| bonzobanana said: 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. |
Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but when you say 400 GFLOPS are you talking about when the Switch is operating in portable mode? If 400 GFLOPS represents the Switch's peak performance then that is barely an upgrade over the Wii U. Heck, even the Wii was about 75%-100% faster than the GCN when it was released and that kind of minimal performance increase was a complete joke at the time.
It's one thing to say that Nintendo doesn't make cutting edge technology, but a 1 GFLOPS machine would not be cutting edge or even close to it (the XBox One will be 3.5 years old by the time that this thing comes out which is basically last-gen). I can completely understand a 300 - 400 GFLOPs machine when in portable mode but that thing better at least come close to the XBOX One when it is docked. Nintendo has gone through the Project Cars fiasco and the complete drought of 3rd party support on the Wii U and so they need to understand the importance of making their hardware fast enough so that developers can at least easily port their games to it. A 400 GFLOPs machine would have no chance of running Final Fantasy or basically any game that wasn't previously made for the Wii U and Nintendo will have done nothing to improve their position with 3rd parties.
