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bonzobanana on 26 April 2017
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JRPGfan said:
BuckStud said:

I'm just curious, but would you like to provide your "proof" that the Switch is 4-5 times less powerful than the PS4?  Less powerful, yes...it's doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, but 5 times, I don't think so.

I know its probably closer to ~4 times less.

But sure....  I did 1840 Gflops (ps4) divided by 397 Gflops (docked Switch) = 1840/397 = 4,63 times.

Its probably not that bad off, but yeah, PS4 probably has 4 times the power of the switch when docked.

That isn't fair or realistic though. Switch is really limited by its portable mode which is 150-200 gflops, the docked performance is really just used for an upscale or anti-aliasing or both. It doesn't reload new assets when you dock and undock it just switches between 2 output drivers. The Switch has total memory bandwidth of 25.6GB/s and the ps4 176GB/s so 7x performance there, Switch is about 12,000 mips cpu compared to about 37,000 mips (after the OS has taken one cpu) plus their is CISC optimisations you can make on ps4 which probably makes it about 4x and of course  in graphic power about 10x going from 150-200gflops to 1750 gflops. Lastly mobile chipsets tend to underperform a bit because the chipsets are designed to conserve power and don't make use of as many support chips on the pcb so that probably drops it slightly again. Skyrim should be a good indicator of the  Switch performance level as that game has both high cpu and gpu demands so will give the system a good workout and makes comparisons with both last gen and current gen hardware easier. 

If you look at the Nvidia Shield box which has twice the cpu power of Switch and 2.5x the gpu it struggles to run a lot of pc ports that well. They are at a limited performance level so you would expect Switch to perform well below those.

I suppose in the future it may be possible that someone would do a slow switching mode between portable and docked that completely reloads the game with higher spec graphic assets but at the moment I believe all Switch games just switch instantly between both modes so its not fair or realistic to claim 384 gflops performance until there is a game that only runs in docked mode. Alternatively perhaps someone can explain how a game running at 384 gflops in docked mode can instantaneously drop to 150 gflops performance and continue at the same frame rate in portable mode while still utilising graphic assets and features designed to make good use of 384 gflops of performance.