Nintendo Plans Switch Model With Bigger Samsung OLED Display, 4K Output

According to Bloomberg, Nintendo is planning to unveil a model of its Switch gaming console equipped with a bigger Samsung OLED display and support for 4K. It's expected to arrive before Christmas. From the report: Samsung Display Co. will start mass production of 7-inch, 720p-resolution OLED panels as early as June with an initial monthly target of just under a million units. The displays are slated for shipment to assemblers around July. The gaming community has speculated online about the introduction of an OLED or organic light-emitting diode screen, but Nintendo has stayed mum and President Shuntaro Furukawa said in February his company has no plans to announce a new Switch "anytime soon." Samsung's involvement is the strongest indication that Nintendo is serious about updating the console, and on a large scale.

Nintendo decided to go with rigid OLED panels for the new model, the people said, a cheaper but less flexible alternative to the type commonly used for high-end smartphones. The latest model will also come with 4K ultra-high definition graphics when paired with TVs, they said. That could intensify a longstanding complaint of developers, who have struggled with the difference in resolution between handheld and TV modes and now face a bigger gap between the two.

Re:

[stealth_finger]

By that time you might actually be able to get one in the shops at least.

Re:That would be 4K UPSCALING

[olsmeister]

That's OK. My eyes are too old to tell the difference.

Re:That would be 4K UPSCALING

[Guspaz]

The rumour is DLSS. Which is actually a pretty ideal fit for the Switch.

Re:

[snowshovelboy]

The upscaling would happen in the GPU. Checkmate Anonymous Coward.

Displays are expensive

[backslashdot]

If you want to sell an iot device, you can do all the compute (arduino) and WiFi for under $5 but if want to add a display the BOM cost shoots up to $50+ and that in turn means you have to make your device expensive. Someone needs to figure out how to make a diet cheap .. I am talking like $2 display thatâ(TM)s say at minimum 5 inches.

Re:Displays are expensive

[Guspaz]

The amount of compute power in a $5 arduino is orders of magnitude less than even the Tegra X1 in the current Switch. It's a tiny microcontroller with no GPU. It's not a useful comparison.

IoT

[DrYak]

The parent poster was thinking of *IoT devices*, and complaining that for *his use-cases* the display is the most expensive component, and dreaming about cheaper screen.

This isn't directly related to Switch nor its chipset, but to display pannels.

(Though, if you add a hardware h264 video decompression chips, and use a Cortex-M based variate of microcontroller boards (although Arduino's are more expensive than 5$), the resulting device could be a half decent client for cloud-based gaming like Google Stadia,

Are there a lot of other "systems"

[bobstreo]

that only do 720P without pumping it through an HDMI port?

I would think, given the prices of 4k tv's that you could at least get to 1080P, but like most anime, higher resolution for Nintendo games may not buy you much...

I mean you can pick up an octo-core 1080P tablet with 4GB of memory for under $100 US.

Re:Are there a lot of other "systems"

[Guspaz]

The limited screen resolution isn't due to some technical limitation relating to the display itself, it's a power consumption thing. They could have put a 1080p screen in the Switch, and they could have clocked the Tegra X1 high enough to drive it (they dramatically underclock it), but the battery on the launch model would have lasted around an hour and a half. People already complained a lot about the official battery life of as little as 2.5 hours in the original launch model, and celebrated the 4.5 hour battery life of the later revision (it was from a die shrink). And even achieving that battery life required clockspeeds low enough that it can't always maintain 720p30 in some games.

I suppose you could say it's also a cost thing. These things are built to a cost. It launched in 2017 with a 20nm TSMC processor when TSMC had already been shipping 10nm chips for a while. A new Switch today could probably push much higher than 720p with reasonable battery life if they put a 5nm chip in there, but they won't. They'll use an older die process to keep costs down.

Re:

[Pierre Pants]

That $100 tablet has a screen that's unsuitable for games, with huge response time ("grey-to-grey") that smears moving images, high latency, and probably PWM or other annoying stuff. The non-Lite Switch has something like a minimum of 4.5 hours play time when the brightness is at maximum and the game is very demanding processing-wise, and more like 7 hours on average. According to Nintendo (it actually provides this info, which is suprirising), after about 800 charge cycles, the battery's charge capacity dr

Re:

[stealth_finger]

They are hardly pushing the bounds of graphical quality in the nintendo camp. 1080 probably seems like overkill for the small screensize.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Great!

[CaptainLugnuts]

When can I buy one as a module with an HDMI input board? The race car dashboard needs an upgrade.

Name

[Anonymous Coward]

They should call it something nice, like the 'Switch We You Us'.

Why 720p?

[HalAtWork]

Why not a 1080p screen and run games as in docked mode while in handheld?

Re:

[darkain]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Shut up and take my money!

[Just A Gigolo]

...so I can be excited to wait if the new Switch will arrive sooner than my XBOX Series X