigahertz with FP 16 is about a teraflop of compute power of arithmetic throughput the FP 32 throughput is 1/2 I'd be 512 gigaflops so making an assumption here to calculate this you take clock rate times and we'll put this on the screen clock rate in gigahertz times two for FP 16 times 2 FM a and then times core count and that would give you the through the compute power so with these clock rates I'd be something like 786 gigaflops @p 16 or around 400 FP 32 when docked and there might be some other considerations there depending on what Nvidia has done to tweak it but that's that's certainly not the most powerful console on the market and it's I guess for some perspective it's well under any modern 100 dollar GPU now of course when you're developing vertov's holds a lot of different there's this NBN API which is a Nintendo the one Nintendo is using with NVIDIA hence NBN and that might be able to leverage well it should really be able to leverage lower-level Hardware access which would mean utilizing that power to a more full capacity whereas pcs generally don't so that is something to keep in mind battery life again two to six hours Delta lasts about three hours on one charge you can power it via USB type-c including battery banks most likely that is certainly relevant and I think we got all of this other than the game so launch titles include well relevant launch titles include Zelda breath of the wild one to switch super Bomberman are for some reason Bomberman has returned and then March you can expect fast our MX sniffer clips whatever that is has been heroes and heading into April there's Mario Kart 8 deluxe and everything else comes after that with a few titles that are not specified like minecraft so the sonic games we don't know if Skyrim is the HD version or not but that's what we're looking at right now for the switch we will have minimally a hardware teardown might look into a console review with the games that we've pre-ordered not promised but that might happen if it does certainly stay tuned and just maybe hold off on your purchases for at least one of those content pieces because that will probably help you make decisions we'll be on the lookout for lag and things like that make sure they deliver in the frame rates that are promised so check back for that subscribe for more as always links in the description below for more information patreon link the postal video thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you