 I am sure by now you have seen the headlines. The next Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, is going to face a backwards compatibility problem. Don't presume that the Switch 2 will have backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility isn't happening. I get it. I understand what's happening here and we need to talk about this because I think the reports are wrong and I also think the source of the reports while somebody who is very well respected here on YouTube and in the development community is overstating the actual issue. That being said we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers and if we can get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out we'll be giving away a collector's edition of Tears of the Kingdom. So the pin set, the steel book, the art book, the poster and that lovely box. Guys, please hit that subscribe button and help us on our road to 100k and let's get into this video. So modern vintage gamer is at it again. He's been sort of beating the same drum now for a couple of years on backwards compatibility. Really since Nintendo put up this slide, this slide shows a number of interesting things most notably that Nintendo plans to carry some things forward to their next system. And the biggest thing here you obviously see is Nintendo accounts, there's a big emphasis on Nintendo accounts being carried forward but this is more than just Nintendo accounts. You see there's also that addition of value added services, now this likely refers to Nintendo Switch Online in addition to Nintendo account right? And modern vintage gamer even in his video that he put out there stated that yeah NSO, those games easily emulated, they will be carried forward and that should continue to grow. But there's also this extra circle that often gets ignored called expanding Nintendo IP which encapsulates the Nintendo Switch and it's integrated hardware software and that next device along with obviously other things and you know this includes the movies and the theme parks and all that stuff in between of course but these devices would heavily be part of that. Now the interesting part of course is that a lot of us just assume there will be backwards compatibility, the 3DS have backwards compatibility to the DS, the Wii U to the Wii and so on and so forth. It's actually been very common throughout Nintendo's history, the Wii could play GameCube games at least in the first couple of years before they ended up dropping that support. So this isn't new, Nintendo's been down this road before but the arguments modern vintage gamer makes for why it's not possible now well here I'll let him explain it himself. Let's assume that the new Nintendo Switch model has a new SOC which is a generational leap over the current Tegra X1 that the system currently houses and it has more power, more RAM and possibly 4K visuals via modern reconstruction techniques either by DLSS, FSR or whatever that totally makes sense right. It's also irrelevant to this discussion about how much more powerful the new Nintendo hardware might be. For this discussion the focus is purely on the SOC. Of course we know that Nvidia developed the Tegra X1 which is using the old Maxwell architecture and we expect that Nvidia will host the SOC of the new Nintendo Switch model, perhaps using Lovelace or Ampere, the actual SOC has been rumoured but that's not really that important. All we know is that it's a different architecture or binary incompatible with a Tegra X1 even though both are ARM64 based. This means Nintendo can focus their new SDK for all intents and purposes as an iteration of the current Switch SDK with specific changes for the new hardware. This makes sense because developers can easily migrate over to the newer hardware and have a very familiar SDK to work with. The GPU stack is rumoured to run NVN2, an iteration of NVN that runs on the Switch although that particular leak as of the making of this video has no direct linkage to a new Nintendo Switch model. It's suggested that NVN2 will power the new Switch and it makes sense but at this time it's only speculation. So Nvidia powers the current Switch and Nvidia will power the next generation model. So backward compatibility should be easy right? It's Nvidia, it's ARM based, it's a newer SOC, a call to draw a triangle on the screen on the Switch should be one to one backward compatible with drawing a triangle on screen on a newer piece of hardware right? Well the answer is no, in fact this is where I've hit a bit of a junction trying to understand Nintendo's strategy. Let's talk about how software runs on the Switch, when you install a Switch game it sits on top of the operating system known as Horizon OS. This physical game data itself comes built in with what's known as Nintendo Shared Object or NSO files and this is not the same as the Nintendo Switch online NSO that you may have heard of. These system objects that are brought in embeds a full Tegra X1 Maxwell GPU driver stack inside of every single Nintendo Switch game regardless of first or third party. Any shaders that are pre-compiled are also bundled with the game and this is the root cause of the backward compatibility problem. A new SOC to power a new Switch hardware will simply not be binary compatible with this code even though it's still on ARM64 architecture. You might be wondering on my PC I can simply update my GPU drivers when I get a new graphics card so why is it possible to do it on my PC but not possible to do it on a next generation piece of Nintendo hardware? Because the GPU driver stack is not statically bundled into the game, drivers are installed externally to the game as a dependency and when Nvidia updates its GPU drivers you know what simply works because its legacy around that is known as the unified driver architecture or UDA. This simply means that your existing games that target Nvidia GPU driver stack will work on any updated drivers and we know this to be true on the PC. On the Switch however UDA is mostly irrelevant because of its custom operating system horizon OS and again due to the embedded nature of the GPU driver stack. First thing he said is that it's a bit of a click madey video that plays on people's anxieties which I don't think is intentional however he does have a history of trolling people on Twitter. He also paints the situation as unique to the Switch but literally both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One uses pre-compiled shaders in their biggest titles including Sony first party games. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series were able to engineer compatibility into the hardware. This was also the solution Nintendo went with the Wii U according to Awada asked when talking about backwards compatibility. I do want to also note that they basically included a Wii chip in the Wii U. I just want to point that out that is a thing they did but he's actually talking about something like that except we wouldn't need the full Tegra X1 chip to make that work. Also the way we did it we had to reboot into a different mode that was obviously not ideal but that's not even there that could have been figured out software wise. Modern Vintage Gamer doesn't even actually give this as an option and also dismisses the idea that Switch 2 would be powerful enough to simply emulate Switch like Steam Deck does even though the T239 which is the rumored chip in the next system is a more powerful system on a chip than the one used in the Steam Deck. There are other incorrect or misrepresented information in this video. Like MVN 2, it's just MVN. There is no 2 and to say there is no link to Nintendo hardware and that it's just speculation is clearly wrong. MVN itself was announced the same day as Switch as an NVIDIA custom API for Switch hardware. It's only used to create Switch software and I'm not even sure you can get legal access to it without Nintendo dev licenses. Furthermore, the only hardware it is built around is the T210 which is the Tegra X1 slash Arista, the T214 which is again the Tegra X1 plus Mariko, and the T239 which is the rumored chip for the next system called Drake. Just a lot of public and known information is dismissed by him so it's a bad video in my opinion because he either knows the information and dismisses it or he doesn't research the information and only makes the problem seem more difficult than it is. Trust me, if your 3-4 year old smartphone can play Switch games and they can, Drake isn't going to have a problem in software emulation and NVIDIA slash Nintendo have the ability to hardware emulate Maxwell shaders if needed. Now someone asked him regarding this very interesting modern vintage gamer video on backwards compatibility potential struggles, what solutions from his list would pretty much ensure that we at least get automatic improvement on games with dynamic resolution and better frame rates. And this is where Zombal list of some solutions that modern vintage gamer listed and well that he came up with. Software emulation is one way, making Drake shader compatible with Maxwell like PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series did with the RDNA architecture to do with GCN. This is something he didn't talk about but there is some hardware compatibility in that in those dev kits. Next up is putting two Maxwell SM inside the system and allowing higher clocks and that's the faster ram slash CPU. He mentioned putting the entire Tegra X1 in but you actually only need the Maxwell GPU cores which aren't that big in our you know the literally around 300 million slash Trey I'm not exactly sure what this means I'm not going to understand the technical jargon but apparently they're very tiny and could just be included as a subset to the chip itself the new chip placing the entire Tegra X1 SOC inside Drake which is something he mentions and then throwing away Drake and just allowing Mariko to run 50% faster. This doesn't fit any of the rumors of course this would be more like a you know new Nintendo switch situation like a Switch Pro where you're basically just running the Tegra X1 at stock which is the same chip so of course there would be backwards compatibility highly likely this is what they're going to do at this point maybe that's something they plan to do with OLED back in the day but at this point I doubt we're just going to see oh here's the Tegra X1 running at stock it's just it's just not something that I think Nintendo is really considering at this point. Now he had a few other things he wanted to add let's say he doesn't buy the backwards compatibility problem that was reignited by minor vintage gamer it's not really an issue. PS5 and X1 consoles had to deal with games having pre-compiled shaders but both were able to solve this for the RDNA architecture which is fundamentally different than what they were using before thanks to some compatibility work from AMD Sony and Microsoft there's no reason to think that Nvidia and Nintendo can't actually just do the same thing and I will note Nvidia has a long track record of making stuff compatible with their old hardware with their new hardware so Nvidia themselves has already done this just in the PC space on their own so I don't know why they couldn't just do that with Nintendo. Drake is apparently a custom part and will have Ampere and or Maxwell architectures share about three-fourths of their instruction sets and the CUDA cores are partly binary compatible patches are still required to push higher fidelity than switch games were programmed for and to introduce DLSS but if all you want to do is run dynamic resolution and maximize unlock frame rates Drake can offer that to switch games without patches so look what we learned from here is we actually have some potential specs for the switch to what we're I'm not going to dive into those right now I think like that's a video for a different day this stuff has been debated and talked about to death for a long time you know remember how we knew it's hey whatever this is looks like it's more powerful than a steam deck what are we talking about well we'll get into that later because that's always really really exciting stuff and because it's been debated and talked about for so long we have more concrete it's still speculation but speculation based on information that we could go over so we'll do that at a different video in a different time but what I want to focus on here is the fact that this problem that switch has with with backwards compatibility isn't unique to switch it is something that other systems had to deal with as well and I think modern vintage gamer dismisses the other systems having to deal with this problem because he thinks the leap in power made up the difference so they could just straight up emulate but it ignores that these systems happen to offer some hardware solutions as well to help with that so while there is probably some emulation involved from a software perspective there's also hardware patches in there enabling all of this so they already thought about backwards compatibility while designing the hardware and there's no reason that nintendo couldn't do this like if it's true all the nintendo needs to do is get the Maxwell GPU cores added to the die they could easily do that make the die just a smidge bigger and there you go you have exactly what you need you could run on the old GPU cores with the faster CPU cores of the new chip use similar instruction sets and next thing you know you have better stuff going on now this in order to get the improved visuals like if you want dls support that kind of stuff will require a patch uh that that's very notable that when we're talking about just backwards compatibility this just means playing switch games as is or playing switch games with the ability to unlock the frame rate and the dynamic resolution so if you have a game like the witcher 3 with dynamic resolution scaling well on the new chip it could just run at its max resolution all the time and could run at a higher frame rate since the frame rate is unlocked right so that could be something that can be added but if you want 4k textures uh an actual improvements to the visuals well that's going to require patches and stuff like that you can't avoid that so it's not as if we we get this new system and all of a sudden your copy of tears of the kingdom you buy on may 12th is going to run at 4k and look pretty out the box it will require a patch in order for that to happen but backwards compatibility isn't about necessarily taking advantage of all the new fancy dancy features of the new system it's just about being able to play the old games in the way we've been able to play them this whole time and then if if developers want to release patches and want to take advantage of stuff they can so that is sort of where all of this uh stems from by the way this is not me trying to insult modern vintage gamer in any way he is an actual game developer he has worked on several games being brought over to switch he has used switch dev units he knows what he's talking about and he's quite knowledgeable and he hasn't only developed for switch but i think he's a little bit dismissive of some things i know that we can't definitively prove that the mvm mentions for the new chip last year are nintendo but we also haven't seen mvm instruction set used in any other device to date it wasn't even used in in nvidia shield and that was using the same technology and had well hey like we games like twilight princess reported to it in hd believe it or not out in china so look it's very clear that it's probably for nintendo's custom chip that news broke last year we talked about it back then i just think that we're in this situation where he is he wants to put some skepticism out there because if the system doesn't have backwards compatibility he wants to be able to be like hey i told you so and if it does have backwards compatibility he can point to hey i never said he couldn't have backwards compatibility i just think it's dumb to assume it will i don't actually think it's that dumb if nintendo's carrying forward nintendo accounts they're carrying forward nintendo switch online why won't they just carry forward backwards compatibility they have a lot of experience using backwards compatibility through various methods in the past nvidia has a ton of experience making their hardware cross compatible i just don't think this is going to end up being as big of a problem it's not like they're jumping from nvidia to amd and that's going to suddenly change anything are going from arm cpu's to intel cpu's right like they're still using arm cpu cores they're still using nvidia technology while there is obviously work that would have to be done to make backwards compatibility work no one's arguing that i don't think it's nearly as complicated as he makes it out to be and i also think he's significantly undershooting what the power in a nintendo switch 2 will be um the fact that he starts off by saying by by talking about how it wouldn't be powerful enough to emulate switch games meanwhile we've got some evidence that it would be more than powerful enough to emulate switch games and yet still be at an affordable 350 to 400 price range that's what we'll talk about in a future video until then thank you guys for tuning in and i'll catch you in the next video