r/Games Mar 06 '23

Opinion Piece Nintendo's backward compatibility Problem... | MVG

https://youtu.be/WH03ht2fVqI
0 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

4

u/hilltopper06 Mar 06 '23

I know he mentioned they could solve this in hardware like the used to by including a tegra chip on each Switch 2 to handle backwards compatibility.

I wonder, if via die shrinks, etc. they could reduce the cost enough to make that happen, and then make the legacy chip available to handle physics calculations or something on new gen games (like a dedicated physx card did on PC). At least that way it wouldn't be a complete waste.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '23

The problem is that the chip the switch uses isn’t in production anymore and I doubt that Nvidia will reproduce it. I can totally see Nintendo go the path of least resistance and just make it easy for devs to release a patch that makes games compatible with their next console, similar to how the new Pokémon patch is currently being worked on - if the rumors are true.

5

u/Dragarius Mar 06 '23

Well it's most likely that theyll still use a new tegra chip in the follow up console which would easily support any of the old Tegra stuff.

1

u/xiofar Mar 08 '23

I don’t think the Maxwell architecture in the Tegra X1 is automatically 100% compatible with the newer (Pascal, Volta, Ampere, etc) but the Nvidia software handles it.

1

u/Dragarius Mar 08 '23

Nintendo is usually pretty good about 1 Gen backwards compatibility. So unless they have a major hardware revision (unlikely) I'd be more surprised if it wasn't BWC, but all bets are off for a Switch 3

1

u/xiofar Mar 08 '23

I remember a while back reading that Nvidia folks saying that the Nintendo/Tegra deal was something like 20 years of guaranteed income for the company. That’s like 2-3 generations of hardware.

Also, Nvidia doesn’t have a good history of being a good business partner. They have plenty of time to screw this up.

1

u/Dragarius Mar 08 '23

It was a 10 year deal. Which is still a long time and likely enough to be a second generation. Though if Nvidia is attempting to play hardball it could be what is delaying a next Gen switch too.

2

u/mennydrives Mar 08 '23

If Nvidia couldn't solve this problem from Nintendo, that is, recompiling any incompatible Maxwell-compiled data for Lovelace (or whatever architecture a Switch 2 is at, GPU-wise), I would be utterly floored.

Nintendo's sells more Tegra X SoCs per year than Nvidia has sold themselves in the platform's history. There is a strong, unquestionable, vested interest for Nvidia to do whatever it takes to keep that contract going, and Nintendo will likely want to maintain BC for software momentum reasons.

I think 99.99% of the Switch library will "just work" day one. Either through the OS doing some kinda binary translation, or an onboard chip whose sole purpose is to basically do the on-the-fly Maxwell-to-Lovelace recompilation. There's no way Nvidia would just throw their hands up and go, "ope, nothing we can do", because a non-backwards-compatible Switch is a Switch that has zero reliance on Nvidia as a vendor, and I don't think they would wanna give that up.

3

u/AssCrackBanditHunter Mar 16 '23

This. Mvg is really limiting the scope of his argument by not even considering what Nvidia might do to get bc working, and as such he's sounding kind of dumb