Soundwave said:
5-8 hours was from NakeDrake, the same guy who said Pascal for Switch, so he's likely wrong on both accounts. Emily has said the battery life is "mediocre", so 3 hours is more likely. A 20nm Maxwell Tegra X1 eats battery like crazy. To get 5-8 hours from a chip like that would require an enormous battery like 15,000 MaH I'd guesstimate. |
Again, development kits tend to perform higher than retail versions, the wii u development kit was 352 gflops but retail was 176 gflops. It will be scaled back for retail, its a custom chip so while it could still be 20nm fabrication it could be improved. Lower mhz on the chips, reduced number of graphic processing elements etc will improve battery life. Portable mode may have the gpu only computing 200-250 gflops.
5-8 hours is achievable and desirable with 20nm and seems a more realistic battery life than 3 hours.
Honestly what is more likely;
a) Nintendo maximises performance making the console more expensive to manufacture and leading to poor battery life which makes the portable function very poor and undesirable.
b) Nintendo compromises performance which also cuts manufacturing costs and massively increases battery runtime making the portable function much more usable and increases profits for the company.
Nintendo massively compromised wii u performance to save costs and they didn't even need to for functionality because it was a mains powered console but here they have the massive excuse to doing so that it is also a portable. They actually can save costs and improve functionality of the device at the same time.
Lets not forget Nintendo will be driving the hardware of the console at a low level. It's going to be getting games fully optimised for the system and doesn't have to comply with mid-level software drivers that slow performance.. It's not a windows or android device. Nintendo will be pushing the hardware at a low level.
If you look at a laptop with a 150-200 gflop gpu and you look at what the wii u delivered the wii u punched well above its weight graphically and the same will be true of Switch.
There really is nothing to worry about if the Switch final gflops performance is 400 or even 350 or 300 gflops. We just need to temper our expectations into something more realistic and not pretend this device will match xbox one or ps4 performance because it won't and doesn't need to.
Case in point. I have an AMD laptop with a 550 gflops gpu. I get 1hr 30m to 2hrs battery life with extensive gaming. My mother has a intel ultra low power celeron laptop that gets 5hrs plus battery life gaming. It's gpu is only a third to 1/4 as powerful as my laptop but still runs many of the same games at lower detail and frame rates but is still massively more desirable than mine for long trips, train journeys etc because while I'm twiddling my thumbs doing nothing the intel laptop is still operating for many more hours. I'm very happy with my laptop because most of the time there is a power socket available but not always.
Finding the sweet spot between performance and battery life is important for the Switch. Nintendo is pushing the Switch as a home console because really they have retreated from the home console market directly but want the Switch to appeal as both home console and portable to maximise sales and see its dual functionality as a big selling point. 3hrs battery life or less is simply not acceptable for a portable console. Nintendo already knows this. Nintendo portable consoles has often beaten off competition not because of higher spec but because of more practical longer battery life.
