| arthurchan35 said: According to a famous Japanese gaming journalist, the Nintendo Switch will likely the NVIDIA Pascal ‘Parker’ architecture for its GPU, and the Tegra chip inside the platform could help the Switch evolve just like the PS4 and the PS4 Pro. The news comes from famous Japanese journalist, Nishikawa Zenji, who has written an article about the Nintendo Switch and its possible specs on Japanese website 4Gamer. Zenji also predicted that Sony would introduce an enhanced version of the base PS4 several years ago. While Nintendo and NVIDIA have confirmed that the Switch will use a custom NVIDIA Tegra chip, the exact specs for the platform weren’t revealed. Nintendo will likely reveal these during its special Nintendo Switch Presentation in January 2017, but for now, we’re left guessing. The article from Zenji is written in Japanese, but we have done our best to translate his post. There’s quite some interesting stuff in the article on 4gamer, and I highly suggest to read it by running it through a translator. According to Zenji however, it’s likely that the custom Tegra chip inside the Nintendo Switch is based on NVIDIA Pascal ‘Parker’ technology. This due to the fact that Nintendo plans to launch the Switch in March 2017 and the latest Tegra generation in present time is the ‘Parker’ technology. Some might argue that the Switch could use NVIDIA Volta tech as well, but Nintendo’s isn’t known for using the latest technology. Of course, the Tegra ‘Maxwell’ architecture is also a possibility, but this seems
Zenji writes that the custom NVIDIA chip will feature a floating-point performance around 1 TFLOPS, and according to the Japanese journalist, there is almost “no possibility” that the Switch will perform above 1.5 TFLOPS (single-precision floating-point performance) due to the battery drive inside the Switch. Japanese journalist Nishikawa Zenj has produced a report on 4Gamer about the upcoming Nintendo Switch and its likely specifications. Zenji reports that the Nintendo Switch will likely use the Nvidia Pascal ‘Parker’ architecture for the system GPU. He also claims that the special Tegra chip could allow Nintendo to enhance the system much like Sony has done with the PlayStation 4 Pro. Zenji is the same reporter responsible for predicting that Sony would released an technically enhanced version of the PlayStation 4 which we now know as the PlayStation 4 Pro.
http://wccftech.com/nintendo-switch-nvidia-tegra-pascal/ Thanks to N-Dub Nation for the news tip! |
All the bulletpoints are plausible. The Tegra X2 could explain the delay if Nvidia wanted to refine the Switch chip further given how recent that tech is (and they don't want the first consumer impresion of X2 to be bad). 1TFLOPS is...tricky. Not impossible mind, the Tegra X2 "Parker" already hits 750 GLFOPS in 32fpp. Augmentation could push it to 1 to 1.1 TFLOPS, if Nvidia and Nintendo so desire (also heard some talk on a techy forum that the 16fpp performance of the Tegra X2 could be used to help get a performane boost for games that go out of their way to use 16fpp for whatever is possible (incidentally, Unreal Engine 4 makes this very easy)). Not surprised they don't want Maxwell. And yeah, 1.5 TFLOPS is impossible though also not overly necessary as Nvidia has always been markedly better with a performance to power ratio than AMD, the company behind other console tech.
Encouraging if true, but now the rumors seem to pull against each other. We'll have to wait and see who is right.
