Hardware Possible 4K Switch dock addon. Your thoughts about this?

Deleted User · Dec 11, 2017

PewnyPL said:
I'm surprised nobody pointed one huge design flaw with the Switch that would make it very hard to achieve 4k. Storage.
Compare size of XBO and PS4 games to size of Switch games, especially for the 'enhanced' PS4 PRO and XBO X games that are made with 4k in mind. Those textures themselves take TENS of gigabytes. That means that a physical copy of the game would be unable to have those textures, it would be necessary to download them from Nintendo's servers. Have fun downloading a 30GB texture pack for example. Not to mention that in such a case the dock would HAVE TO have built in storage, because the 32GB of the Switch itself, or even the SD cards would simply be not enough to handle those. And with that would come a huge problem, such dock would basically rob Switch of it's main gimmick, taking the console out to play on the go, as during a 4k game like this it would be depending on the external memory that would be disconnected the moment you take the Switch out.

With my 256 gb card I see no problem. A friend of mine has 512 gb sd card.. that shouldnt be a problem for someone who just plays one game at a time

nmkd · Dec 11, 2017

Guys, it's technically not even possible.

The Tegra X1 has no kind of support for external GPUs.

It would be possible for a future handheld, but the current Switch simply can't use an eGPU.

Deleted User · Dec 11, 2017

the_randomizer said:
4K will only simply enable graphics fanboys obsessed with 4K resolution to get their jollies. I don't see the point.

It may be useful when/if we could play videos on the switch. Even then- not really...

mgrev · Dec 11, 2017

Shadowehh said:
Well, Nintendo did make "add-ons" to basically every single console they made back then and I can't see why they wouldn't do something crazy like this especially when consoles about $600 for 4K is very cheap compared to PCs right now. I mean have you seen the boom in XBONEX's lately? They literally sold out on pre-orders. I really want to see how the community reacts as of this right now.

I don't think that a 600$ addon for 4k support is "Cheap"
And no, i don't think this will ever happen.
EDIT: And yes, i have an rx 580 in my desktop, which would be on-par, or better than a 1060, and i still play at 1080p 144hz, because i prefer framerates, and for a 24" screen, i don't have any real use with a higher resolution, at least not for games. Each to their own i guess

SG854 · Dec 11, 2017

mgrev said:
I don't think that a 600$ addon for 4k support is "Cheap"
And no, i don't think this will ever happen.

That'll be $900 including Switch. Not cheap.

mgrev · Dec 11, 2017

natanelho said:
With my 256 gb card I see no problem. A friend of mine has 512 gb sd card.. that shouldnt be a problem for someone who just plays one game at a time

The issue would be the speed of the SD-card, and the gigabyte to dollar ratio, compared to something like a 7200rpm drive

Deleted User · Dec 11, 2017

mgrev said:
The issue would be the speed of the SD-card, and the gigabyte to dollar ratio, compared to something like a 7200rpm drive

yeah that's true... but as we see the storage is the least of our 4k problems

the_randomizer · Dec 11, 2017

natanelho said:
It may be useful when/if we could play videos on the switch. Even then- not really...

I don't see the point personally

Bedel · Dec 11, 2017

nmkd said:
Guys, it's technically not even possible.

The Tegra X1 has no kind of support for external GPUs.

It would be possible for a future handheld, but the current Switch simply can't use an eGPU.

But the TX1 is not the CPU, the A57 is, so the problem shouldn't be there, am I that wrong about it?

Biduleman · Dec 11, 2017

Bedel said:
But the TX1 is not the CPU, the A57 is, so the problem shouldn't be there, am I that wrong about it?

The Tegra X1 is the full package. 4x A57 as the CPU, proprietary GPU by NVIDIA.

A new dock could enable the 4k output for streaming video (the chip has a dedicated decoder for 4k H.265 @60fps, 4k VP9 @60fps, 4k H.264[not sure about fps, probably 60 too]).

But forget about 4k games, the processing power is not there and like others have said before, I'm pretty sure the chip doesn't support externals GPUs.

Edgy_Edge · Dec 11, 2017

Yes baby, finally!

Shadd · Dec 12, 2017

Most people think that the Switch cannot sell for $600 for 4k. In fact, a GTX 1060 GPU is around $300 with 8GB of ram. Nintendo's solution for issues with it not enough bandwidth, pricing, etc. is not our problem and will very likely sell for $300 either way. I'm not asking if it would work with the Switch. All I'm asking is if this "addon" will contribute (aka benefit) to the Nintendo Switch's community (such as attracting more people) and if you think it should come for some personal or other reasons.

Futurdreamz · Dec 12, 2017

:shrug:

It might be good enough for the graphics whores who admit to liking the portability aspect.

Shadd · Dec 12, 2017

Futurdreamz said:
:shrug:

It might be good enough for the graphics whores who admit to liking the portability aspect.

True.

Shadd · Dec 12, 2017

PewnyPL said:
I'm surprised nobody pointed one huge design flaw with the Switch that would make it very hard to achieve 4k. Storage.
Compare size of XBO and PS4 games to size of Switch games, especially for the 'enhanced' PS4 PRO and XBO X games that are made with 4k in mind. Those textures themselves take TENS of gigabytes. That means that a physical copy of the game would be unable to have those textures, it would be necessary to download them from Nintendo's servers. Have fun downloading a 30GB texture pack for example. Not to mention that in such a case the dock would HAVE TO have built in storage, because the 32GB of the Switch itself, or even the SD cards would simply be not enough to handle those. And with that would come a huge problem, such dock would basically rob Switch of it's main gimmick, taking the console out to play on the go, as during a 4k game like this it would be depending on the external memory that would be disconnected the moment you take the Switch out.

Actually, textures don't take much storage, but games require larger space the more textures they have (it's almost the same as the game's code). Also, most graphics cards can't really hold many textures in at once and it isn't because there isn't enough storage in it. Graphics cards have "texture units" in which means that they can only hold a limited amount of textures. Most of the visible textures use the exact same textures in order to compensate for the somewhat low amount of available textures that can be held. For example, since the GTX 1060 is predicted to be the external graphics card, it can only hold 80 textures at once, again not because of the size of the textures, but because of how much it can hold at once. 4K textures don't take a lot of space, just more.

DiscostewSM said:
Personally, 4K Switch gaming is not going to happen. Not any time soon anyways. Too many restrictions to the base hardware to prevent that. As it is, the current dock only supports 4K @ 30fps (v1.4b HDMI), so any sort of addon like what was diagrammed would be limited to that. Even if that were the target, you're not going to fit a 4K-capable GPU in that small section of the dock. A stand-alone 4K home console may not even be possible either, simply because of system design unless they did a redesign that basically made it become a new system that accepts Switch games, much like the PS4 Pro or XB1X. But that would cut out the "Switch" aspect of the system, which is really what's driving system popularity right now. Even with all this, if we were talking about true 4K and not simply running the games at a higher resolution, then it would also need textures to match, which will probably not go over too well with devs. Plus that would mean downloading the data to some external storage, and then having the games actually operate using them, which could affect load times from having initially been using flash storage (that has negligible random access time delays compared to HDDs).

The most we could hope for is a dock that will allow full 1080p @ 60fps for pretty much all games. Maybe 1440p upscaled to 4K, but that may be pushing it. But even with that, that's only possible if the Switch were designed to allow a connection of external GPUs, and whether it could allow the ease of "switching". Obtaining 60fps may be an issue because that may be bottlenecked by the CPU, which runs at 1Ghz. If the CPU in the Switch could be bumped higher while the GPU could be dormant (offsetting the heat and power requirements), then perhaps it's possible. The ease of switching I was referring to is with regard to utilizing the external GPU followed by undocking, or being portable and then docking it. The utilization of an external GPU is going to have its own vRAM, so game assets will need to be uploaded at appropriate times. If going from undocked to docked, how exactly would it know what needs to be uploaded to the external GPU? What about the other way? My thoughts are the following.

- In all instances, the game loads the appropriate assets into Switch's RAM to allow being able to undock.
- When docking, the entirety of Switch's 4GB of RAM is duplicated through the USB-C connection to the external GPU's RAM at a theoretical 10Gbps minimum (1.25GB/s), assuming it is USB 3.1 gen2. Then a slice of time to set things up to enable the dock's GPU, so you'll probably be looking at 4-6 seconds of waiting for it to sync. Maybe 1-2 seconds tops when undocking, because all the data will already be on Switch's RAM, but reinitializing the Switch GPU might need some time.
- When loading data from internal storage, cart or microSD while docked, data is first loaded into Switch RAM, then shot through USB-C to the external GPU RAM. Dunno if this would affect real-time performance.

Nintendo can do things such as pausing the game when undocked saying to "please reinsert the Switch back into the dock or Switch to lower graphics" and this might compensate as well to it. Also, if you ever heard of an external GPU (mostly used on laptops), you can probably see how this would work. It even does a great job at having a high and steady FPS (depending on the computer). I think they used USB 3.0 if I'm not mistaken, but they probably have evolved to using USB 3.1 (especially for the switch).

DiscostewSM · Dec 12, 2017

Shadowehh said:
Actually, textures don't take much storage, but games require larger space the more textures they have (it's almost the same as the game's code). Also, most graphics cards can't really hold many textures in at once and it isn't because there isn't enough storage in it. Graphics cards have "texture units" in which means that they can only hold a limited amount of textures. Most of the visible textures use the exact same textures in order to compensate for the somewhat low amount of available textures that can be held. For example, since the GTX 1060 is predicted to be the external graphics card, it can only hold 80 textures at once, again not because of the size of the textures, but because of how much it can hold at once. 4K textures don't take a lot of space, just more.

That's not how it works at all. Having 80 TMUs (texture mapping unit) doesn't mean a GPU can only hold 80 textures. It means it can access up to 80 textures at the same time. A GPU's RAM can hold a lot more and of many different sizes, limited only by available space.

Shadd · Dec 12, 2017

DiscostewSM said:
That's not how it works at all. Having 80 TMUs (texture mapping unit) doesn't mean a GPU can only hold 80 textures. It means it can access up to 80 textures at the same time. A GPU's RAM can hold a lot more and of many different sizes, limited only by available space.

My point only was that the textures weren't a huge deal.

DiscostewSM · Dec 12, 2017

Shadowehh said:
My point only was that the textures weren't a huge deal.

Don't be so sure. A single texture may not seem to take up a lot of space, but having a lot of textures readily available can add up quickly. A 4K texture, or more specifically 4K x 4K x 32bit texture takes up 67MB, and that wouldn't even be the largest size texture for a 4K game, since texture size is independent from display resolution. Even a game like Fast Racing Neo on the Wii U, with only 1GB of RAM available for games, utilizes 4K textures.

Shadd · Dec 12, 2017

DiscostewSM said:
Don't be so sure. A single texture may not seem to take up a lot of space, but having a lot of textures readily available can add up quickly. A 4K texture, or more specifically 4K x 4K x 32bit texture takes up 67MB, and that wouldn't even be the largest size texture for a 4K game, since texture size is independent from display resolution. Even a game like Fast Racing Neo on the Wii U, with only 1GB of RAM available for games, utilizes 4K textures.

That's exactly where I was going. 4K textures on just 1GB of RAM. Not a lot compared to 8GB predicted. Also, it depends on the file type on how it creates that 4k file by either making it better or removing unnecessary things to conserve space.

Futurdreamz · Dec 12, 2017

Shadowehh said:
That's exactly where I was going. 4K textures on just 1GB of RAM. Not a lot compared to 8GB predicted. Also, it depends on the file type on how it creates that 4k file by either making it better or removing unnecessary things to conserve space.

It also depends on the game. Forza 7, for example, requires a 100GB download for 4K upgrade.

Hardware Possible 4K Switch dock addon. Your thoughts about this?

Should this "addon" come to the Nintendo Switch and will it benefit from it?

Yes, this should come to the Switch and will benefit from this.

Yes, this should come to the Switch but might not benefit from it.

No, this should not come to the Switch but it might benefit from it.

No, this should not come to the Switch and will not benefit from it.

Honestly I don't know, why are there so many questions here?

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