MudMan

I’m confused. The article you linked seems to very clearly agree with me:

In terms of performance, the Switch 2 is clearly more powerful than the Steam Deck before we even start talking about cooperation with NVIDIA, DLSS upscaling, and tighter game optimizations possible when developing for a fixed console hardware platform.

I mean, yeah, that tracks and is verifiable. It’s a more power hungry APU (although admittedly on a larger node), it has more cores on both the CPU and GPU side, a higher resolution and framerate screen. Storage seems to fall somewhere between the cheaper and more expensive Deck models and, while it has less memory it’s also… you know, a console, so there’s presumably less overhead and the RAM itself is a bit faster, which is very relevant to APUs. The Switch 2 is built on Ampere, while the Deck is on RDNA 2. Both launched in 2020, but I think it’s not controversial to say that Nvidia had the edge on both features and performance for that gen.

It is absolutely true that Nintendo traditionally latched on to older, less performant components paired with hardware investment elsewhere, but the Switch was a huge outlier there. If you consider it against handhelds it stood alone as the single most powerful one. Granted, the Vita was the closest comparison and that was a whole generation behind, but I can’t stress enough how outclassed it is against the original Switch. The need to push a TV display from a mobile chipset ended up making the Switch a genuinely beefy handheld.

The Switch 2 is interesting because besides iterating on that requirement it also seems like a very deliberate response to the Deck and PC handhelds. It seems intentionally designed to be competitive against the current set of those. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Nintendo pushed the price and performance up a bit specifically for that reason, frankly. It seems egnineered specifically to not feel outdated at launch, even if it will presumably be outclassed again in a couple of years.

And for the record, I’m not “white knighting” Nintendo. They’re famously ruthless, litigious and quirky bordering on unreasonableness. Not white knighting (or grinding an axe against) Valve, either. They’re also ruthless and quirky bordering on unreasonableness, although clearly much, much better at PR with core gamers. I am actively hostile towards Nintendo’s approach to a number of things (primarily emulation) and to Valve’s approach to a number of things (primarily their gig economy approach to game development and their monopolistic tendencies). Not rooting for one of them doesn’t mean I’m rooting against either of them, or that I don’t acknowledge the things they do well or poorly.

I legitimately thought you were talking about Nintendo hardware there for a while.

As far as we can tell the Switch 2 seems like it’s a bit ahead of the Deck, which is on the low end of the current batch of PC handhelds anyway. I don’t think the quality of hardware is the differentiating factor here, one way or the other. I also don’t think “anemic” was what the Switch felt like at launch. It was somewhere between the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, which was only slightly inadequate for a home console and incredibly bulky for a handheld in 2017. “Not pushing any interesting boundary” is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.

I have to say, it’s a bit surprising to see all the hostility from… I don’t know who this is. PC master race bros? Steam fanboys? You’d think that last group at least would have some fondness for the Switch, given it effectively invented the entire segment of modern hybrid handhelds. Not that I have a horse in that race, there are pros and cons of both, I own both and I think both are pretty great. The Deck effectively replaced the Switch on my rotation, then it got replaced by a Windows handheld and I assume the mix will lean slightly more towards the console end when then Switch 2 comes out, then swing back when newer PC handhelds come out. I am fine with that.

I find the last point interesting, though. What IS a “cultivated garden” platform? I don’t know that I think of Steam in those terms at all. Steam is a software platform that just happens to be tied to someone else’s hardware and OS and seems very unhappy about it. From the perspective of a PC user I think Steam’s dominance is a problem. For one thing because my storefront of choice is GOG (screw DRM, thanks) and for another because the entire point of an open platform is competition. From the perspective of a console user Steam is… well, not that. It’s a PC gaming thing, so I don’t see it as direct competition in the fist place. Which I guess is why I’m more weirded out than anything else to see people taking sides this aggressively.

You are all over the place here. I’m not doing quotes, either, it’s an obnoxious way to argue online.

In no particular order: No, it’s not just developing countries on older hardware (although there ARE significant markets where high end hardware is less popular, and they matter). Microsoft doesn’t own Windows, Valve owns Windows, at least on gaming, as evidenced by the long string of failed attempts from Microsoft to establish their own store on Windows PCs. The standard controller was part of that, but it wasn’t all of it. And yes, most of the 14000 titles on PC are tiny indies that sold next to zero (or actually zero) copies.

Valve runs steam as a gig economy app, there are very few guardrails and instead very strong algorithmic discoverability management tools. Steam has shovelware for the same reason Google Play has shovelware, Steam is just WAY better at surfacing things specifically to gamers.

Incidentally, most of these new games support controllers because the newly standardized Xinput just works. Valve has a whole extra controller translation layer because everything else kinda doesn’t and they wanted full compatibility, not just Xbox compatibility because the blood feud between Gaben and Microsoft will never end, I suppose. None of that changes that it was the advent of XInput and Xbox 360 controller compatibility that unlocked direct ports, along with consoles gradually becoming standardized PCs.

A lot of PCs can’t do a lot of games. That is precisely the point.

If you look at the Steam hardware survey at any given point in time, mass market GPUs are typically mid-range parts two to three generations old. And even then, those are still the most popular small fractions of a very fragmented market.

The average PC is an old-ass laptop used by a broke-ass student. Presumably that still is a factor on why CounterStrike, of all things, is Steam’s biggest game. It sure was a factor on why WoW or The Sims were persistent PC hits despite looking way below the expectations of contemporary PC hardware.

The beginning of competent console ports in the Xbox 360 era revolutionized that. Suddenly there was a standard PC controller that had parity to mainstream consoles and a close-enough architecture running games on a reliably stable hardware. Suddenly you didn’t need to target PC games solely to the minimum common denominator PC, the minimum common denominator was a console that was somewhat above average compared to low-end PCs.

In that scenario you can just let people with high-end hardware crank up resolution, framerate and easily scalable options while allowing for some downward scaling as well. And if that cuts off some integrated graphics on old laptops… well, consoles will more than make up the slack.

Sure, there are PC exclusives because they rely on PC-specific controls or are trying to do some tech-demoy stuff or because they’re tiny indies with no money for ports or licensing fees, or because they’re made in a region where consoles aren’t popular or supported or commercially viable.

But the mainstream segment of gaming we’re discussing here? Consoles made the PC as a competitive, platform-agnostic gaming machine.

And theoretically you can install Windows on a Steam Deck. Not making something specifically unsupported doesn’t mean you’re not building your business model around the default use case.

For the record, Nintendo games can be legally run on an emulator, much as Nintendo may protest this. It’s a pain in the ass to do so without technically breaking any regulation, but it sure isn’t impossible, and the act of running the software elsewhere isn’t illegal.

This is objectively wrong.

I mean, the PC market has grown, don’t get me wrong. Consoles use to be the only thing that mattered and that’s no longer the case. You can’t afford to ignore PCs anymore.

But consoles still drive a majority of revenue for a majority of games, to my knowledge. And the Switch is a huge market by itself.

More importantly, PC gamers should be extremely invested in console gaming continuing to exist. Console gaming is a big reason PC gaming is viable. They provide a static hardware target that can be used as a default, which then makes it the baseline for PC ports. With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs. That’s why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.

Consoles also standardized a lot of control, networking and other services for games. You don’t want a PC-only gaming market.

You mean as opposed to the Steam branded Steam PC running the Steam OS that boots straight into Steam?

Nah, this is pretty bad analysis.

Nintendo got to the Switch via the Wii U and through the realization that they could package similar hardware with affordable off-the-shelf parts and still drive a TV output that was competitive with their “one-gen-old-with-a-gimmick” model for home consoles.

It was NOT a handheld with AAA games, it was a home console you could take with you. That is how they got to a point where all the journalists, reviewers and users that spent the Vita’s lifetime wondering who wanted to play Uncharted on a portable were over the moon with a handheld Zelda instead.

So yeah, turns out the read the article has is actually far closer to what happened than yours, I’m sorry to say.

Well, that’s supposed to be the point of the paper in the first place. They seem to be tracing paths through the neural net and seeing what lights up when they do things step by step. Someone posted a link to the source article somewhere in this thread.

Best they can tell, as per the article, they say the math answer and the answer to how it got to the answer are being generated independently.

Points for acknowledging the obvious loophole, but ultimately you’re assuming EU investors wouldn’t jump in to fill the vacuum.

There are other tools to move the needle here (some of which these protestors are requesting explicitly). Ultimately you don’t care as much about the source of capital as you do about the practice.

This is true. That said, presumably at least some of those have either a pre-existing install base they can keep selling digital games and services to or built-up stock.

Nintendo has zero Switch 2 units in US households and will be expected to honor preorder prices. Who knows how much stock they have in the US at this point. Probably next to zero.

US gamers won’t have cheaper choices to buy new hardware, but they sure will have the obvious choice of not spending money on unnecessary new toys at all. Especially because for how messed up gaming hardware is going to get there are going to be entire other market segments getting much worse that you don’t get to just opt out of.

This is atrocious timing for Nintendo. But hey, Europe has 450 million people and you weren’t going to sell 100 million Switches day one. Shave fifty euros off that sticker and I betcha some of them will take that unused US stock out of your hands and even buy some games on top.

You’re antropomorphising quite a bit there. It is not trying to be deceptive, it’s building two mostly unrelated pieces of text and deciding the fuzzy logic is getting it the most likely valid response once and that the description of the algorithm is the most likely response to the other. As far as I can tell there’s neither a reward for lying about the process nor any awareness of what the process was anywhere in this.

Still interesting (but unsurprising) that it’s not getting there by doing actual maths, though.

I’ve always hated it and eight. I can only remember the ones that are familiar at a glance from the reverse table and to this day I sometimes just sum up and down from those “anchor” references. They’re so weird and slippery.

Well, yeah, but if the final store price is 750 instead of 450 the number of consoles allocated to the US market, let alone sold through, may be much lower.

Given that tariffs could be lifted at random, just like they were set, not even scalpers would want to buy tech that could drop in price dramatically any day.

You misunderstood, I said it’s Vietnamese/Chinese because that’s where a lot of the components are manufactured and why the tariffs are a problem for US distribution in particular but not for other regions.

That’s what’s fascinating about how it does language in general.

The article is interesting in both the ways in which things are similar and the ways they’re different. The rough approximation thing isn’t that weird, but obviously any human would have self-awareness of how they did it and not accidentally lie about the method, especially when both methods yield the same result. It’s a weirdly effective, if accidental example of human-like reasoning versus human-like intelligence.

And, incidentally, of why AGI and/or ASI are probably much further away than the shills keep claiming.

OK, I’ve been willing to just let the examples roll even though most people are just describing how they’d do the calculation, not a process of gradual approximation, which was supposed to be the point of the way the LLM does it…

…but this one got me.

Seriously, you think 70x5 is easier to compute than 70x3? Not only is that a harder one to get to for me in the notoriously unfriendly 7 times table, but it’s also further away from the correct answer and past the intuitive upper limit of 1000.

Carts and console could very much change. Some estimates say up to 50% up.

Given that digital games will not this could make the Switch a de facto digital-only thing in the US.

I mean, assuming Trump isn’t beaten with a stick into submission in the next couple of weeks. We’ll see.

In the US. Key part there is “in the US”. You guys deal with this nonsense. I intend to be playing my MSRP Vietnamese/Chinese console at launch, thankyouverymuch.

Hell, I’ll take whatever stock you don’t, maybe we can get a tenner or two shaved off the price. I’m sure the “let’s sneak in the exchange rate and pretend it’s VAT” thing is starting to look less appealing right about now.

Is that a weird method of doing math?

I mean, if you give me something borderline nontrivial like, say 72 times 13, I will definitely do some similar stuff. “Well it’s more than 700 for sure, but it looks like less than a thousand. Three times seven is 21, so two hundred and ten, so it’s probably in the 900s. Two times 13 is 26, so if you add that to the 910 it’s probably 936, but I should check that in a calculator.”

Do you guys not do that? Is that a me thing?