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bonzobanana on 21 September 2017
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curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:

Lets wait to see how portable mode turns out. I certainly do feel there is a cpu deficit in the Switch design but only by the ratio I have already stated based on benchmarks and evidence. We don't know how much dynamic resolution is being used or seen final retail code. It doesn't matter about age only peformance. The wii u was based on later technology but often performed below ps3/360 levels because it was low performance costed hardware. Again we had all this before with Nintendo fans claiming wii and wii u were more powerful than they were but the facts got through in the end and those fans were shown to be incorrect. Lets not forget not only do they have to make the game run at a much lower performance level in portable mode but give reasonable battery life too. There may be other power saving issues we haven't seen yet that the retail code will get. Again this is all premature we need to see final retail code. There are also other factors like compression on cartridges. Rayman Legends has a lower frame rate and inferior graphcs on Switch than wii u. Not because of any shortfall in Switch performance but because of minimising file size with heavy compression. That could also be a factor with larger games like this for retail code. It's naive in the extreme to base performance on what publishers and developers want you to see before the game is launched. 

Also I've been writing in the past about the Switch being capable of running VR versions of many 360 and PS3 games if a VR headset becomes available for Switch like the Nintendo patents. I'm fully aware of the superiority of Switch over 360 and PS3 in many areas. Admittedly I believe such a headset will be reliant on a power connection so it can run at docked performance level though.

I get that you still feel burned by the Wii U, and that you want to protect yourself from a repeat disappointment, but I think at this point it is safe to put aside any fears of Switch being weaker or on par with PS3/360/Wii U.

The specs and the games clearly show it's a step above. We're talking about a GPU a decade newer plus 6-8 times as much RAM.

You don't get anything sadly. I bought and enjoyed my wii u but the farcical nature of the fanboy nature has always annoyed me. I have all 3 consoles; ps3, 360 and wii u and the defence of wii u when clearly it is performing to a lower level than the previous consoles overall has always annoyed me. Missing detail, slow loading, churning disc drive, inferior sound, lower frame rates for many games and a poor controller with important missing features like analogue triggers and yet many claim it to be superior. There are some fantastic games on wii u despite the hardware and there are games which utilise the later gpu feature set but the overall picture is of a weaker struggling console for many games.

Again you are making assumptions here. The Switch is a two tier system, one is its portable performance level and another is docked. Despite some shortfalls in cpu performance and memory bandwidth its clear the docked performance level is superior to 360/PS3 however for the portable performance level there is obviously a severe drop and the need to conserve battery power. Also cartridges and limited flash memory means there is pressure to downsize and highly compress data which are other factors and that applies to both portable and docked modes.

How many Switch games are going to get the amazing 7.1 high quality soundtracks that the ps3 had. That is pretty obviously zero because its limited to 5.1 channels. How many Switch games are going to get hours of high quality 1080p fmv? again zero, not that many would want it but for some games where you have an unfolding story and the fmv is very high quality it can be enjoyable. How many games on Switch will benefit from the subtle control of analogue triggers for driving and guns, again zero it doesn't have them.

I'm just making the point for many games the Switch will not be able to offer the same experiences as 360 and PS3 even though there will be many games on Switch that would not be as well done on PS3 or 360.

The Switch gaming experience is a slightly different one from 360 and PS3.

However again this is premature, we will get a full picture of how the Switch performs in portable mode  for these games when we see the reviews of retail code and digital foundry does its comparisons.  

Lets not forget unless Nintendo have changed the timings in their firmware the last concrete information we have from developer documentation is it runs 3 Arm A57's at 1020mhz for game code and has a performance of 153-157 gflops for portable mode GPU. If it strays from that battery life will decrease, any sort of boost mode or not enabling power saving will drop battery life considerably. Also from what has been discussed elsewhere on neogaf the Switch utilises the cpu for wifi processing and the wifi chip itself is pretty power hungry. Doom for example is a very multiplayer focused game. You don't want players droppring out of the game all the time because their battery needs charging. It will be interesting to see how ID and Bethesda approach portable performance of that game. Nintendo claims the minimum playing time of 2.5 hours for Switch and we have seem 3 hours for Zelda which is a single player experience. Doom features much heavier use of detailed textures, lighting, much faster pace gameplay, lots of rapid scene changing with requirements for hd feedback constantly. It's a killer for battery life on gaming laptops. I'm geniunely intrigued to see how it performs on Switch in portable mode. I'm expecting a nice playable 60fps version docked though unless they try to get close to PS4/Xbone visually and end up at 30fps which will be very disappointing. Docked is a different ball game, it takes all the restrictions off except for cartridge size limitations.

Anyway I wasn't wrong about wii or wii u and don't expect to be wrong about Switch portable mode but will be more than happy to be wrong.