Digital Foundry: Nintendo Switch CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed

[fleischr]

Captain_Yuri said:

fleischr said:
It's sad to say that I'm not surprised... by the meltdowns here...

The specs on their own, while I wish they could be better to accommodate *all* 3rd party games without exception, are still rather good. It's really like a far more portable WiiU with extra home console power -- that alone I like

I gotta wonder how many devs will continue to do 720p/low-end skews that fit the Switch hardware. I'm sure many devs do that for the low-end PC gamer crowd and Vita folk, but they move on at some point.

I think at this point, they can't actually port their games but rather remake them just for the switch if they want it on the Switch.

The docked mode isn't the main issue although granted its still not that great. The portable mode is the main issue because every game must be made to run in portable mode which is rumored to be at 157 or so Gflops according to neogaf. I doubt devs will be able to make a game exclusively for the docked mode since the main gimmick is to be able to play it anywhere. So devs will be looking at the 157 or so Gflops in performance first and then enhancing it after rather than looking at the docked mode first since the bottleneck will be the portable mode.

But either ways, as Pachter said in his recent ep, publishers make about $36 or so with each retail copy sold. If the Switch is powerful enough to handle ports, the publishers can spend about 5 million (in his example) to port the games. (36 x 500,000 sales = 18 million = profit) But if they have to make the games from ground up due to it not being powerful enough, they would have to spend 40 million in his example which wouldn't be worth it for them. ($36 x 1 million sales = 36 million = no profit since it costed 40 million to develop for the Switch). And that excludes marketing and etc.

So idk if there will be very many third party games at all from the western front. I mean, did we hear any rumors about any modern ports yet apart from like not very intensive games such as Just Dance?

I think it's decided at this point that Switch's AAA 3rd party support comes via streaming. I mean that's the angle Shield devices took before, so why not have it in the Switch?

Nvidia has the tech to leverage an extra system like a PC, a cloud system, or even external GPUs.

I figure Switch could have success with this model if the streaming options are simple and affordable. The way gamers really play games these days - it can be a better value to both publishers and gamers if they just pay a Netflix-like subscription fee for either a specific game or curated collection of games.