It could be, sure. Which has minimum specs well south of even the PS4, release date merely three years ago. I'm not saying it's a bad game. (Skyrim is the last Bethesda game I enjoyed--man, FO4 was bad.) But it is not really a benchmark in 2016.
This is a higher-end Tegra. It's impressive-for-a-mobile-chip, but mobile chips still aren't really impressive. Maybe the base has additional GPU muscle or something, who knows. But the existence of a video-rendered Skyrim on-screen isn't really indicative of "graphical prowess" in the first place.
Is there any other console that can play Skyrim smoothly on the go? No, which is why this is impressive. We'll have to wait for the specs to be announced before we can confirm that the docked console is behind the rest.
Why limit it to "consoles"? An iPad could, depending on the desired render quality. The A9x is probably beefier than the Tegra in this, or is at least competitive. (edit: "Probably" is a strong word, given that this is coming out in early 2017, but at least in the ballpark.)
Don't get me wrong, I think the device looks cool and I was already planning on buying one. But "playing Skyrim" just doesn't tell you anything, especially when the video on-screen is plastered there with After Effects. It's sloppy thinking to jump on that as meaningful anythings.
I've yet to see an iPad game at the level of Skyrim. Yes, you could get the same graphics, but I doubt you could get one with such scale onto an iPad.
I understand that the trailer is not meant to reflect the exact console. But remember that Bethesda is behind this, and so we have their seal of approval, so to speak.
I'm not saying the games exist on the iPad platform. I'm saying that the hardware is certainly competitive with this and so it's not some super-impressive thing that this is coming out with Skyrim. Like, we have this hardware already.
No inside information, but I can make some educated guesses? It's an nVidia Tegra-platform SoC in a mobile form factor, which limits its TDP. That it has a fan grille suggests that it can run a little hotter than a no-fan device like an iPad, but you're still fighting with battery life. Like, there's only so much you can do with that, plus the needs to keep costs down in order to be price-competitive with the PS4 and Xbox One. By "we have this hardware already", I was referring to how preposterously tight Apple has gotten with their A9x/A10 hardware in terms of CPU and GPU performance. It's still not as competitive versus Intel in general use cases as Apple wants you to think it is, but it is very, very good and is definitely no worse than "competitive" against nVidia's current Tegra line.
I don't think I'm saying anything particularly shocking. And none of that's to say it can't be a good, satisfying device. I mean, Christ, I was playing my Vita this morning, and the chip at the heart of that is Frito-Lay. Just that the gamer conception of "power" really isn't...real? And that there are a lot of things that have to be considered in terms of that.
Fair enough. I'm honestly hoping that the base has some kind of GPU acceleration a la Surface Book. Otherwise, it's going to be treated the same way as the Wii U by third party devs.
"Release date three years ago" was referring to the PS4. Fallout 4's minimum specs on PC, even (i.e., not an optimized platform), are lower than the PS4-equivalents on that platform. I would expect a mobile device (and the Switch is on a Tegra platform, it's a mobile device), three years further down the line, to be able to be at least in the ballpark of "competitive", with allowances and restrictions (lowered draw distance, simplified shaders, maybe reduced texture size depending on the memory budget), with a machine packing a Radeon HD7870.
My point is that re-engine'ing the game doesn't change the assets involved (stuff like texture quality or shader complexity has a pretty significant impact on performance), nor (necessarily) the visual effects involved. You could scale UE3 down to run on absolutely laughable hardware and games today still regularly support 640x480 and other silly things. Being "on an engine" means something only when you have hard hardware requirements, like requiring support for SM 4.0 or whatever.
FO4/GameBryo has really weird hardware requirements in general that make it less conductive to mobile ports. It's super sensitive to single-threaded performance, it's super sensitive to memory bandwidth (very unusual for a game), it eats a whole bunch of GPU power in city areas, etc. Portables tend not to be known for those things. It also really prefers to be run on a SSD so it doesn't stutter when it's paging game-world cells in and out, although that could probably be tuned.
I generally agree that you can probably stuff it into a portable with some compromises within the next couple years, sure. But I'm glad I'm not a Bethesda employee, that's going to suck and I think the compromises are going to be big.
Re-engine'ing a game is a massive undertaking. There's a huge amount of work involved in porting mission systems and event triggers and so on between the two systems. I don't really think it's feasible, I'd see it as much more likely that they port the engine rather than porting the game to another engine (which AFAIK is what they did with Skyrim Special Edition).
It's especially unlikely because Bethesda has put a huge amount of work into developer/world-building tooling for GameBryo. They have been on a single engine for almost 20 years now (since Morrowind) and it's going to be a tough sell to throw all that tooling and experience away, even with the engine making ominous creaking sounds (as the FO4 codebase clearly is doing).
It clearly needs it though. Like, STALKER was playable on a laptop processor and iGPU ten years ago and the newer games are on par with FO4 visually in most ways. In many RPG senses it was even more flexible and more ambitious (A-Life was similar to Radiant AI). FO4 just runs like shit compared to how dated it looks and plays.
I'm not sure you're actually disagreeing with me here? SkyrimSE is using the upgraded "Creation Engine" variant of the same Gamebryo engine; that's what I was referring to. It's still Skyrim-era assets, for the most part, and that has a much bigger impact on performance and suitability for Tegra-esque hardware than the particulars of that flavor of the underlying engine.
I think you were downvoted because you misread the comment you were replying to, which generally isn't considered productive. It happens, it's not abuse of the system.
(You were then downvoted for complaining about votes, because that is universally considered negative behavior.)
You can always email hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like.
Telling you what you wanted to know wasn't an invitation to argue with me. I am the OP to whom you refer. I didn't mix the dates; you misread the antecedent to which "release date" referred and, in an effort to treat your response in good faith, I issued a mea culpa I then edited out when I realized that I had had it straight in the first place.
What did you had straight in the first place, the fact that your comment wasn't clear about if you where talking about Fallout 4 (like you said in the mea culpa that you now removed) or Skyrim Special Edition, or that you said it "came out 3 years ago"?
Because neither Fallout 4, Skyrim original and Skyrim Special Edition "came out 3 years ago", and if you weren't going around editing your comments, my comment would be both factual and properly addressing your original comment.
The PS4 came out three years ago (almost exactly). Skyrim's recommended PC specs are somewhere below the PS4 in terms of performance. It's not an unclear sentence, and it isn't one that I edited.
You were mistaken. Your fictional Internet points aren't important. You should stop.
This is a higher-end Tegra. It's impressive-for-a-mobile-chip, but mobile chips still aren't really impressive. Maybe the base has additional GPU muscle or something, who knows. But the existence of a video-rendered Skyrim on-screen isn't really indicative of "graphical prowess" in the first place.