Nintendo Switch (Currently Plagued) - Here we shit post about the new Nintendo console, The Switch

[Baraka Obama]

I swear they must run their shit on a dialup modem in the middle of nowhere in North Korea. I've never seen any online service run so consistently slowly. Time of day, day of week, etc. makes no difference at all. It's consistently shit.

Isn't it due to the slow cpu? Anything downloaded needs to be unencrypted and decompressed and verified...

 

[moocow]

Isn't it due to the slow cpu? Anything downloaded needs to be unencrypted and decompressed and verified...

Nah. Extracting (all phases) is faster than compressing/encrypting. On modern CPUs it's negligible -- one of the reasons on-disk compression on filesystems like ZFS and btrfs are so effective. It can actually be faster to read a compressed block from disk and decompress it on the fly than it might be to have the same data uncompressed on the disk and wait for the reads (more I/O). CPUs and RAM are substantially faster than storage (even NVMe SSDs). There's some benchmarks on the project page for lz4 (a popular and fast algorithm) if you're curious. Even on comparably shitty hardware like the Switch SoC, decompression is still going to be a lot faster than reading equivalent data from storage.

 

[skykiii]

.... This is either complete insanity or the best game ever made.

 

[Baraka Obama]

Nah. Extracting (all phases) is faster than compressing/encrypting. On modern CPUs it's negligible -- one of the reasons on-disk compression on filesystems like ZFS and btrfs are so effective. It can actually be faster to read a compressed block from disk and decompress it on the fly than it might be to have the same data uncompressed on the disk and wait for the reads (more I/O). CPUs and RAM are substantially faster than storage (even NVMe SSDs). There's some benchmarks on the project page for lz4 (a popular and fast algorithm) if you're curious. Even on comparably shitty hardware like the Switch SoC, decompression is still going to be a lot faster than reading equivalent data from storage.

It's not negligible, even downloading things from steam on my ryzen 9 I see huge cpus spikes, this is at gigabit fibre speeds. The switch CPU is very slow and system use is even more limited, which seems like a natural bottleneck for network activity. I wouldn't be surprised if they are brotli compressing the partial objects to reduce bandwitdth costs which would make it even more slow.

 

[moocow]

even downloading things from steam on my ryzen 9 I see huge cpus spikes

The Steam client is verifying MD5 checksums, decompressing and writing to disk as the download progresses. If it's an update, and it's a delta patch, it's rewriting entire files to apply those patches. And they certainly aren't using lz4 (which was designed for speed above all else) -- it's either bzip2 or lzma now. That's the cause of the CPU spikes. Note that heavy disk I/O increases CPU usage a bit as well -- the system spends more time blocking on I/O and less time idle.

I assure you, lz4 in particular is a speed and space win, even on dog shit hardware. There's a reason it's the default choice for ZFS and btrfs.

 

[Baraka Obama]

The Steam client is verifying MD5 checksums, decompressing and writing to disk as the download progresses. If it's an update, and it's a delta patch, it's rewriting entire files to apply those patches. And they certainly aren't using lz4 (which was designed for speed above all else) -- it's either bzip2 or lzma now. That's the cause of the CPU spikes. Note that heavy disk I/O increases CPU usage a bit as well -- the system spends more time blocking on I/O and less time idle.

I assure you, lz4 in particular is a speed and space win, even on dog shit hardware. There's a reason it's the default choice for ZFS and btrfs.

I know a thing or two about this. Nobody is using LZ4 or BZIP2 for CDNs. It's either gzip or brotli compression. You would see the same checksums/verification, decompression, and writing for switch downloads that you do for steam.

Now try to do that on a <1ghz arm cpu on a thermally constrained tablet which limits system use to 1 cpu core... you can even see a worse case than this on 3ds, where New 3DS with faster CPU had upwards of 4X faster game downloads vs original 3DS. Standards are higher now, game size is higher, but CPU perf is still holding back nintendo downloads.

 

[Calandrino]

Anybody else sick of slow Nintendo servers when downloading games? It's much faster on Steam with the same internet.

If I buy something from the nintendo.com website, it doesn't automatically start downloading to the console anymore. Is it just me?

 

[Mysterious Figure]

I swear they must run their shit on a dialup modem in the middle of nowhere in North Korea. I've never seen any online service run so consistently slowly. Time of day, day of week, etc. makes no difference at all. It's consistently shit. They have never understood "online" in general and have always fucked it up in every iteration and attempt. Switch 2 requiring an internet connection to unlock Switch 1 games and even just enable the unit on launch day is going to be a fucking disaster.

It's insane that Switch 2 needs the internet to be unlocked. Nintendo should just release the console early instead of making everybody wait 2 weeks for no reason.

 

[Betonhaus]

didn't someone already rip one apart and realised that the Switch 2 doesn't actually come with a full OS, just enough to connect to the internet and download the full OS it needs to run?

 

[Amaranthy]

It's insane that Switch 2 needs the internet to be unlocked. Nintendo should just release the console early instead of making everybody wait 2 weeks for no reason.

Two weeks? it's like less than five days?

 

[moocow]

I know a thing or two about this. Nobody is using LZ4 or BZIP2 for CDNs. It's either gzip or brotli compression. You would see the same checksums/verification, decompression, and writing for switch downloads that you do for steam.

Now try to do that on a <1ghz arm cpu on a thermally constrained tablet which limits system use to 1 cpu core... you can even see a worse case than this on 3ds, where New 3DS with faster CPU had upwards of 4X faster game downloads vs original 3DS. Standards are higher now, game size is higher, but CPU perf is still holding back nintendo downloads.

I've worked a lot with ARM systems. lz4 and brotli decompression are near-instantaneous and lightweight. There is zero chance that decompression impacts download performance. And that's on 300 MHz systems with limited RAM. gzip isn't as fast in decompression, but is still pretty good. Unless your bandwidth is in the hundreds of megabytes per second, there is no way data is coming in faster than the CPU can handle.

It doesn't really matter anyway. Nintendo doesn't push near that much bandwidth from their servers to begin with and they've always been super slow no matter what system or bandwidth you hand it.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Wii U also had good online. Nintendo learned (some of) the wrong lessons from its failure.

Wasn't that the only online console they had that didn't require friend codes to be exchanged? Wii also had gifting games as a feature like Steam, which was neat.

 

[Gorbino]

The scene recently lost the creator of a famous "hacked firmware" called Kefir. He was Ukrainian and ardently supported the Ukrainian army. But at the same time, he himself was a draft dodger (oopsie). However, this week he was caught and forcibly sent to the front.

His project on github: https://github.com/rashevskyv/kefir

Proof (ukrainian):

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Nintendo Switch Lite $150 (& more) - Staples in-store-only VERY YMMV $149.99

The ad banner fine print says the $50 off ends 6/7 (photo #1). But each individual price tag states the prices are valid until 6/21 and 7/5, respectively (photo #2), so I would assume these sale prices will remain until they sell them (I highly doubt they'll need to do another round of clearance reduced pricing to sell them all away, but you're welcome to try and wait).

• $299.99 for Nintendo Switch OLED
• $269.99 for Nintendo Switch
• $149.99 for Nintendo Switch Lite

you can get used OLED models for $200 used right now. That's the way to go, everything else is a waste. these would be worth it for $80-$100 price

At some point, the price is good if it's possible to hack it and fill it with pirated games. I don't follow this scene very closely.

 

[Fcret]

Nintendo Switch Lite $150 (& more) - Staples in-store-only VERY YMMV $149.99


At some point, the price is good if it's possible to hack it and fill it with pirated games. I don't follow this scene very closely.

Pretty much everything after the initial run of Switches with the fuse gelee exploit needs a modchip. If you're a dab hand with a soldering iron, it's not too difficult but it's honestly not worth it compared to simply emulating the Switch on PC/Steam Deck.

 

[Betonhaus]

I wasn't really paying attention to the Switch to as kit only had a cart racing game, but MKW is turning out to be more filled then I initially anticipated. Not enough to pay $700 in local currency, but getting there

 

[Premium Gonzo]

I've got one of the original release switches wondering if it's worth trying to mod in the long run and if its even possible now with all the recent patches?

 

[whatever I feel like]

I've got one of the original release switches wondering if it's worth trying to mod in the long run and if its even possible now with all the recent patches?

Original Switches are forever moddable due to a hardware oversight.

 

[Betonhaus]

Wasn't the Switch supposed to have some write once memory that could never be wiped or altered except by firmware updates, which just put more data on the unused sections of the memory?

 

[Soggy Floppa]

Wasn't the Switch supposed to have some write once memory that could never be wiped or altered except by firmware updates, which just put more data on the unused sections of the memory?

the X1 chip has physical fuses that the software can physically destroy, its used when the console updates to block any sort of downgrading. You can bypass it by updating the firmware via homebrew