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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 18 2017, @04:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the start-saving-your-dollars dept.

Coverage of the Nintendo Switch console "launch" is available at Ars Technica, Tom's Hardware, Anandtech.

Nintendo Switch uses a USB Type-C cable for charging, and has a battery life ranging from 2.5 to 6.5 hours, comparable to (but less than) the latest version of the Nintendo 3DS XL. It can be played in Console, Handheld, and Tabletop modes. The handheld has a 6.2" 720p screen but the docked console supports 1080p60 gaming.

The Switch has 32 GB of internal storage, some of which is used for the operating system. It has a "game card slot" for games released on some form of proprietary physical flash media, but also comes with a standard microSD slot for expandable storage.

Nintendo will offer a free trial of a paid online gameplay service for the Switch (similar to Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus) until sometime in Autumn.

The system will be released on March 3, 2017 for $299.

Here are some of the games.

Previously: "Nintendo Switch" Coming in March 2017
Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 18 2017, @01:30PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 18 2017, @01:30PM (#455372) Journal

    Dunno about the ARM CPU (too lazy to care), but the GPU portion smokes your kid's tablet.

    I guess we could compare the undocked-tablet-faux3DS performance to the tablet, but even then it has fairly advanced GPU cores. Although not the Pascal cores that may have been available had Nintendo waited a few months*.

    http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/12/nintendo-switch-nvidia-tegra-x1-specs-speed/ [arstechnica.com]
    https://www.slashgear.com/nintendo-switch-nvidia-maxwell-in-pascal-out-15467635/ [slashgear.com]
    http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/14/nintendo-switch-specs-less-powerful-than-playstation-4/ [venturebeat.com]

    Obviously, gameplay/controllers and a variety of games beats the need for cutting-edge hardware. There is a decent amount of doom and gloom over the Switch's chances. And although it has an ARM chip, it won't support the existing base of (mostly shitty) Android games out of the box. Although given the expandable storage and plenty of I/O and whatnot, this thing will probably be hacked to support Android games on Day 2.

    * Given the use of standard Nvidia ARM hardware, it shouldn't be impossible for Nintendo to refresh the hardware every 2-3 years at little additional cost. That is desirable simply because newer gens would have better battery life. It's basically the same story for PS4 and Xbone, but I think the Tegra SoC is even less customized than the ARM APUs those systems use. Consoles are now fancy PCs.

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  • (Score: 2) by mth on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:58PM

    by mth (2848) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:58PM (#455560) Homepage

    Eh, PS4 and Xbone use x86-64 APUs.

    Given that a lot of games they announced aren't ready at launch, I do think they would have been better off waiting until the second half of the year, even more so if that would have gotten them a more advanced GPU.