Gadgetory

- [Male Host] Today's video is sponsored by RAID: Shadow Legends. While there are plenty of rumors going around right now regarding a new Switch system coming out sometime late this year or maybe even sometime next year, that hasn't stopped Nintendo from actively improving the current Switch. Now there's been a lot of news traveling around the idea of a Switch Boost Mode which is a slightly misleading term, but it does get the idea across of what exactly is happening with the Switch. Now what a lot of people think about the idea of Boost Mode, they think of the PS4 Pro's Boost Mode where it takes the added power of a PS4 Pro and uses it to improve games in ways beyond of just simply increasing the resolution. For instance, maybe giving you a smoother or better frame rate. Or adding some visual affects the game didn't originally have. When it comes to using the Switch in handheld mode, the system is basically handicapping itself. It's still capable of doing the same resolution of frame rate and everything that we see in docked mode, except if it did that on the screen, well first off it wouldn't be necessary 'cause the screen can't do that high of a resolution. But on top of that, it would drain the battery system significantly faster. Not to mention getting really warm in your hands. So something that Nintendo and different developers have begun supporting is the idea of overclocking the system specifically when it is loading up games. And this is evident in titles like: Legend of Zelda, and Mario Odyssey, after some recent updates. As well as in more recent intensive titles like, Mortal Kombat 11. Basically all it's doing is leveraging the power the switch already has and overclocking it just during low times of games to ensure that those low times happen much faster than normal. And because it's only doing it for those very brief periods, it doesn't really impact the battery at all. So as a result, you're seeing what is basically improved performance in handheld mode without actually impacting it in any kind of major negative way. This is honestly a genius idea and has done a great job of improving the handheld experience of the system. And this is something that generally happens over the lifetime of different systems, where developers over time learn how to better make use of what's on it, to give us a better resulting experience. And thinking about how Nintendo's been leveraging the power of the system two years into it's life cycle it makes me wonder, what if we're thinking about the idea of a new Switch product wrong. What if we are getting maybe a Switch mini, but what if Switch Pro isn't exactly what we think it is? Before moving on, I want to take a second to thank RAID: Shadow Legends for sponsoring today's video. RAID: Shadow Legends just came out and is one of the most ambitious RPG products of 2019. And best of all, it's completely free. RAID has all the features you'd expect from a new RPG. An amazing storyline, awesome 3D graphics, giant boss fights, PvP battles, and hundreds of champions to collect and customize. And to top it off, it is an incredibly gorgeous mobile game. Just look at the awesome detail on these champions. RAID's special launch tournament is happening right now and it is growing super fast, so check out the link in my description. Download RAID only through my link to get 50,000 silver immediately. You'll get automatically entered into their special launch tournament where you'll be competing against me and other players for crazy in game prizes, and physical prize packs. Good luck and I'll see you there. Now when you're talking about having incremental upgrades to a system generation, a lot of times lately people will think in terms of the point five systems that we've had recently, like the PS4 Pro, or the Xbox OneX. Or even with Nintendo and the new 3DS. Now what's interesting about these examples is that they act as brand new models that act as just kind of upgrades to what we already have working. In the PS4 Pro and Xbox OneX's case, there's not any kind of unique games or anything that's blocked off just for them. It's just that, oh, if you want 4K support, or just having a better frame rate or visual effects in some select games, that's what it's gonna offer you. The new 3DS is an interesting counterpoint to that though where that's a system that was a new model that has specific games that won't only work on it, and even some games that while not advertised to be unique to the new 3DS, run so terribly on the original one that you just shouldn't even bother. So this is the concept that people have in mind when they talk about having upgrades to modern generations before going on to a whole new cycle of systems. But if you go further back in gaming history, there actually are examples of consoles that had incremental upgrades in the form of add-ons. Where instead of having to buy a whole new model, you just bought something that upgraded your current system. At least in some very specific way. Specifically for Nintendo, a key example would be the N64 Expansion Pak. So there was a pack you could buy separately for your N64 that came bundled with some games that went in this slot right here, that effectively doubled the RAM of the system; going from four megabytes to eight. And this was necessary to play a handful of games, kind of like with the new 3DS. But also offered a number of upgrades for pre-existing games. Similar to the PS4 Pro and the Xbox OneX, this is things like improving the resolution of some games, offering improved textures that you wouldn't have otherwise. Or even doubling the frame rate in a couple specific cases. And again, there were some games that just outright required it to work in the first place. Specifically, Donkey Kong 64, Legends of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and Perfect Dark. Though Perfect Dark did offer a side mode you could play if you didn't have the expansion pack. Of course there are also examples to look back on that didn't end very well. And one very good example of this is Nintendo's key competitor back in the day, Sega, with the 32X. ♪ All right ♪ ♪ Baby ♪ - This was an attachment that went onto the top of the Sega Gen System and offered a more powerful solution, making it a 32 bit system. And could play very specific games that were designed for it. It just didn't go very well. Now part of this has to do with marketing and timing. The entire idea behind the 32X was, hey, if you can't afford to buy a brand new Sega Saturn which is coming out really soon, well we have a cool midpoint where if you a Genesis-- ♪ Sega Mega Drive ♪ ♪ (Japanese) ♪ ♪ (Japanese) CPU ♪ ♪ (Japanese) ♪ - You can buy this to do this kind of mid-step. And people didn't really react well to that. While it was cheaper than buying a whole new system, the amount of money you're paying to close the gap was still quite a bit and none of the games that were released alongside it were very strong arguments for why you needed to buy the upgrade. Causing 32X to go the same way as it's other attempted attachment, the Sega CD. Where again, cool idea, it just didn't work out. So what does this have to do with the Switch and having a Boost Mode? Well, the reason I bring it up is because I think it gives a good past example of how systems can approach a more modular version of approving their performance. And when it comes to the Switch, well there's something we haven't really talked about a lot. And that's the idea of a pro dock. See, a lot of people have talked about a Switch Pro, where we're gonna get a new system down the line that has a bigger screen or better resolution. More power, whatever. And that is a distinct possibility still. But something that came up before we even knew when the Switch was called, the Switch, was the idea of it hooking up to an external GPU. Way back when the Switch wasn't officially unveiled yet and we still knew it just as simply, Project NX, there were a lot of wild theories and speculations about what exactly that system was going to be. And a lot of those theories were based on patents that Nintendo had filed shortly before it's official reveal. Looking back on those patents, there are a lot of them that you can see clearly played a role in what the Switch is, and there were others that ended up not happening. And among the ones that didn't really play a role that's really interesting and plays into what we're talking about right now, is the idea of the Switch having a secondary computational device. Now a lot of these early patents, the picture was, hey, we have a mean game console, there's a secondary device it plugs into, and that plugs into your TV to create a thing. So that kind of creates the basis of what we thought the dock was gonna be. So much so, that when the Switch actually came out we were surprised to find that the dock basically doesn't do anything. So this brings up back to the idea of, well what if that's what the new Switch product is? What if we're not getting a brand new Switch model that adds power to the main system itself, but instead we get a new dock that actually acts as an external GPU for the system? Now with this idea in mind, there are certainly some limiting factors to what it could and could not do. Because while it is possible they're making a system that adds more power to the Switch, it would likely be more something along the lines of a PS4 Pro or an Xbox OneX situation, where it's not opening a whole new array of games. It's not a new generation. It's merely a bump up in power for the system to be able to achieve graphical intensity that it previously couldn't have. Adding things like 4K gameplay and maybe even stabilizing or adding a little more frame rate to select games. So pushing that idea of it being a full generational gap aside, the idea of a dock acting as a point five system instead of being a whole new model of Switch, actually makes a lot of sense. Because it's making it a way so that people who currently own a Switch can buy this upgrade that's gonna give them that better TV situation. Where you're gonna get the 4K resolution, or whatever kind of performance increase it's going to add, while maintaining the same handheld mode allowing you to have the same games across the regular Switch library. Or, for people who own a Switch and this new Switch Pro dock. Again, this is all very theoretical and based on patents that Nintendo has yet to make use of. But going with the narrative of what we're seeing right now with Nintendo it actually kind of makes a lot of sense. There's been a ton of rumors about them working on something new. Something that's Switch related and more powerful. And while we do seem to have some degree of confirmation that there might be a Switch mini on the way, Nintendo has been very adamant about the idea of, we're not releasing a Switch 2.0, we're not working on a new Switch right now. We're just focusing on what we have. And that's basically true if what they're working on instead is a dock. 'Cause they're not releasing a new Switch, they're releasing a way to make your current Switch even better. Is this for sure what I think they're going to do? No. I think this is a really neat idea and something that I've honestly been theorizing ever since the Switch first came out. I always thought the idea of having a dock that actually supplies external power would be really cool and a great way to leverage the balance between having a handheld system and one that you can use on a TV. But again, it's just theories. There's a whole lot Nintendo could be working on. They've been keeping everything very close to the chest and so we're just gonna have to wait and see right now. We've got E3 coming up and it sounds like they probably won't actually announce anything. But they could always surprise us. Only time will tell.