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bonzobanana on 26 January 2017
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Miyamotoo said:
bonzobanana said:

There is no confirmation of that surprisingly at this stage. Nintendo announced the 2GB memory of the wii u quite freely but with Switch they aren't being as clear. It's also higher than the more powerful competition using the same chipset and rumours also suggested it was originally going to be 2GB but the retail version would match the development kit with 4GB. I'm not totally convinced and won't believe it until Nintendo states 4GB or we see it in the tear-down. It just seems too much for a console of this performance level. With the Nvidia shield box only having 3GB yet meant to be a gaming centric box supporting 4k and hdr  and yet the lower spec Switch has more memory all of which needs to be powered by battery in portable mode and lowering runtime it just makes no sense at all. The Switch has its 4 main cpu's running at half the speed of the Shield and doesn't feature the other 4 little arm chips at all yet needs even more memory?  It's a strange design choice if nothing else. It made total sense the dev kit had 4GB as headroom for developing and a final retail version would be down to 2GB to extend battery life and reduce costs. In a few weeks we will know anyway. 

Only reason they reveal Wii U RAM is because Wii U had more RAM than PS3/Xbox360, but Switch with 4 GB will again have twice less RAM than XB1/PS4 so its not something to brag about compared to Wii U vs PS3/Xbox360.

Evre believable rumour said 4GB, actually I don't recall that any rumour suggested 2GB of RAM. More RAM is always better and prices of RAM today are very low.

No the original design was 2GB only the developer versions were 4GB but then it was stated 4GB was expected for retail versions.

http://www.idigitaltimes.com/nintendo-switch-ram-specs-leaked-insider-say-more-ram-wii-u-565975

If this March launch is a soft launch just to milk early adopters and they always planned for a signficant price drop later then a lower price for manufacturing of 2GB will clearly help to maintain a profit margin. Clearly it would never be as cheap to make 4GB compared to 2GB in reality you have to pay more and RAM is always a signficant cost on a logic board after the main chipset or even sometimes above it.

Knowing the surprises that have come out in the past with Nintendo products this wouldn't surprise me. I'm not saying it isn't 4GB but as Nintendo decisions go making the Switch 2GB doesn't seem a particularly bad one especially when your actual games come on cartridges anyway its not like its directly comparable to a console with an optical drive.

I would of thought it quite rare for a development kit and final retail hardware to have the same memory capacity. Makes optimising games to use all memory difficult if you have other background resources due to game development also taking memory.