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Soundwave on 06 December 2016
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Miyamotoo said:
Soundwave said:

The one thing that worries me about Switch is the games they showed in the trailer, specifically things like Splatoon, Mario Kart, etc. looked basically just like Wii U games.

Even the new Mario game looked a bit better than Mario 3D World (considering it only has one character on screen instead of 4) but it didn't look like a PS4-tier game to me. 

There's no guarantee Nintendo will use a fully clocked chip here. Even a Tegra X1 consumes up to 20 watts when pushing full load without an LCD screen to account for, that's pretty hot when you consider all the internal hardware of the Switch has to be inside a very small central space there and then also consider a large chunk of that internal space has to be taken up by a large battery.

My worry is Nintendo basically told Nvidia that something just a little better than a Wii U was good enough and that they focused otherwise on keeping the power consumption low. Seems like a very Nintendo-ish thing to do.

I'm not so sure we're getting like a 20 watt Tegra X2 (docked). It may well be some more akin to a downclocked 10 watt Tegra X2 (docked) and 5 watt (undocked). 

Nintendo said that people dont need to assume that games showed in Switch trailer in reality looks or run like they were in trailer. That was pre recorded, maybe they were not running at all on Switch hardware in that video, that Mario imagine was edited for instance. Point of 1st Switch trailer wasnt games at all, they wanted just to show variety of games not how exactly they look or run.

There's no guarantee, but with trustible leaks and insiders (Emily for instance said less than XB1 in raw power but comparible to XB1 power) we have good picture what to expect, that means around 3x more power than Wii U hardware (I dont talk only about GPU, but about CPU also that was bottleneck for Wii U games and most likely 3x more RAM for games). We have dock mod that can consume more power and it seems that Switch has holes for cooling on Switch itself and at dock also, it very possible that there is active cooling in dock or dock mode.

Around 3x more power is much stronger than Wii U and actually it will be enough for Nintendo games running at 1080p. My guess with Switch hardware is that Nintendo is aming 1080p for their games in docked mode, same like with Wii U they aimed 720p with Wii U.

I'm not sure I really buy the excuses any more, it seems like this happens every time Ninendo unveils hardware (don't worry the graphics will get way better later on ... and they don't really). 

Why would you purposely show off game demos that have graphics performance far below what your actual hardware can do? 

Also we know (or at least it's pretty heavily hinted at by reliable sources) that those Mario Kart/Splatoon snippets weren't just thrown together for a teaser, those games are in development, apparently Splatoon is even going to be the pack-in game. 

Again I just don't see the logic here in either showing severely gimped versions of those games ... for what reason? We've all seen PS4-caliber graphics so it's not like that would be some huge surprise that Nintendo needed to hide. 

They showed like 7 different games during that teaser too and not one of them was PS4-caliber type of a title. Skyrim is a 5-year-old PS3/360 game, NBA 2K is still being made for PS3/360, so it's hard to say anything definitive off that. 

I don't really see why they would create a "fake" or purposely gimped Mario 3D demo to look worse than it actually would. Maybe getting even if Wii U-level graphics running on a portable without the portable throttling from overheating for 3 straight hours of play is more challenging than we think it is.