Rumor: Nintendo Switch Dev Kit Specs

[Scisca]

Sh1nn said:
From Sebbi,he works at RedLynx (Trials series)

56 CUDA cores = 512 flop/cycle (multiply-adds, fp32). At 1 GHz this is 0.5 TFLOP/s. Main memory is 4 GB and bandwidth is 25.6 GB/s.

Xbox One GPU is 3x wider. 768 SIMD lanes = 1536 flop/cycle (multiply-adds, fp32). At 853 MHz this is 1.3 TFLOP/s. Main memory is 8 GB and bandwidth is 68 GB/s. Plus ESRAM of course.

Xbox One raw performance and bandwidth are both roughly 2.5x. Even if we assume that Nvidia's GPU is more efficient, we are looking at roughly 2x difference.

This comparison completely ignores the fast ESRAM memory on Xbox One. It will further increase Xbox One's bandwidth advantage. And Xbox One's main memory BW is already pretty low compared to 176 GB/s of PS4. Double rate 16 bit math will of course help the Nvidia GPU a bit, but this only increases ALU performance (in limited cases) and only helps in cases where you are not texture samping bound (2:1 ALU to TEX rate makes you easily TEX bound) or memory bandwidth bound (25.6 GB/s means that you often are BW bound).

If these specs are true, this console is not fast enough to run Xbox One 900p ports at reduced 720p resolution. Quality also needs to be slightly scaled down. But these are rumoured specs, hopefully the real specs are a bit higher. I would like to see a new Pascal based GPU.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/nintendo-switch-hw-api-discussion.59709/page-3#post-1948968

One thing worth noting when it comes to the size and bandwith of RAM - this is a cutting edge nVidia product we're talking about and we're comparing it to old, old, old AMD tech. Watch vids comparing performance of Polaris and Pascal and take a look at RAM usage. Pascal GPU's use significantly less RAM to render the same scene (that's why they can get away with having 3GB@192bit bus vs AMD's 4GB@256bit bus). When Polaris uses 3.6 GB, Pascal uses 3 GB. They have superior tech when it comes to optimization and bandwith usage - and this is compared to Polaris, which is way ahead of the tech Xbone and PS4 are using. I know this won't bridge the whole gap, but let's keep that in mind, the gap will be smaller than what pure numbers indicate. Possibly around 4GB on Xbone/PS4 being equal to or less than 3GB on Switch.

Still, I hope that the console is more powerful than what we see in this thread.