Is Switch's processing power important to you?

[bonzobanana]

Soundwave said:

bonzobanana said:
I'm still going with the 2-3x wii u performance upgrade but you have to factor in the wii u performance was at a very low level. It will not be competitive with ps4 or xbone in either gpu or cpu performance. As crap as the x86 processors in the ps4/xbone are they still will comfortably outperform the arm's of the Switch I expect. It's all a grey area though as we don't know the final spec of Switch but I'm confident Nintendo will compromise it slightly to reach a certain manufacturing cost. I still think gflops performance of around 400 gflops, only 4 cpu's and slower older ddr3 memory or single channel ddr4. If it's shared memory I expect there will be something in the main SOC to provide enough space for the frame buffer plus a bit more, perhaps 32 or 64MB of fast memory, cache etc. This memory may well replace some of the cpu or gpu units.

Clearly Zelda is looking very similar across both consoles so I doubt there is night and day performance differences.

I am expecting cartridges to be smaller than people are expecting so I think there will be some issues there.

It's not going to get decent versions of major third party games. Even if it sells huge numbers its technically much weaker and they don't sell too well on Nintendo platforms. It will be the same situation as wii. Cartridges ensure it will be expensive for third party developers and history shows us such games sell badly so its a non-starter.

It's not as bad as the Wii, the Wii was a full generation behind the 360/PS3 and didn't have any kind of modern shader technology that really made that HD next-gen go. 

Switch should be able to run a fair number of PS4/XB1 games, hell the PS3/360 even can (MGSV is still one of the better looking next gen games if you ask me, but it's also able to run on the PS3/360) ... Switch should be more powerful than a PS3/360 without much fuss and has 6x more RAM to boot (if we're talking 4GB RAM with 3GB reserved for games). So a fair number of ports should be doable. Some won't be, probably more ambitious titles like The Witcher 3. 

Don't expect even performance though, things are going to have to be sacrificed. 

I agree with your points on a technical level but I feel its commercial reasons why the Switch is unlikely to get many big third party games.

1. Cost of cartridges for publishers with limited storage plus Nintendo's history of high royalties and unfair terms and conditions

2. Low sales due to wrong userbase and poor performance compared to other versions of same game

3. Additional development time and additional optimisations  required to get games running on low performance arm based console which increases costs

4. Optical discs can be heavily discounted because manufacturing costs are low and publishers can be flexible with retailers regarding sale or return or discounting plus easier and cheaper digital delivery systems where as cartrige game prices remain higher for longer.  Result is ps4 and xbone versions will be much cheaper after the launch window. End users would be paying more for much inferior versions.

5. Nintendo's online infrastructure and DRM system is basic and dated compared to Microsoft and Sony meaning online functionality will be more problematic and not ideal for many games where online play is important.