By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
bonzobanana on 17 December 2016
Edit Thread
Miyamotoo said:
curl-6 said:

I reckon Nintendo fans should be happy with those specs. Better-than-Mario-Kart-8 graphics on the go is pretty good.

Of Course, that's basically around 3x more power than Wii U, and enuf power for instance to run MK8 at 1080p with AA and some other effects.

 

 

bonzobanana said:

Still seems too high.  The Tegra spec with the extra denver cores  and  50GB/s memory gets 750 gflops yet stripping out the denver cores and only 25.6GB/s memory speed still achieves 600 gflops and then its likely based onthe older architecture anyway. No those figures are not realistic at all. For me the absolute top figure is around 500 gflops with the lowest at perhaps 300 gflops so I've gone for a middle position of 400 gflops. That I feel might even be optimistic going by Nintendo's past record but for me 600 gflops is just a fantasy figure. I don't even want 600 flops because the more I think about it the more I hate the idea of only 3hrs battery life and if its 600 gflops docked with 1080p output it still probably needs 300 plus gflops when portable at 720p which will be terrible battery life.

Even 400 gflops with 25.6GB/s is restrictive. The wii u had 12.8GB/s memory with 176 gflops but had a 32MB of ultra fast memory built into the chipset. Unless Switch has a similar arrangement the Switch will be bottle-necked by memory speed even at 400 gflops.

Doesn't seems at all too high, just basic Tegra X1 without active cooling can achieve around 512 gflops on stock clocks, but Nintendo is using custom Tegra so we dont know what improvements Nintendo made (my bet is 50 GB/s for memory and something else), and actualy has active cooling. So 500-600 Gflops does not sound high or unrealistic at all, not to mentionle fantasy figure, lol. :)    Actually your 400 gflops estimate is lowest estimate I saw until now on Neogaf or here in threads, actually most of people expecting around 300-400 gflops for portable mode.

Definitely Switch will have some improvements compared to custom Tegra X1, it still custom Tegra.

 

Nintendo's history is that their custom designs are lower performance not higher and if the development kit spec is correct then it still is 25GB/s not 50GB/s. There is a difference between expected performance and desired performance.  We have lots of indicators that Nintendo have gone for a lower spec design than the reference Tegra design and that battery life may have improved to 5-8hrs. In the case of the wii u in the past it was speculated that the wii u would have 800 gflops at the beginning and final actual value was 176 glops and I wonder if we will get a similar ratio here. Maximum claim so far is 1.5 terraflops and that would distill down to 375 gflops for a similar ratio.

Lets not forget that the wii u had an absolutely hopeless cpu arrangement of about 9,000 mips but the Switch's quad Arm A57's are going to be 3-4x that power so that memory bandwidth of 25.6GB/s will also be under greater strain.

Lets take a realistic approach here and work with that 25.6GB/s memory bandwidth and what would be a performance level based on that. The wii u memory bandwidth was half that so you could say using the wii u that would give you 352 gflops and 18,000 mips cpu performance. The ps3 has 25.6GB/s for its video memory and about 19,200 GB/s for its main memory so the Switch represents a reduction in memory bandwidth over the ps3. I think 360 was something like 25.6GB/s for its shared memory with 10MB of high speed memory.

Realistically  if the Switch has some high speed embedded memory like 32MB or 64MB somewhere then maybe up to 500 gflops could be achieved with some bottlenecking issues in memory access but without the high speed embedded memory then a fair bit lower.

With the wii u we can see the memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/s was perfectly judged for a low performance 32bit cpu arrangement and 176 gflops gpu and there is no reason to believe the Switch won't be equally well set up with memory bandwidth being no more or less than needed for the cpu and gpu performance.

I hope no one is disappointed if its as low as 400 gflops or perhaps even a bit lower. Remember Nintendo makes reliable, dependable hardware designed to take some abuse it doesn't make hardware at the cutting edge of technology. We can hope for higher performance but its not really required for a product like Switch.