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Slimebeast on 28 October 2016
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Soundwave said:

I will say 1/3-1/2 of an XBox One in actual real world performance.

Memory bandwidth is going to be the big problem for the Switch since I don't think they can realistically use high bandwidth eDRAM or eSRAM in a portable.

And even going with a 128-bit bus for the RAM is a problem potentially because that would increase battery usage and cost. My guess is they're making due with 25GB/sec 64-bit bus but leaning heavily on Nvidia's tiling approach to reduce bandwidth as much as possible with some faster memory caches.

If this thing is really capable of running PS4/XB1 ports, why in the world would you show a five year old Skyrim primarily in the teaser trailer? That Mario game also looked nowhere near a full generation leap past Mario 3D World, it looked very marginally better. Also Eurogamer's sources, which got everything basically right about the NS say 2-3x better performance than a Playstation 3 (not 4). 

Which for a portable system is pretty damn good. If you were expecting more than that, I just don't think it's reasonably possible with today's technology. 

You can't have a 20 watt portable, your battery will be dead in an hour. 

Deja vu.

I swear I just read some of these sentences elsewhere just a moment ago lol

That they used Skyrim as a teaser might simply be because Bethesda has heavily been advertising the Skrim Remaster this fall. It's an important game in their lineup and makes more sense to use than Fallout 4.

But of course it's a little worrying that it just may be the case that modern games like Fallout 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 simply can't run properly on the Switch. Scary thought.

The margin is very small and I do think it's up to those extra % and that it will make a huge difference whether it is 1/3 of Xbox One or 2/3.

If the Switch turns out to be only 1/3 of Xbox one I think it's game over when it comes to multiplatforms, while if the Switch is 2/3 of it, then there's a huge chance that most third party developers will think it's worth it to at least try to make a decent port. The margin is that small.

Many third party devs in this gen choose to make their multiplatform games run at 900p on the Xbox One (while 1080p on PS4) and it's easy to imagine they would aim for 720p on the Switch, which on paper would require 64% of the power of the Xbox One.

But if the Switch is only 1/3 of the XBox One, it just becomes very hard to optimize (downgrade) the game to make it run at 720p and the thought of even lower resolutions (576p lol) I think sounds very unattractive to developers at this point of a generation when 4K is the buzzword.

It's really an exciting time and it's just soooo frustrating that we don't know yet.