Alleged Nintendo NX Leak Could Be Most Interesting Product Concept Yet
The leaks surrounding Nintendo's upcoming NX console continue to flow. Last week, a website claimed to have received exclusive information about Nintendo's console, and depending on your perspective, it will either sound great or lackluster, if you weren't big on the Wii or Wii U.
First and foremost, the biggest thing that would set the NX apart, if rumors are true, is that it'd be primarily a portable console - not portable like the PS Vita, but portable enough to pick up and walk around a house with. A TV wouldn't be removed from the equation entirely though; you'd be able to dock this portable unit and use it as a console in the traditional sense as well.
Nintendo NX Mock Render - Credit: Dualpixels.com
The render above is from website Dualpixels.com, and despite being made before last week's leaks, it so perfectly complements them - a portable console that can connect to a TV. And speaking of portable, that sounds an awfully lot like "mobile" and that leads to some other speculation.
It seems like the NX might be the first game console in quite a while to not have AMD under-the-hood. Instead, it has been bantered that NVIDIA's Tegra X1 could bring the company back into relevance for this particular market segment. While a powerful chip, the Tegra X1 is an aging one. So, it might be even more interesting if the X1 variant speculation was off the mark, and a Pascal-based Tegra be featured instead. Either way, even Tegra X1 could deliver a quality gaming experience for the Nintendo platform, so it's hard to call it a slouch.
Beyond the notion that NVIDIA could earning a design win for its mobile SoC in the NX, this move leads us to wonder what else that chip might allow Nintendo to do. The same Tegra chip is found in NVIDIA's SHIELD Android TV, after all, and that unit's capabilities are well established and very polished, with its new-found Plex Media Server capabilities. From pure gaming perspective, it also allows people to stream full-fledged PC games to their SHIELD device. Cloud gaming in general is something that the NX could feature too. However, again, nothing has been confirmed by Nintendo, so it's still all speculation at this point. Such features would definitely add to the uniqueness of the NX, however.
Here's a definite caveat, though: while the Wii U and Wii had great backwards-compatibility capabilities, if Nintendo moves over to a chip like the Tegra, then that is likely to go right out the window. It's a cloudy situation regardless if this is all pans out and NX could simply be just a new platform.
We're still probably way out from hearing official news on the NX from Nintendo, but the hype surrounding the console proves that if Nintendo plays its cards right, the NX could very well prove to be one of the company's most interesting products in years.
