Dvader said:

Take that spot so no one can have it again.

gamingeek said:

Dvader said:

Take that spot so no one can have it again.

Not possible. Now the govt is making my street a controlled parking zone and are going to charge us to park on our street outside our own houses. Or I'd have to pay $3500 for the permits to park on the paving in front of the house. And the paving already belongs to us.

Did you miss work because of this?  I don't see why the police couldn't do anything.  Could you move your car so that it occupies two spaces to make it hard for someone to park behind you?

I've had people sit and box me in like that before, living in one of the shittiest areas here in northeast usa. What I do is get in my car and just blow the horn constantly and I find that more often than not somebody will find the person or their keys. Then I make it known that I will slice their throat if they do something this stupid again.

edgecrusher said:

I've had people sit and box me in like that before, living in one of the shittiest areas here in northeast usa. What I do is get in my car and just blow the horn constantly and I find that more often than not somebody will find the person or their keys. Then I make it known that I will slice their throat if they do something this stupid again.

So we had a huge round of new rumours over the weekend on NX

Another huge round of NX rumors from 10k ​ :

Like last time, I'm using the tiered rumors where a T1 means one source told me, T2 means two, Tier 3 means 3, and Tier 4 means four or more (there are no T4 this time). I will reiterate this, I am not the source of any of this information. I am simply passing along what I heard. It should all be taken with a grain of salt and not be taken as gospel. Don't cry and flame me if by June none of this is true.

Nirolak told me to contextualize the rumors and was a fan of the tiered system, so I did it. Please read it through and enjoy. Feel free to debate it, get mad at it, get hyped by it or whatever, just know things like these can change at any time and may never come to fruition exactly how it's worded.

T3 Rumors

The NX gimmick. I uh....was told not to post this part by some people. As usual, take it with a grain of salt (although I don't know why I would be warned if it was false) I'm not under any NDA though, and well, it could end up being false. But I was told a variation of this by three different sources. I don't believe they have a reason to lie to me. Here goes....

The NX is going to have a screen controller (whether it's optional or standard I don't know) and can be used anywhere to play your home console games. The controller itself will not have any processing capabilities, it'll essentially be a dummy vita. It'll likely have basic OS functions to access the NX console from anywhere, like a tiny cpu. Nintendo will use enhanced Wii U gamepad streaming tech, and allow the controller to be taken anywhere, connect to the NX console at home (likely through Wi-fi or personal hotspots and the NX console will likely have to be in stand-by mode). Basically, it's remote play built into the box and won't require a $200 add-on to experience it. This is likely what Kimishima meant in his interview with Sankei (http://www.sankei.com/west/news/1601...030012-n1.html) "different way to play with a dedicated machine" and the whole "new way to experience games" mantra that's been going around Nintendo PR.

Speculation: Nintendo could also sell personal hotspot usb adapters to get internet anywhere and plug either directly into the controller or a wall outlet to not drain the controller battery. The Supplementary Computing Devices may actually be portable hotspot devices with chips in it to boost the quality of the stream. (Maybe the NX will be called the Stream, a speculated final name during the WUST's).

Note: This does not mean there will not be a handheld. This isn't meant to be a replacement for the handheld as there will still be limitations and the controller won't have a full OS or the capability for physical game media (discs or cartridges). The needs of a handheld won't be fully met with this feature. It's just a nice add-on.

T2 Rumors

Luigi's Mansion 3 is in development for NX. This rumor gained popularity awhile ago from Geno but this isn't my source. This was a T1 to start but today I got another source to give some info on it. Two different sources have told me that it is in development for NX, and one source said it's being developed by Next Level Games, who is big enough to do this and Federation Force at the same time. One source said it started as a Wii U game but after the disappointing performance of the Wii U and the scheduled release date for the game being late in the console's cycle, Nintendo decided to switch development over to NX. (basically the same situation as Zelda for Wii U, but no word on if this game will also get a Wii U version). The other source said it's a pretty big deal (he didn't elaborate if he meant Nintendo is making it a big deal or his workplace is). To support this, http://www.nintendolife.com/news/201...edits_the_post

an employee stealth edited his post last year.

T1 Rumors

The NX will use a custom Polaris-like GPU. Likely will be on a FinFET 14nm fabrication node. The source told me it's on the same architecture with heavy customizations of course . It will contain the feature set of Polaris. It is "marginally better than the PS4" and theoretically could be "2x the power of PS4 GPU". I asked about PS4K being rumored to have a gpu 2x as powerful as the OG PS4 and how the theoretical performance of the NX would be and was told "Theoretically it could be close to the PS4K rumored specs". Of course, we know nothing of Polaris or the PS4K specs, but he gave that metric.

I'm going to paraphrase here, but one comment from a source about the power of NX was that "Dev's could port over a PS4 game easily and have power to spare. Even the most demanding ones". My own theory is any game that dips below 30fps on PS4 will likely stay at 30fps on NX and maybe have some enhanced effects.

One feature he highly touted, which improves performance greatly in games, especially graphically demanding ones such as AAA open world games is Primitive Discard Accelerator. A TechGAF member described it as

"designed to perform culling of triangles before they hit the geometry processor. Effectively, what this means is that it runs through the triangles (also known as primitives) as they hit the GPU and tests them to see if they're actually going to be visible on the screen or not (with a variety of tests), then throws out the triangles that aren't going to be on screen (i.e. discards them or culls them).

Now, this is a good thing, pretty much regardless of the type of game. Attempting to render triangles that aren't actually going to end up in the final image is a waste of GPU resources, and preventing that would be a pretty good thing. One of EA's Frostbite developers actually just gave a talk on this at GDC (PDF link, very technical), where they describe the software-based culling methods used in Frostbite. In their test scene, they could throw out over 75% of triangles before hitting the geometry engine, resulting in an almost 20% performance improvement. AMD have also recently released their own software-based culling solution, GeometryFX, which like Frostbite runs as software on the GPU's shader units. Hence, they're obviously interested in the problem of triangle culling, so it wouldn't be surprising if they developed a hardware unit to perform it more efficiently."

This was great to hear, but I asked if it was possible to get this feature set on 28nm GPU's since those are more established and cheaper than 14nm and there isn't a yield risk on those.

"Well, from a purely theoretical perspective, any "Polaris exclusive" feature could be adapted to a 28nm process. Work on Polaris had likely been going on for about a year or so when work on NX started, so it is in theory possible that they said to AMD "Hey, we like this primitive discard accelerator thing, can we have it on our planned 28nm chip?". The issue with this is that Nintendo would have had to fork over quite a lot of extra R&D dollars to get a functional block "back-ported" to 28nm, compared to components from existing GCN 1.2 chips, which were already ready to go for TSMC's 28nm process. The other issue is the assumption that the primitive discard accelerator is single functional block that can be just pulled wholesale out of Polaris. It could be an integral part of the geometry processor or command processor, or the manner in which it operates could depend on the newer geometry or command processors in Polaris. This would mean that you'd need to port the bulk of Polaris's improvements back to 28nm, or do a substantial amount of redesign work on the primitive discard accelerator to get it to work in a GCN 1.2-era chip (either of these would add substantially more R&D cost).

It's impossible to say how much it would cost them in the scheme of things, but it does seem like an unusual added expense over just taking existing GCN 1.2 tech, which would still be a generation ahead of the competition."

So with this quote, while it's not confirmed, it is highly likely Nintendo is using a 14nm Polaris GPU in the NX based off of the expensive nature of using PDA or any Polaris feature set and putting it on a 28nm chip.

If Nintendo does go with 14nm, it is very likely they will be taking a loss on each NX sold, but we don't know the dealings AMD have with Nintendo. Once source told me "AMD may have been desperate enough for the business to offer Nintendo, say, the first year's supply at a fixed price, to reduce Nintendo's yield risk. They may also have specifically pushed Nintendo into a 14nm Polaris-based chip, as it would allow Nintendo to also use a Polaris-based 14nm chip for the handheld. This would not only be a big business win for AMD in itself (Nintendo's handhelds typically sell a lot more than their home consoles), but it would also big a big PR win for them, by showing their ability to compete in the ultra-low TPD sector, which is a market they've made pretty much no traction in up until now."

.

So 14nm is still likely in 2016 and Nintendo could still sell it at a reasonable price and not lose too much money or even break even.

tl;dr The NX GPU is using features that are debuting on the Polaris chip, and is therefore heavily speculated to be a Polaris chip, as that would work well in a handheld too and help AMD prove they can make low wattage chips with good performance for small devices. (GCN 1.3, Vulkan, Primitive Discard Accelerator, etc)

Nintendo is using Vulkan with NX. This goes hand in hand with using a Polaris-based GPU, and goes with the announcement of Nintendo joining Kronos. But the dev I spoke to about the GPU, who is porting a PS4 game to NX said Vulkan is not ready yet (as of the 2015 December SDK, should be an update in May) and they are using a variation of the PS4 API, GMNX, until Vulkan is ready. Nintendo providing some nice tools like GMNX to help devs port from PC, XBox and PS4 to NX.

Most dev kits won't be given until Nintendo formally reveals the NX. As my previous post indicated, Nintendo is none too happy with the leaks and is keeping things on lockdown. Outside of close partners and internal teams, most devs are using SDK's until the NX reveal. Not a big deal, but I was told specs are pretty much final as of now, and the May update will likely be for the final spec sheet and not target specs.

MercurySteam has a dev kit and is making an already announced game for the NX. The only announced game they have is Raiders of the Broken Planet, currently under development for PS4, XB1 and PC. This is likely it. (Take this one as a T0.5).

Final Fantasy XV on NX. My single source on this said he's heard more of his sources mention it's coming to NX. No idea when. I pressed for FFVIIR but nobody has heard about it. Gaf's very own mod Kagari hinted that Sony may have co-funded it and it may never get released outside of PS4 and PC (like Street Fighter V).

NX will likely launch at different times per region. Only heard this from one source but it does make sense if the NX does use 14nm chips, as there's a risk of not having enough of those chips ready on shelves for holiday 2016.

No regions were specified, but one would assume with the slow adoption of consoles in Japan, and the popularity of handhelds over there, the NX will launch in the west first like some past Nintendo consoles (consoles are more popular outside of Japan). Likely North America and Europe.

There are lots of NX games in development. Once source told me to post this so I won't edit it at all

"And you can quote me on this on GAF too: "I think NX software output is going to blow away Wii U. There's a LOT of games in development. I don't know if we'll see all of them at E3, since a lot of Wii U projects weren't announced until January 2013, but I'm very impressed so far with what I'm hearing."

New IP are being developed. I asked this because I noticed some complaints about how there were no leaks about new IP and NX was looking like another Mario/Zelda factory with a bunch of remasters and ports. The source said "I'm not allowed to give specifics, but that's a sure bet."

Since then we've learned that 10K got his info from twitter and GAF insiders that were verified by GAF as likely having knowledge of what they were talking about. Emily Rogers of Paper Mario Wii U outing fame, then said that 10ks rumours on NX's second screen gimmick were wrong as was the power level and Polaris talk. But she said it was good hardware. And from LCGeek we know that the CPU is still 30% better than XB1s, which is already better than PS4s CPU.

She didn't debunk anything else.

SupremeAC said:

Personally I wish everyone would shut up about it.  All this is about is 10 minutes of internet fame for those leakers.  As if the prowess of the CPU will be relevant to Nintendo and their games.  CPU speed means nothing these days.  heck, the X360 had a beefier processor than the Xbone.

It's relevant because Nintendo doesn't like bottlenecks and most tech guys say that means the GPU would be bumped up to avoid this. Bumped above PS4. The rumours about it being more powerful than PS4 haven't been debunked - the ones saying it would equal PS4k have been.

Anyhow 10k has been banned from GAF and deleted his twitter account. Turns out most of his sources were game journalists and not devs. Only 1 dev.

Now I have a keyboard, let me explain what I was talking about with Zelda production.

There was a 4 year gap between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess - a 5 year gap between TP and Skyward Sword - and a 5 year gap to Wii U Zelda.

Typically Nintendo think for a long time about what the next zelda should be, then make a Zelda game, then take a break and think for a long time about what the next game should be, before then starting pre-production, then main production, then think again for ages. This leaves us waiting 4-5 years for every Zelda game.

What I am saying is that the way you currently get Zelda, new artstyle, new concepts, nothing would change from that perspective. You would not get some sanitized unimaginative Zelda games. Simply that instead of having this end of production downtime period, you have a small separate team that is working on concepts and doing planning and pre-production for Zelda 6, when Zelda 5 is being made by the main team. So when Zelda 5 is done and released you can immediately get going on making the next one because all the planning and conceptualising and art style choices have already been done by that team.

Like any other HD game, the grunt work needs to be outsourced to let people concentrate on what they are good at. And I'm not advocating yearly releases or any dumb shit, but waiting 3 years is better than 5 FFS.

Giantbomb gets PS4k documents, codename NEO. Full specs.

GAF said:

Neo, Morpheus lol who the hell is obsessed with the Matrix at Sony

So what are peoples thoughts on PS4 Neo?

On the one hand having a NEO mode for every game mandated is great for people who buy it.

I can imagine that most devs will be a little perturbed as having to forcibly do them by mandate, though.

No exclusives or anything like that, is good for normal PS4 owners, but then it kinda takes away the special aspect of a new console if there aren't going to any games that can take advantage of the new tech to do something the old tech couldn't. Also all these mandates on what your frame rate can be etc.

SupremeAC said:

It's no different from the New3DS.  Not a big deal.  I can see this as a way for them to cater to those with high-end TV's.  It's good that they're not forcing 4K resolution onto devs though, as no dev will be happy to have to spend all that extra time making better textures for a slight minority of the userbase.

I'm assuming Sony realized they made the PS4 too sturdy, and that they'll never reach PS2 like sales if no one replaces their original model once or twice due to it breaking down.  This is their answer to make people buy the same hardware multiple times, regardless of the condition of their 'vanilla' PS4's.  

There's a bigger power gap than between 3DS-New one would presume.

I think the reason they are not forcing devs to do 4k games is because the system is not capable of doing it (natively).

You will have a handful of 4K games, but for most titles you would have to downgrade everything else to get the game running in 4K. So they will just let the system upscale the video output like your TV already does or how most Wii U games are 720p but it outputs the signal at 1080p upscaled.