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Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas. How does Nintendo pull it off?
by spaceman_2020 3y ago
Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas.
How does Nintendo pull it off?
- qwertywert_ 3y agoKind of a spoiler for people trying to play the game fresh.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spaceman_2020 3y agoNoted. Edited my comment
- censor_me 3y ago[dead]
- Dalewyn 3y agoThe better question you should be asking is why does everyone else need 300GB of disk space that transfers at over 7GB/s, 32 CPU cores at 6GHz, a video card worth $3000 dollars, and RAM sizes measured in gigabytes with 3 digits just for a fucking game? At some point I have to wonder if the reason we have so much computing power is so we can use that computing power.
- meheleventyone 3y agoGaming has been a massive driver of hardware for a very long time in a way that can always be looked at as unneeded. We surpassed more compute for the sake of compute a while ago. The neat thing is that there are still new things to do with it. Real-time path tracing will be the next thing as well as moving more compute over to the GPU. We don’t need it but it will open new possibilities. And it seems less wasteful than running ten copies of Chrome to support a few desktop apps. The new Zelda demonstrates something that’s been true of every console generation. They are a fixed platform and the later games are always considerably better at utilising the hardware.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoYeah, just look at FromSoft's output for the PS4 for example. Bloodborne came out very early, and while it looks great, it doesn't hold a candle to Elden Ring. Though gameplay wise I have to say I prefer it. Elden Ring has too much stuff in it(crafting, gathering, tons of cookie cutter dungeons, and too many easy boss fights) for me. Bloodborne is very stripped down and devoid of fluff. I can sort of keep the whole game in my head and I love that about a game.
- shapefrog 3y agoFurthermore, why does a 2023 released game, in development since 2018, run like utter garbage on said spec hardware that is orders of magnitude more performant than last years specs ...
- GaelFG 3y agoIf you are serious (I do game development for a living and work on graphical assets daily so that seems evident for me, but I totally understand it can be arcane stuff) it's simply that they choose a stylized graphical style avoiding a lot of costly details you generaly find in hight end games. They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lot of engine if you want realistic shadows on higtly detailled environment) and their shader materials probably use very simple and low resolution maps. All these thing decrease the asset footprint by orders of magnitude. If you want to look in more detail in can look and compare a similar rendering in unity. Taking two unity exemple you can compare : - 'chop chop' a game using a similar rendering style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE, if you take the pig and its environment showed in the video and go in the github repository you can see they only use one texture map : an albedo one. All the models (pig + environment) weight about 6mB of textures and 350kB of models. and are sufficient to have the full main character and an environment. - a 'realistic PBR workflow gun asset' on asset store (choose randomly but seems nice, realistic and containing only the gun so we can see download size) : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps-weapon-akm-180663#content https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps.... The workflow need 6 maps (there are 7 here but you generaly only use either a normal map or a heightmap) The pack weight 35MB. It's only the gun, you lack a full character handling it and the environment. While I really like zelda, even with stylized graphics the game look a bit outdated for me. The cellshaded characters are fluid and pretty but the 'low resolution texture and low poly models' bother me a bit especially on environments. The artistic direction is really good but technically I can only think they are held back by the hardware. As a game developer, I totally want to use all the resources i know i can find on the target hardware. Trust me even today they are lots of features game designer dream to put in game and cant because computing resources are still limited ^^. Do game NEEDS them to be fun ? Of course not, but COULD they be fun experiences ? I think yes :)
- Dalewyn 3y ago>If you are serious I absolutely am serious; a lot of games and software in general today demand far more system resources than they have any reasonable right to. Don't give me "but the textures!" and the like either, optimize that stuff better instead. Whether it's Windows 10/11 or Call of Duty or Elite: Dangerous or Chrome or whatever strikes your fancy, software today has no business demanding the resources they do. Lest we forget, the hardware we can buy today would have been considered supercomputers just a few years ago. You want to tell me that will choke and croak just doing mundane stuff like playing games or browsing the internet?
- m_rpn 3y agoWe need this power because companies need to keep selling us new stuff and also because developers nowadays can't optimize their games too much since their managers make them do ten times the work, in half the time, and for one third of the pay they had on the 1990s.
- PurpleRamen 3y agoBecause this hardware is for a different experience. Zelda is nice, but the style has its limits. It's kinda like asking why Disney invests hundreds of millions of Dollar into Marvel and Star Wars-Movies, when you can also make a cheaper but polished animation-movie with a fraction of that price. It's simply not the same.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoI doubt anyone is asking that question since none of what you said is true. This just seems like rant of someone wanting to play recent games and not wanting to upgrade their computer. If that's the case, just say that instead of whining about a trend that's been going on for 40 years.
- gowld 3y agoNot even that. The games are playable on low end computers, with lower details. It's just content-free ranting.
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- derefr 3y agoMechanical sympathy. Rather than designing a game on a PC to take arbitrary advantage of modern tech and then trying to cram it down onto a more limited console platform, Nintendo ask, at design time, what the most interesting things they can do are that would work perfectly within the constraints of the platform — and then do that. (And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.) Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)
- realusername 3y agoAnd also Nintendo has a long history of developing games for outdated hardware, their consoles were never that powerful
- Algent 3y agoI wouldn't say seamlessly but it run okay yeah. There is a digital foundry video already on the technical side of thing, apparently it's using AMD FSR1
- SCdF 3y agoI think it's great that it maintains a solid 30 and seems to have very few issues. Another interesting perspective is that it—a game made at the end of the Switch's life (we hope)—is only marginally prettier and more polished than BOTW—a launch title. I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles, including third parties (I realise this is subjective). I'm not sure of another console where you don't make graphical progress in 6 years of it existing. I don't know why this is, or even if it's a failing, I just think it's interesting.
- philsnow 3y ago> I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles +1; I don't usually care much about graphics (I play ASCII roguelikes for crying out loud), but there have been several moments in BotW where I found myself soaking in the scenery because it was gorgeous.
- rkangel 3y agoI think sometimes we conflate "graphical fidelity" with "beauty". I agree that BotW is one of the most beautiful games I've played, and that's an artistic achievement not a technical one. They do of course go hand in hand to some extent - sometimes you need technical tools for artistic vision, but you don't need high-tech for beauty.
- nikanj 3y agoI guess they don't think optimization is evil
- johlits 3y agoNintendo games are like well crafted watches, they may not show the time perfectly but they are damn well optimized under the hood.
- illwrks 3y agoPerfect analogy.
- FeistySkink 3y agoHow does that work? What are these watches optimized for then?
- daveloyall 3y agoI think the commenter means that mechanical watches don't keep time as well as digital watches. So, I guess they are optimized for mechanical beauty instead of timekeeping.
- FeistySkink 3y agoThat you never see? So a piece of software might be amazingly-engineered but doesn't do the main function well - is that the analogy?
- peanuty1 3y agoThe graphics are pretty basic (like 2006-era) compared to modern AAA titles on other consoles.
- dirtyid 3y agoIs there actually no loading screens? While not a deal breaker, BOTW with zero waiting 5-10s for fast travel or shrines or loading saves would have been a MUCH smoother experience.
- slackfan 3y agoThere are loading screens. It's basically same as BOTW.
- shp0ngle 3y agoLook at the latest Pokemon game, it runs horribly on Switch. Even they don’t pull it off…
- dpatterbee 3y agoPokemon games are developed by Game Freak, not Nintendo's in-house studio (Nintendo EPD).
- PurpleRamen 3y agoPokemon-Games are not from Nintendo itself. They own shares of the franchise, but it seems they are overall not directly involved into the game-development, unlike with Zelda. And Pokemon in general has different problems regarding quality. They are more time-constrained, stressed, and seem to have some internal struggle in the last years. While Zelda seems to had the liberty to develop peacefully for years on their own.
- evantbyrne 3y agoTotK has also basically been in development for a decade. The game represents peak Switch optimization.
- slackfan 3y agoNot even close. It's a BOTW expansion pack writ large, there's little performance or graphical difference between TOTK and BOTW, a game that released six years ago.
- kibwen 3y agoThis is apparently incorrect. I'm avoiding detailed tech reviews right now so as to not spoil myself, but reports are that the original BOTW held itself back in order to accommodate the Wii U. Draw distances appear to be higher, objects are more detailed and there are more of them, there are more LODs, and the framerate is now reliably 30 FPS in all but the most demanding scenes (which sounds like faint praise, but if you've ever played the original, is a definite improvement). It helps that the original game was utterly gorgeous, thanks to inspired art direction.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt's using proven technology and they didn't push any boundaries, graphics wise; Breath of the Wild also came out for the Wii U, which is nearly 11 years old now and even at the time didn't really try to push any performance boundaries.
- slackfan 3y agoSame way they pulled it off for the original game - BOTW, considering it's the exact same engine with little to no graphical changes.
- fartsucker69 3y agono offense to nintendo and fans, but fidelity wise the game looks like an early ps3 game and runs at 30 fps with dips in certain areas and very regular dips when using certain game mechanics. I can count the triangles on a lot of geometry visibly, and the textures are so blurred it looks like you take any modern PC game and only render the lowest available level of detail of all the textures. I can count the pixels in the shadows on the floor and lighting wise the game is extremely basic (it doesn't need to be more because of the art style). most effects you see in the game are literally blurry billboarded (but granted alpha blended) sprites, including the clouds that are so important in this games visuals. and to top it off we're in 2023 with half the people or more on 4k screens and the game doesn't even manage native 900p most of the time. the art design of the game is just designed well around those constraints. very well. but the devs likely did nothing super special to make it run well.
- cdelsolar 3y agoyeah none of that matters, if the gameplay is amazing. BOTW was amazing and this one looks to have surpassed it from reviews.
- pb7 3y agoOriginal comment: >Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas. >How does Nintendo pull it off? Because it looks like two decade old game. No one is arguing that it can be fun, but it looks awful.
- zac23or 3y agoPriorities. For Nintendo, size matters. Time also matters. In an old interview, Someone from Nintendo says that the time to put the disc in the Wii and be able to play Zelda needs to be less than 30sec. A great example is the size of Super Mario Odyssey being 5.7GB and a save file from NBA2k18 being 5GB. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/super_mario_odysseys_file_size_is_only_a_little_bigger_than_an_nba_2k18_save_file https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/super_mario_odysse...
- esprehn 3y agoApparently the save data was really only 75MB. I'm not sure what could use 5GB in save data... dynamically generated FMV?
- nikanj 3y agoNintendo save: bit-optimised tightly packed binary NBA savegame: json encoded in xml, run through a base64 because < in team names was breaking saves, all packed in YAML because the new summer intern couldn’t find a parser library for anything else
- kibwen 3y agoNote that all Switch games have to be small, out of technical necessity. The Switch only comes with 32 GB of internal storage, and that also gets used for your game saves, your screenshots/videos, and the OS itself. If Nintendo wants to offer digital downloads, and if it doesn't want to require users to go out and buy an SD card to expand their storage (which, to be clear, you should anyway for convenience), then they have to keep game sizes small.