By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
bonzobanana on 08 March 2017
Edit Thread
Soundwave said:
bonzobanana said:

Its been widely reported how incredibly easy it is to develop for Switch and we know it has shared memory of 25.6GB/s so we can compare the total amount of data the Switch can move which puts it below last gen ps3/360. It's identical in memory bandwidth to the xbox 360 except the 360 also had memory bandwidth of 256GB/s for 10MB of memory. PS3 had 25.6GB/s and 19.2GB/s and wii u has 12.8GB/s  for main memory and about 60GB/s for its 32MB of eram. So the Switch sits between wii u and 360/ps3 overall in the maximum amount of data it can process.

The Switch is not powerful, we can see that even Zelda with a tiny upgrade from 720p to 900p in docked mode still drops frames to wii u levels in certain places. I don't think its unrealistic to say the Switch is in the region of 30% more powerful than wii u for gpu performance based on that result.

The end result is a very powerful portable, well beyond Vita but a home console marginally more powerful than wii u.

We don't need excuses like lazy ports or developers struggling with the hardware etc for Switch its pretty much performing as expected for its technical specification.

I think the Switch is a good deal more powerful than the Wii U, the memory bandwidth is the bottleneck that I think is causing a lot of the problems. 

25GB/sec is OK but lacks even the eDRAM buffer the Wii U had for more intensive tasks. 

Maybe a Swith Pro will go to 50GB/sec LPDDR4 or something better than that even will be available in a few years. 

Switch is definitely at least 2x cpu performance of wii u but the wii u does have some advantages, the 60GB/s of eDRAM, the secondary wii gpu which may be able to be used for processing main graphics not just generating gamepad screen and a dedicated ARM DSP for all audio. Ultimately memory provides the top barrier to performance so shared 25.6GB/s memory is the top limit. How much does only 32MB of 60GB/s eDRAM assist 12.8GB/s of 2GB memory, would need to know the ratio of eDRAM access to main memory but looking at the xbox one compared to ps4 it does help maybe covers 20% of the bandwidth deficit on that system but then with the wii u having such low bandwidth main memory it probably is much more effective. I wouldn't be suprised if the combination gave wii u effective memory bandwidth of 18-20GB/s but these are total guesses. Hardly a world apart from Switch at 25.6GB/s.

Unless of course there is some customisation of the Nvidia X1 that enhances performance on Switch which I've been looking for in the game performance but sadly if anything the Switch is performing below my expectations in docked mode probably purely down to the low memory bandwidth that is killing performance when the system is under higher load. Sadly its not something that can be tweaked with a later firmware either as I can't see Nintendo overclocking their memory chips even if they could tweak the cpu and gpu speeds a bit when docked.

I was hoping that Nintendo had put some additional cache memory in the customisation of the Nvidia X1 to replace the little cpu cores. It will be interesting to see the x-ray scans of the Switch chips.