| zorg1000 said: I mean in terms of support the system recieves. |
It does. Because if the hardware isn't "Good enough" to receive ports. Then it won't receive them.
| Soundwave said: That's not really a great comparison. The PS2 had a beefy CPU design because Ken Kutaragi was into that (PS3 also had the CELL design which a relatively powerful CPU for its time). The GameCube GPU was definitely better than the PS2. |
The Cell was pretty average. The only way you could get anywhere *near* it's theoretical performance was with iterative refinement floating point.
The fact it was a fairly "Dumb" design, with no coherancy between cores, in-order, non-multi-threaded layout is a testament to that fact.
And that is without even touching upon bandwidth, latency, branch tree prediction, caches etc'.
It was a cost-optimized, highly parallel CPU. It was never really as powerful as some would inaccurately claim, Essentially, Jaguar is better than Cell. - And that, even with 8x cores is a Netbook/Tablet CPU equivalent to a mid-range CPU from over a decade ago.
The PS2's CPU was certainly decent at the time, all things considered. But it still fell short of a Pentium 3, Athlon or Duron in the real world... And still couldn't hold a candle to the Original Xbox's Hybrid Pentium 3/Celeron chip... Which also fell short of the PC as well, which had Tualatin and Thunderbird at that time.
| Pyro as Bill said: Did anyone expect/predict that it would be underclocked to the level it is? Why so much unused overhead? |
Nope. Don't think anyone did expect for it to be underclocked to such an insanely low level.
With that in mind, hopefully the uproar continues and Nintendo "Up Clocks" it. ;) Worked for the Xbox One.
I think Nintendo is expecting to sell a vast majority of units and thus placed a large order with nVidia... And one way to keep costs low is to have as many functional chips as you can, which means either above average voltages (Not good for mobile) or lower clocks. Or even both.
| Soundwave said: Nintendo likely got a hell of a deal on those Tegra X1 Maxwell chips. Nvidia probably fucked up in designing it thinking it would be in a lot of devices. But to make that chip usable in a portable device the size the Switch is (keep in mind there has to be a battery inside that main unit) ... they had to underclock. |
I doubt the deal is as good as you think. nVidia is known for being expensive, even for old hardware.
They also don't fabricate the chips, they get a 3rd party like TSMC to do it and usually don't have a ton of stockpiled chips waiting around.
And it doesn't matter what size the switch is or the size of the battery. These same Tegra chips ended up in mobile devices of similar size anyway.
| zorg1000 said: They will, improved sequels to 3DS games will help the 3DS audience to upgrade to Switch. Its not all thats needed but appealing to 3DS owners is certainly something that Nintendo needs to do. |
Compared to the 3DS, the Switch will look like it skipped a couple of generations. The difference will be night and day.
So the Switch will likely appeal to mobile gamers even with it's performance being hampered... But how will it appeal to console and PC gamers with higher demands and expectations?
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
