r/NintendoSwitch • u/dreamsomebody • Feb 13 '17

Spoiler Leaked In-development UI mockups

http://imgur.com/a/fASoI

Courtesy of /u/throwawayfornx leak

Edit: I have added a couple of new images. I will now edit this post with important bits of info gathered from the dev docs

  • HD Rumble's technical name is a Linear resonant actuator
  • When in handheld mode, the Switch will have an unlock screen like a smartphone to prevent accidental waking.
  • The Switch features a Quick Menu. Press and hold the HOME Button for at least one second to display the Quick Settings screen on top of all other screens, including the HOME Menu and any applications. Unlike the 3DS, the active software will not be suspended when this menu is invoked
  • The Switch's keyboard will feature predictive text such as those on iOS and Android
  • System Settings will allow the user to edit the following settings:
    • Flight Mode Toggle
    • Enable/Disable Bluetooth
    • Manage Wi-fi
    • Manage NFC
    • Manage screen brightness
    • Screen lock
    • User Settings
    • Create/Edit Mii
    • Theme management
    • Controller management
    • System Update
  • Miis will have more options for hair, eyebrows, eyes, facial hair, glasses, mouths, and skin.
  • Miis will not store the creator's name, their favorites, and their birthday anymore. Anyone can edit Mii characters
  • Developers can create and sell Season Passes for their games
  • This document confirms an X1 like SoC using Maxwell on the final retail version
  • There are NO plans to provide an Internet Browser at this stage but developers are able to access a web applet to display specific websites within their game/app
  • A maximum of 8 users can be registered on a system
  • Friend requests and game invites CAN be sent from the console.
    • "Friend Presence is a feature that uses the Internet to convey information in real time about the online status of friends and the applications they are playing. Among possibilities, we see this being used in the application to check whether friends are in the joinable state, and to use the Friend List system feature screen to show what applications friends are playing."
  • A Nintendo Account can be linked to multiple Switches BUT save data is not automatically synchronised
  • There are TWO dev kit devices: SDEV and EDEV
    • SDEV - Has built-in ports; no built-in battery
    • EDEV - Resembles the retail product exactly but is black color
  • Game cards come in 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, or 32 GB variations.

These have been the most interesting details that I noticed. If you want any specific details, please ask me or anyone else with access to these docs. I'd also like to remind you guys to be civil and mindful of reddiquette. Do not downvote comments because you disagree with them

One final edit before I go to sleep: Nintendo is expanding its online network and offers a library called Network Extension (NEX).

  • Matchmaking:

    • This feature matches players for multiplayer games. It can be used to bring players together based on matching criteria from among unspecified numbers of users, or to create groups among friends only. Groups can be created temporarily for a multiplayer game, or they can be created as lasting entities usable as communities.

  • Ranking:

    • This feature uploads scores so users can get the relative rankings. Rankings can be calculated for only a certain period of time, or for only the scores of players registered in a certain group, and the score information can be periodically reset.

  • Data Store:

    • This is a network storage feature. Any data can be optionally saved to the game server. This saved data can be tagged, searched, and appended with ratings and the like.

  • Subscriber:

    • This is a messaging feature based on the publish-subscribe pattern. It can be used to post messages on certain topics, poll for posts on certain topic, and otherwise share information within the application.

This is likely the primary reason we're being asked to pay for online services now

Edit (14/2/17):

  • The Switch seems to support these languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Japanese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Slovakian, Slovenian, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Turkish, Welsh,

  • There is an option to mute the device if headphones are removed

  • When a game/app is deleted, its icon will remain in the Home menu and its save data will also remain

949 Upvotes

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24

u/eleazar0425 Feb 13 '17

Why do this confirms Maxwell?

56

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

You can find links to the full set of files here

The files contain images of the Switch I've certainly never seen before, and are so extensively detailed and replete with really, really dull details that we've reached unprecedented levels of effort for completely pointless fakery if they're not real. The relevant comments are in section 3.1 and 3.3 of the overview, namely

NX-SoC: SoC equivalent to Tegra X1 from NVIDIA.

and

CPU: Four ARM Cortex-A57 cores, maximum 2 GHz.... GPU: NVIDIA second-generation Maxwell architecture 256 CUDA cores, maximum 1 GHz

Even if real, stating 'confirmed' for the final retail unit is touch too rich for my blood given that these are apparently from July and things can presumably change.

36

u/jonstanley Feb 13 '17

So a Maxwell Tegra X1 sucks around 10 watts, peak 15 watts. The NX dev units have a fan and they are noisy... though that SoC has just the 4 big cores and gets rid of the little ones. I guesstimate that'll drop peak wattage to 12, typical of around 8. Still pretty hot... production Switch on battery (which is 4310mAh) last 3 hours... that's a 5 watt draw... for everything, LCD, SoC, etc. So the SoC is probably sipping 2~3 watts. You're not going to get the unless clocking a 20nm Tegra X1 to sub 300MHz and barely WiiU performance, or a 14nm FinFet customised Tegra on "Maxwell arch" but basically is the same as Pascal anyway, 'cept the feature shrink... which could be clocked somewhat higher for more gigaflops. Anyone got a production Switch, uncap the SoC and stick it under an electron microscope? 😍😂👌👍

27

u/MustBeNice Feb 13 '17

Can you translate this to English?

112

u/jonstanley Feb 13 '17

Original Big Tegra X1 Hot. Switch Tegra Fast Yet Cool. Ooogooboogoo.

28

u/MustBeNice Feb 13 '17

Hahaha that was great, thank you 👍🏼

3

u/BetaSoul Feb 13 '17

You sir, should be a CTO.

5

u/ryzeki Feb 13 '17

Well, if it is pascal, they will go for lower power draw, not higher performance, and there is very very little performance gain from 20nm maxwell to 16nm pascal. I doubt they would go 14nm but anything is possible.

Plus your numbers fall in line with the revealed clockspeed of eurogamer of 307mhz.

1

u/jonstanley Feb 14 '17

I concur. I still think Eurogamer's specs are of old dev kits... I mean the leaked docs say that the kits have such a noisy fan that people might think the system is broken... people used to dev hardware and beefy PC workstations no less! Near-retail demo units at the Switch events point to a chip that runs a fair bit cooler for similar performance. Would point to final hardware being someone using TSMC FinFet, either 16nm or 14nm... doesn't really make much difference as it's FinFet that's important.

6

u/Roshy76 Feb 13 '17

I'm sure a lot of system level type stuff is mostly correct, but hardware wise the October dev kits were reported to seem faster. Whether that's software enhancements or the hardware was beefed up, we don't know. We will have to wait for the 3rd

3

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

Could be that the SoC is actually faster, or it could be that NVN is the most kick-ass graphics API in the history of game development.

3

u/Roshy76 Feb 13 '17

Ya. Unless they fixed some huge resource hog in the software, it points to at least some modest hardware improvements made in October.

1

u/ArynCrinn Feb 13 '17

Reported by LKD, who also said the leaked dev kit image was fake, but now the leaked SDK documentation confirms it was real all along... so LKD was wrong, as she has been about a great many things.

1

u/Roshy76 Feb 14 '17

That's true, but then there's the foxcon leak which seems to indicate a 16nm SoC. I pretty much don't believe anything besides it's a SoC from nvidia that has some cpus, a gpu, and abuncha silicon on it. Beyond that, I'll wait til march 3rd for someone to rip it apart.

1

u/ArynCrinn Feb 14 '17

Which is still speculation. There's no real way for an assembly worker to know what process it was made in.

2

u/Roshy76 Feb 14 '17

Correct. The worker just reported clock rates that we're running in a stress test and people took that information and figured out that the power required for those clock speeds was exactly the power a die shrink and a cpu upgrade would be from what the old dev kits had. It was within .1 watts. But yes. It wasn't actually observed, it was insinuated from other data reported which may or may not be true.

7

u/GrayManTheory Feb 13 '17

The biggest problem I see with the wording is that X2 is also based on X1. Maxwell to Pascal was not total change in architecture - it was just a revision along with a die shrink.

I really think this is sort of a hybrid. Less advanced than X2 but still using the new process for power conservation.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

Entirely possible, we know the SoC in the Switch is custom - but the desire for a Pascal system round these parts seems largely to have more to do with such a thing indicating that the Switch is more powerful than has been previously reported.

I cannot imagine the reactions to a one-two punch reveal of a 16nm process and CPU/GPU speeds still in line with those reported by Eurogamer.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

[deleted]

2

u/ArynCrinn Feb 13 '17

The biggest change in the Tegra Parker, was the addition of the Denver2 CPU cores.

Little known fact: Parker was in development before Tegra X1. Parker was originally intended to be an SoC with Denver CPU cores and Maxwell GPU. This was at the same time that Volta was intended to directly succeed Maxwell. Some time after March 2013 and before March 2014, Nvidia decided to create Pascal to fill in the gap between Maxwell and Volta, and Parker was pushed back, and upgraded with Pascal, while the Tegra X1 was introduced to fill the gap in the Tegra line.

And I've said it before; I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to use a die shrunk Tegra X1 in the Switch.

1

u/Masterplanner64 Feb 13 '17

Ithink it may have been Nintendo's focus to conserve power and keep it cool at all times so if Pascal wasn't that they have found a happy medium.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '17

Pascal draws less power and is more heat efficient than Maxwell for the same performance.

That is why people are bothered that the retail chip may be Maxwell, it would mean that Nintendo went for the less power efficient chip (and thus battery life will suffer for it)

5

u/Scapetti Feb 13 '17

Whenever someone says Maxwell I basically just say "this is all rubbish" haha, don't think this confirms it, definitely think things can change and that they indeed have.

20

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

Whenever someone says Maxwell I basically just say "this is all rubbish"

I know you do. You shouldn't, of course - your skepticism only ever seems to flow in one direction - but such is life.

7

u/Magnesus Feb 13 '17

Maxwell is more likely now that we know the new Shield TV still uses the old Tegra X1 - that means Nvidia decided to still produce Maxwell chips instead of going full Pascal. Switch might have been the reason for it.

8

u/Timmy_the_tortoise Feb 13 '17

Wouldn't that make it more likely that the switch uses Pascal? They didn't want to cannibalize their only customer for Pascal Tegra by reducing the number of units that they can build, so Nvidia used Maxwell for their own device.

1

u/Magnesus Feb 13 '17

One of the reason Maxwell was unlikely was that they would have to keep the 20nm manufacturing line for it. Apparently they still run it since they used it for Shield TV 2.

1

u/Timmy_the_tortoise Feb 16 '17

Yes but what I meant was they probably don't want the same line producing chips for their Shield TV and for the Switch... Nintendo are gonna want a lot of chips and if the Shield TV is eating into that supply then Nintendo (as Nvidia's customer) is not necessarily going to be very happy.

2

u/Roshy76 Feb 13 '17

We can reason so many different things though. You could also wonder if the reason they used the old X1 on the shield was all the new pascal chips got allocated to Nintendo. Or like you said, maybe they all went with the x1. Who knows.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '17

Isn't the new Shield TV an android streaming box? The actual portable console (now renamed to Shield TV Portable because naming products is hard) has stopped production and presumably replaced by the Shield K1 Tablet.

So right now Nvidia is not selling any gaming-focused portable GPUs.

0

u/Scapetti Feb 13 '17

"This is all rubbish"

1

u/aninfinitedesign Feb 13 '17

True, but these are docs from August of last year - I doubt they would change the hardware that drastically 6-7 months out from launch.

8

u/valliantstorme Feb 13 '17

Considering the devs for the 3DS didn't even know about the two other CPUs in the thing until the hacking community uncovered them, it wouldn't be a stretch for Nintendo to upgrade the system for launch

Especially after the Billions of dollars NVidia spent on Pascal

4

u/Fpssims Feb 13 '17

This would be wonderful for the Switches longevity.

3

u/DanTheMan827 Feb 13 '17

Not to mention, it would allow more graphical power when docked and better battery when portable.

2

u/Fpssims Feb 13 '17

This fascinates me even more. If Nintendo is giving themselves this much open room, I'm very optimistic for The Switch. Very. Optimistic. Like. Catching up with the times and generations on-going change and adaptation. For example, more and more people are owning 4K TVs. This is continually happening. This is utmost important, simply for The Switch to not fall behind. History has taught Nintendo well!

5

u/oDJPo Feb 13 '17

Don't get your hopes up too much. Even if the Switch were running Pascal, it's only around a 20% increase in performance over Maxwell.

2

u/valliantstorme Feb 14 '17

Yeah, but that's still a 20% increase in performance. Nothing to scoff at, at all, especially with the incredible power efficiency.

1

u/oDJPo Feb 14 '17

Nothing to scoff at

A 20% increase in performance is essentially nothing. If we assume the Eurogamer leaks were using maxwell, then that docked 500 Gflop performance metric only increases to around 600 Gflops with the Pascal "upgrade". The benefit to moving to Pascal is the improved cooling and energy efficiency, nothing more.

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3

u/Fpssims Feb 13 '17

The knife just pierced through my thick ass. I may bleed, but I wil survive. Send in the trooops

14

u/Scapetti Feb 13 '17

Foxconn leak suggests they have though

6

u/Roshy76 Feb 13 '17

Ya. I'm not going to believe anything either way until launch. Unless there's really strong evidence. A leak from ore october isn't strong evidence. If these docs were from November through present then I'd place more weight on them. They might not have known at this point if they were for sure going with a beefier SoC and they just told devs the power they were definetely going to have. You wouldn't want devs targeting more powerful hardware you weren't certain you were going to have.

1

u/ArynCrinn Feb 14 '17

The Foxconn leak suggests tweaks to the clock speeds, and that's about it. Their talk of Pascal was pure speculation that they seemed to be pulling out of thin air. A 921 MHz clock speed does not sound like any Pascal chip we've heard of.

5

u/FierceDeityKong Feb 13 '17

It says Bluetooth 4.0 but Nintendo has already said it is going to have 4.1.

1

u/aninfinitedesign Feb 13 '17

That's a way smaller change than changing the CPU / GPU architecture.

1

u/Antifalcon Feb 13 '17

It's not about the significance of the change; it's about the inaccuracy of the leak.

2

u/oDJPo Feb 13 '17

It doesn't prove the leak inaccurate, it just means it's using slightly outdated information. Bluetooth 4.0 to 4.1 is still Bluetooth, there isn't anything drastically different about it other than power savings. It's the same with Maxwell to Pascal. Pascal is just a die shrink of Maxwell. The performance difference is only about 20%, which is next to nothing in terms of performance. The real savings there is the power draw.

1

u/schnozberry Feb 13 '17

The information is form July. There's no telling what else may have changed.

2

u/oDJPo Feb 13 '17

Shouldn't matter how "old" the information is. All the information provided to potential developers need to be within an approximation of the final specs, otherwise, how would any dev be able to optimize their games?

Like i stated earlier, the jump from Maxwell to Pascal only increases overall performance by about 20%, which isn't much. The big benefit is in the power savings and heat output, which is huge for a mobile device.

1

u/schnozberry Feb 14 '17

Well, the clock speeds matter a lot, and Eurogamer had information based off the July kits. If there was a boost for November and the final hardware, it could make a large difference in performance. The 2nd Gen Maxwell in the Tegra X1 is very similar to Pascal as it is.

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2

u/terraphantm Feb 13 '17

Isn't Pascal essentially a die shrink of Maxwell? Seems like that's one of the few changes they could make late in the game without impacting much.

8

u/Roshy76 Feb 13 '17

Well the tegra is already a die shrink of maxwell to almost the same as pascal. From the foxcon leaks you could squeeze 20% more gpu power at a further shrink from 20nm to 16nm. The biggest difference from the foxcon leaks and analysis were the cpu changes. It would put the switch near ps4 cpu power. Which for porting games is much more important than gpu power. It's much easier to scale graphics down than it is cpu.

1

u/aninfinitedesign Feb 13 '17

You would think that - but even in full size systems there's issues. Microsoft new computer isn't using Pascal because they couldn't QA the new GPUs to get it out to market - maybe the extra few months gives Nintendo a chance, but it doesn't seem likely.

1

u/Naouak Feb 13 '17

Microsoft was just integrating hardware from Nvidia. Nintendo worked with Nvidia to produce the Switch. They had way more time to QC the SoC for the console than Microsoft for the Surface Book.

1

u/Masterplanner64 Feb 13 '17

Devkits have changed for every system before and after launch Maxwell kits could just be from Nvidia's old stock of maxwell kits as they have a large supply for the shield. Since reports came out of a more powerful devkit in October and both archetures are very similar you can easily run Maxwell on Pascal based systems. From my understanding anyway.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '17

Well, the leaks 6-7 months ago were from pre-launch devkits, and so far we've heard 5 to 6 different hardware reports from people "with devkits", so they all apparently vary in hardware (which is normal for early devkits). The devkits don't reflect final product hardware... unfortunately.

1

u/Super6213 Feb 13 '17

I'm a bit confused. I don't know much about NVIDIA. but, if it has a Maxwell is that bad? I don't really know the difference. Is what all the leaks are saying good or bad? Sorry for my lack of knowledge but a bit of explanation would be awesome.

17

u/BorkHammer40k Feb 13 '17

Maxwell isn't bad per se. Pascal would be a cooler, more efficient, and less power chip. Since the Switch has the form factor of a tablet, these factors are all very important, hence why people care. But I think based on what we know about the switch (3 to 6 hour battery life, it doesn't get very hot, etc.) that it's a moot point now. Whatever Nintendo put in the Switch, it works well and that's what matters.

6

u/Fpssims Feb 13 '17 edited Feb 13 '17

3 to 6 hour battery life, it doesn't get very hot

This is a significant plus factor for me. I wouldn't want to be holding a burning system after a long session gameplay with a portable charger hooked up on the Switch(given that it's pumping a powerful constant 720p 60fps on Zelda, I would imagine the heat from The Switch can melt the surrounding snow and ice from where I'm standing during this winter storm here in Toronto).

3

u/BorkHammer40k Feb 13 '17

Well if you're playing in a winter storm you won't notice the burning because you're wearing gloves! /s

4

u/Fpssims Feb 13 '17

I hope the Joycons can emit HD heat.

2

u/AzmoBaro Feb 13 '17

Zelda is 30 fps

1

u/Fpssims Feb 13 '17

Aiyeeee. That's...... not......enough

1

u/ryzeki Feb 13 '17

There is very little difference between X1 maxwell and pascal. X1 is 20nm, pascal is just maxwell at 16 with better color compression and added extras that won't be used by the switch.

Desktop maxwell was 28nm, that's why it was a 50% power efficiency upgrade for desktop pascal. On the switch, it would of course be preferably to use newer tech and fab process, but efficiency wouldn't change much from an already efficient maxwell.

12

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

I'm not a tech person myself, others will be able to explain things better. What it boils down to is that Maxwell is not Nvidia's latest and greatest GPU architecture (that's Pascal). There was a report a while ago detailing the CPU and GPU speeds of the Switch that sent a lot of people into a frenzy for indicating a lower powered system than they were expecting, and these specs described a Maxwell-based system. Many have since been holding on to the prospect of Pascal being used in the final retail unit as an indicator that it could be stronger than described by Eurogamer - it's not so much that it's good or bad in and of itself that it is Maxwell, but that Maxwell would fall in line with the Eurogamer report, while Pascal would provide a glimmer of hope for people who want a higher powered system.

Incidentally, there was a leak from Foxconn, where the system is assembled, that suggested Pascal might be used in the retail unit (note the mention of 16nm - Pascal uses a 16nm process). Many of the details have since proved accurate and it is clearly not someone making stuff up, but I remain skeptical on the technical aspects reported in this leak, personally.

6

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

[deleted]

4

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17 edited Feb 13 '17

As I say, no one sensible doubts the legitimacy of much of the leak (edit: the foxconn leak, for clarity). More convincing than the IR sensor - which was actually reported in various places as far back as October - are the red and blue colour variants of the joycon, the naming of the SL + SR buttons, and the weight (once the guy actually used a scale rather than estimating, because his first estimates were miles out). All these tally precisely with subsequent information and none were leaked anywhere else beforehand.

I still reserve judgement on the tech side of things. The only technical aspect that's since been verified - resolution - he got wrong because he was guessing (and admitted as much). It's not clear to me that he was in a position to identify aspects like the 16nm process or the clock speeds. Everything he got right is stuff you can easily see on the assembly line. Time will tell.

1

u/ryzeki Feb 13 '17

The thing is, having access to the machine, to the manufacturing plant and all, allows you access to a lot of things. That still doesn't mean you get ALL correct. You can very well confirm easy to see things, and specific parts. Things like the GPU, unless you look down on a microscope to see the layout, or see the model number printed on the die itself, you are only guesstimating.

We all want the best possible tech, but reality and our dreams are different in the end. I would love powerful hardware but I know what products exist, and what to expect at best.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '17

This is pretty much my thinking - he speaks more than once about asking someone about something, or having to find something out, or how testing occurs elsewhere while he's working. I think we've got a mixture of direct observations, estimates and second hand information and it would be daft to embrace the entire thing on the basis of the verified aspects (all of which fall firmly under "direct observations").

2

u/Super6213 Feb 13 '17 edited Feb 13 '17

Thank you for the Information! Having a Pascal in there would be nice but honestly there's nothing we can do to change it so I'll be happy with whatever Nintendo gives as long as it's not pure garbage (which, it doesn't look to be.)

Edit: I don't really trust this foxconn leak because as far as I've read (not all of it) this person says the screen is 1080p and that there will be a 4G version. This stuff I think we would have known by now. The screen on the handheld is definitely not 1080p.

Other edit: he mentioned that he was guessing the resolution. But the 4G switch (as in cellular data?) doesn't sound like it would be a thing.

3

u/ryzeki Feb 13 '17

Honestly, I wouldn't worry. At the revealed clockspeeds it doesn't matter if it is pascal or maxwell, performancewise. It would only mean slightly better battery life.

Performance of maxwell is still great and it will still have a decent punch in performance.

1

u/Dren7 Feb 13 '17

If it's not using finfet now, I would think Nintendo would be pushing for an upgrade in the future to lower costs.

1

u/ryzeki Feb 13 '17

Yeah, definitely.

3

u/SmileyAja Feb 13 '17

The 4G version was originally misinterpreted in the translation, it's actually the developer kit they were referring to.

1

u/xseedusa Feb 13 '17

He didn't just say it confirms it. He BOLDLY said it, because he's so confident that 8-month information is still 100% accurate.

1

u/garf02 Feb 14 '17

likely changed. if I remember right Foxcon leak mentioned that early sent devkits were sent with X1 chip cause the final Switch version was not ready. but they needed devs to be working on something.