A Speculation Exercise Over the New NX Rumours

What does it change from by previous NX article?

Well, there are “new rumours” about the NX but for the most part, there is nothing really new, I mean, we’ve heard everything by now, what can really be new?

The only thing going for these “new rumours” is that more media and publications are backing it up, giving more specifics about the hardware rather than just Emily-who and some Reddit and Neogaf users. But it’s funny how people are still panicking over it, just like they did when similar rumours surfaced last year.

Panickers gonna panic, haters gonna hate, the Internet is going to rush into conclusion by overreacting to everything. But that’s the Internet.

I just don’t understand the panicking, I really don’t. How many times have I read “I’m done with Nintendo” and unsurprisingly the same people are still there, repeating it months afterwards, still digging into NX rumours. But that’s how panickers are — or maybe just people in general nowadays.

They lower their expectation by playing the worst case scenario and all because they are not mature enough to deal with any possible disappointment. They get themselves in this denial bubble driven by disdain — because deep down, no matter what they say, that they had enough, that they lost hope, that they are done, they secretly want it to be right — just so if everything goes wrong, at least they can lie to themselves by saying they knew it.

But let’s move on and for the sake of the speculation exercise, let’s assume that most of it is true then.

The Old New Rumours of a Hybrid Console

So the NX is handheld with hybrid capabilities, possibly through a dock and it has an ARM based Tegra chip in it. Within that it’s either the one year old Tegra X1 or the not yet announced Tegra X2.

The Tegra X1 will be more than 2 years old by the time the NX is launched but as reports continue to say “industry leading chips”, the possibility of a Tegra X2 instead makes sense too.

Nvidia recently announced that they are going to focus their Tegra chips not in gaming but in the automobile and autonomous industry. The Tegra X1, when announced back in 2015, if I’m not mistaken, it was the first mobile chip to get over the 1 Teraflop barrier and if you think that the Xbox One has about 1.3 Teraflop, it’s pretty close.

Right there it would be enough to not panic. A handheld video game that can match a home console doesn’t sound bad at all.

I doubt Nintendo will put a 1080p display in their handheld, I think that 720p is very reasonable but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 540p, it all depends on the cost, screen size, pixel density, the quality of the display and so on and so forth.

A custom Tegra X1 can power some 1080p games at 60fps, so I can assume that 720p at 60fps is an easy task. This is plenty for a handheld experience, so you can basically port all Xbox One and Playstation 4 games to this handheld NX.

Let’s remember that a handheld needs a battery and that the bigger the screen and the higher the resolution, the more power it needs. Although the delusional people will want everything at the max, the reality is a bit different and there will be some compromise.

The size of the screen, the capacity and weight of the battery, how that adds to the total weight, everything needs to be considered when making a video game that will be played in your hands. Too much power not only drains the battery in an instant but it also brings overheating issues.

So the same way the PSVita was basically an underclocked iPad 3, the NX might feat an underclocked Tegra chip to deal with both power consumption and overheating issues.

There are several combinations to make it work. The Dock can feat another Tegra X1, the handheld and feat a Tegra X1 while the Dock has a Tegra X2, or they both can have a Tegra X2, it’s hard to know.

What would the NX be as a hybrid?

Under this Nvidia Tegra speculation, for me there are three likely scenarios:

1. The handheld will have a Tegra X1 and so will the Dock, maybe an overclocked version for the Dock since it can have a much better cooling system and no worries about power consumption.

The positive about this is that the Nvidia Shield that has a Tegra X1 chip costs $199, but it has no screen and it’s not mobile anymore, so it doesn’t have a battery either. But giving it’s $199, that’s a nice price for Nintendo to work around, even more considering that the NX will come 2 years later. So the Dock + controller can cost between $149 and $199 and the handheld can float around $199 and $249.

2. The handheld will have a low-power setup of the Tegra X2 just enough for a smooth 720p experience. The Dock will provide some more power ups like extra memory, more storage, some extra feats and of course, enough power and cooling system to allow the Tegra X2 to use its full potential.

The advantage of this is that you only need a single chip to power the whole system, the disadvantage might be the cost. Having a full Tegra X2 but without using its full potential sounds like a waste in some ways.

Tegra X2 would be coming 2 years after the Tegra X1, in theory, as its successor, the X2 should cost around the same as the X1, but giving how Nvidia is doing with their new GPU, the Tegra X2 will probably cost a bit more, stretching the possible NX Handheld unit’s price a bit higher.

The problem with that is that although the price will be pretty much in line with what other consoles offer, consumers are not used to an expensive handheld and the market didn’t handle the PSVita’s pricing very well. I know that the situation is quite different but I’m not sure Nintendo would be willing to take that route.

On the other hand, the Dock would be less expensive, becoming much closer to the $99 to $149 range. The combo could still cost around the same as the first option I presented.

There are two rumours that address this though. There is an old rumour that said that Nvidia was trying to get a console design win and that they were possibly selling it to Nintendo for cheap and a recent rumour and speculation said that the NX might be cheaper than people are expecting.

So if Nintendo manages to squeeze the Tegra X2 and ask for $200 or less, that would work pretty well, but that does seem a bit unrealistic, I don’t know.

3. The handheld will have a Tegra X2 with the minimum specs to run 720p games. So instead of a low-power setup, it will actually have less CPU and GPU cores and memory to save costs and not be an overkill for 720p games. The Dock could have a similar Tegra X2 and together they could act like a full Tegra X2 setup.

This seems like a long shot, mainly because I don’t even know if this is possible. Having a chip with less cores and slightly different insides could actually end up costing more since it’s not the standard manufacturing process of the rest of the chips. But at the same time, giving that Nintendo will need quite a lot of chips, Nvidia would possibly need a separate manufacturing plant anyways.

Following the rumour of Nvidia doing everything to get a design win, possibly even taking a loss on the deal, maybe that’s enough leverage to get that to work for Nintendo. If Nintendo doesn’t manage to get the low-power Tegra X2 setup, this third option is certainly the most appealing. The Tegra X2 offers a lot of advantages over an older Tegra X1 chip, be it in its smaller 16nm architecture or integration with Pascal GPU.

With a possible Home Console with a full Tegra X2 chip, I think it would work well for the NX as a system composed of a Handheld, a Dock and a Home Console, all running — in some way — a Tegra X2 chip.

Early rumours point out to the Tegra X1 but there is a 4th option involving the Tegra X1, so it could be a Tegra X1 but with Pascal GPU integration but certainly at least an updated Maxwell GPU, it would be like a middle ground and best cost-benefit option between the Tegra X1 (used in the Nvidia Shield in 2015) and Tegra X2.

We are still in the rumours realm, so who knows?

Will there be a Home Console NX then?

A part of me wonders if there is really a need for a home console but I think there are people that would prefer it though. Expecting the home console to be between $299 and $399 seems very reasonable as well as it’s a competitive price. Costing around $100 less than the handheld + dock combo, it might be well worth for some.

By the numbers of the Nvidia Drive PX, a single Tegra X2 could achieve around 4 Teraflops when paired with a Pascal GPU unit but this is the Tegra X2 at its full power. So a more conservative 2 to 3 Teraflops seems more likely and that would be plenty for a home console to run all Xbox One, PS4 games and beyond at a stable 1080p 60fps.

Another possibility would be the Home Console having the dual Tegra X1 inside and 2.3 Teraflops is still more than the PS4's 1.8 Teraflops and plenty extra so the NX would have the best graphics of the three.

But it feels much less likely to me, I just don’t know if having two chips is very energy efficient or even if it’s costly effective, but since Nvidia is already going to do that dual Tegra X1 platform, it might be possible.

Nvidia hasn’t announced anything related to a semi custom design win, but I don’t think that’s an actual evidence as for counting Nvidia out of the race, it would be too suspicious if Nvidia was to announce that out of nowhere.

They could be just waiting the actual NX announcement to reveal it, they could be even waiting the Tegra X2 announcement if that’s the case. Rumours were saying that the NX manufacturing wouldn’t start until 4Q of 2016, so maybe Nvidia could even be waiting for that too, who knows? Anyway, I wouldn’t read too much into that for now.

For the sake of the exercise I wrote it assuming that the NX has an Nvidia Tegra — as in a previous article, I already wrote assuming that the NX has an AMD Polaris based — , but these are still just rumours, there is no evidence that it’s Nvidia, AMD, even both or neither.

September is near…

A month or two from now the Nintendo NX should be revealed and all of this fun speculation will end. Regardless if it’s a hybrid or not, if the first is just a home console or just a handheld, if it’s Nvidia or AMD, there are a few things we can take away from all of this.

There are too many rumours talking about a handheld, so even if it’s not a hybrid I still think that closing the gap between the handheld and home console will be a big part of Nintendo’s console strategy.

Add to that my speculation over the use of cartridges, I think it still makes a lot of sense. The ability to play the same game and cartridge at home or on the go is indeed a game changer.

Having the handheld and the dock might help Nintendo in the future if they decide to support VR since they could use the same principle and even the same chip, saving a lot of money.

The worst case scenario now for the Nintendo NX is that it will just be a Tegra X1 Handheld that allows you to play on your TV as well, without ever matching Xbox One or PS4 performance.

But giving everything that has been said by Nintendo itself or even the rumours, that seems very unlikely and if it was just that, developers wouldn’t be publicly showing excitement about the NX like they are doing since the E3.

In the end, whether if it’s x86 or ARM, Polaris or Tegra, none of that really matters. The outline so far is that Nintendo will deliver the power, so I’m not worried about that. There are some interesting things that I haven’t seen people talking about so I should write about it soon — I’m calling it “Nintendo’s Disney Project” for now. People need to get a bit away from this spec-driven geekness and see the big picture Nintendo is painting.

So far I stand by most of the things I speculated and I wonder if we will get to know what the NX actually is before Nintendo reveals it or if it will be kept a secret until the announcement. People are so anxious for NX info that I don’t doubt that someone might actually do something crazy to get the info.