Comment by bangaladore

The other problem is Intel's graphics drivers for 3d gaming are a distant 3rd place. Games just haven't historically targeted their GPUs. We've had like 2 decades of games that for the most part have tested compatibility with Nvidia and AMD.

Those even were on the desktop, for a very short while, with the broadwell processor i5-5675C and i7-5775C.They were stronger than the FM2+-Apus AMD had released earlier, that Intel otherwise could not beat for years, just weaker than the following Ryzen Apus.

Ofc gone in the next generation. But those widely available might have changed things.

And that's telling, isn't it? Even in this space, Intel's iGPUs are totally ignored or dismissed out of hand. I say it's because they have an unending string of broken promises, saying "This'll be the time we get integrated graphics right", over and over. It's never been true, and I for one have totally wiped them from my vision due to that.

I think changing from AMD GPUs to Nvidia GPUs by itself has a good chance of breaking backwards compatibility with how low level and custom Sony's GPU API apparently is, so the CPU core architecture would just be a secondary concern.

I was not saying Sony should switch to Nvidia, just pointing out that it is objectively incorrect to say that AMD is the only option for consoles when the most popular console today does not rely on AMD.

I also fully believe Intel could scale up an integrated Battlemage to meet Sony's needs, but is it worth the break in compatibility? Is it worth the added risk when Intel's 13th and 14th gen CPUs have had such publicly documented stability issues? I believe the answer to both questions is "probably not."

Emulating x86 would be an option - though given Sony's history, I doubt they'd consider it seriously.

For context...

- PS1 BC on PS2 was mostly hardware but they (AFAIK?) had to write some code to translate PS1 GPU commands to the PS2 GS. That's why you could forcibly enable bilinear filtering on PS1 games. Later on they got rid of the PS1 CPU / "IO processor" and replaced it with a PPC chip ("Deckard") running a MIPS emulator.

- PS1 BC on PS3 was entirely software; though the Deckard PS2s make this not entirely unprecedented. Sony had already written POPS for PS1 downloads on PS2 BBN[0] and PSP's PS1 Classics, so they knew how to emulate a PS1.

- PS2 BC on PS3 was a nightmare. Originally it was all hardware[1], but then they dropped the EE+GS combo chip and went to GPU emulation, then they dropped the PS2 CPU entirely and all backwards compatibility with it. Then they actually wrote a PS2 emulator anyway, which is part of the firmware, but only allowed to be used with PS2 Classics and not as BC. I guess they consider the purchase price of the games on the shop to also pay for the emulator?

- No BC was attempted on PS4 at all, AFAIK. PS3 is a weird basketcase of an architecture, but even PS1 or PS2 aren't BC supported.

At some point Sony gave up on software emulation and decided it's only worth it for retro re-releases where they can carefully control what games run on the emulator and, more importantly, charge you for each re-release. At least the PS4 versions will still play on a PS5... and PS6... right?

[0] A Japan-only PS2 application that served as a replacement for the built-in OSD and let you connect to and download software demos, game trailers, and so on. Also has an e-mail client.

[1] Or at least as "all hardware" as the Deckard PS2s are

> Nvidia has graphics chips, but it doesn't have the CPUs. Yes, Nvidia can make ARM CPUs, but they haven't been putting out amazing custom cores.

Ignorant question - do they have to? The last time I was up on gaming hardware it seemed as though most workloads were GPU-bound and that having a higher-end GPU was more important than having a blazing fast CPU. GPUs have also grown much more flexible rendering pipelines as game engines have gotten much more sophisticated and, presumably, parallelized. Would it not make sense for Nvidia to crank out a cost-optimized design comprising their last-gen GPU architecture with 12 ARM cores on an affordable node size?

The reason I ask is because I've been reading a lot about 90s console architectures recently. My understanding is that back then the CPU and specialized co-processors had to do a lot of heavy lifting on geometry calculations before telling the display hardware what to draw. In contrast I think most contemporary GPU designs take care of all of the vertex calculations themselves and therefore free the CPU up a lot in this regard. If you have an entity-based game engine and are able to split that object graph into well-defined clusters you can probably parallelize the simulation and scale horizontally decently well. Given these trends I'd think a bunch of cheaper cores could work as well for cheaper than higher-end ones.

Nvidia has very little desire to make a high-end razor thin margin chip that consoles traditionally demand. This is what Jensen has said, and it makes sense when there are other areas that the silicon can be directed to with much greater profit.

>The problem with choosing Nvidia is that they can't make an x86 processor with an integrated GPU

Can't and not being allowed are two very different things

We already have a good sense of what SoC Nintendo will likely be going with for the Switch 2.

Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about.

The Switch 1 used a crappy mobile chip, sure, but it was able to run tons of games that no other Tegra device could have dreamed of running, due to the power of having a stable target for optimization, with sufficiently powerful APIs available, and a huge target market. The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can, while using a fraction of the power, thickness, and cooling. With the Switch 2 almost certainly gaining DLSS, I fully expect the Switch 2 to run circles around the Steam Deck, even without a “high end chip”. It will be weaker on paper, but that won’t matter.

I say this as someone who owns a PS5, a Switch OLED, an ROG Ally, and a fairly decent gaming PC. I briefly had an original Steam Deck, but the screen was atrocious.

Most people I see talking about Steam Deck’s awesomeness seem to either have very little experience with a Switch, or just have a lot of disdain for Nintendo. Yes, having access to Steam games is cool… but hauling around a massive device with short battery life is not cool to most gamers, and neither is spending forever tweaking settings just to get something that’s marginally better than the Switch 1 can do out of the box.

The Switch 1 is at the end of its life right now, but Nintendo is certainly preparing the hardware for the next 6 to 8 years.