With yesterday’s bombshell report announcing that the Nintendo NX would be primarily a portable console with removable controls, the internet has been quick to come up with what they believe the console could look like.
The one thing that is certain is that even though this report is pretty detailed, there’s still a lot up for interpretation. It’s absolutely impossible to know that Nintendo could be cooking up. One can only dream for something as sexy as what’s going around the internet at the moment.
We’ve included some of the best below.
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All seems super weird. Guess we have to wait and see.
The innovation for this thing could be what is really tight about it. Hard to say though, I agree.
Depends if it's packing a Tegra X2 that has an automatically reduced clockspeed when on the go, but over-clocks to hit the 8th gen console speed mark (around XB1) that could be great for a Nintendo handheld and 3rd party developers could still port their games too it, if the memory is actually better than what XB1 uses (it appears to be something of an Achilles Heel for that system's processing performance) then devs may not have that many issues, they could recompile their X86 code to run on Arm if NVidia have helped Nintendo with the development resources.
Nintendo are a part of the Khronos Vulkan group, so I can see them using a version of Vulkan to make developer's lives easy to make games for NX.
Cartridges shouldn't be a problem when it comes to their technical capabilities nowadays, because they actually provide faster read and write speeds than HDD or Bluray drives.
Cost may be a problem, but if Nintendo are buying chips in huge volume they could get good prices that don't hinder game costs much, if at all.
Cost wise it could be around $249 or $299, maybe even $199 for a base model, with the dock holding a reasonable sized HDD and some flash memory for the portable.
Tegra X1 would still be a decent step up from Wii U, allowing Zelda BOTW to run better on NX and improved memory would help there too.
Metroid, F-Zero and other Nintendo staples could still look great on this and then there's the bonus of being able to play those games on the go.
Even if Nintendo lacks 3rd party support they only have to make their games for this one platform, no dividing their attention between a handheld and a home console that gets less customers than the handheld does.
Pokemon with a big screen style experience would be awesome.
Nintendo won't need to make 2 Mario Karts or any other games they usually have to develop twice because they're supporting a handheld and a console, they can just make one and increase their output.
Maybe they'll be able to develop more new IPs because they aren't spreading their resources so thin.
Rumors previously said that NVidia were after a design win and were willing to make small margins on chips to get the business, so perhaps Nintendo got whatever chip they're using at a really good price.
Hopefully we'll learn official details about NX soon, my money's on early to mid September before the holiday marketing of games and tech starts, so that Nintendo can get their product into the minds of people for spring 2017.
You can not get the power of an Xbox ONE in a handheld. We are not even close to that. Sorry, keep dreaming. For one it will not be using the X2, that chip isnt close to market ready. Nvidea says so themselves. The NX launches in March 2017. That means production is already locked. It will at least be locked by November. For production, dev kits and what not. The X2 is no where near that. Even if it was using the X2 it still wouldnt match the Xbox ONE. Like i said, you cannot get that power in a handheld yet. Do you not understand cooling? Do you really think that you can get the clock speeds with no internal fan? Do you know how big the chip is in the Xbox ONE? Have you seen the fan that cools it? And that was even considered amazing for how small they got it. But that is even if they use the X2 which they wont. It will almost certainly be a modified X1 and we already know what performance that can do. Just look at the Nvidea Shield tablet(which is basically what the NX is going to be), It basically has the power of a Wii U. The NX will have power closer to the Wii U then the Xbox ONE. We are barely surpassing the performance level of the 7th gen in mobile processing, BARELY. And thats high end.(x1) in a large form facter. Have you seen the Nvidea shield? Its a mini console and its plays a 7th gen version of Borderlands like utter shit. And its way larger then the tablet form of the NX, which will be a small tablet, remember, it has to be handheld size. Probably not much bigger then the 3DS XL. You are living in a dream world if you think its going to be Xbox ONE level of power. I bet that the only difference between Zelda BOTW versions is, you can take the NX version of the go and MAYBE and thats a big maybe, native 1080p. All tech will be the same. Like i said, we already know what the X1 can do(Nvidea Shield) and thats in a much larger form with cooling!!!!!!!!!! I would be amazed if this thing was much more powerful then the Wii U. Mark my works.
Holy wall of text Batman
So what ? That's great.
I'm not reading a wall of text, actually use proper grammar if you're going to reply to people, it's rude to put a reply in a block post like that.
Very true; well said. Yeah, the fact that Nintendo can now have their first-party teams work on just one piece of hardware is prob the biggest plus when you think about all the common advantages of the NX's alleged "setup." Maybe they will be able to work on some new IP. We'll see how it plays. I dunno about the Tegra X2 btw.. we'll see about that too; totally possible tho.