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bonzobanana on 24 November 2017
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curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:

I was pretty much all over the place myself. At the beginning thinking it would be running the Tegra chipset at full speed and the rumour of a VR headset had me imagining a VR system capable of running 360/PS3 ports in VR then the Switch launched and the games were really disappointing technically even for early titles. It's pretty much turned out right in the middle of my opinion swings in the end. One thing when comparing the spec I probably didn't take account of which I should was how much of the ps3 and 360 performance is dropped simply because they are always moving data in and out because  of limited memory with more ambitious games. The Switch doesn't have to do that (thanks Capcom) and I feel gave it an important upgrade going from 2GB to 4GB which is 1GB more than the Shield box. In the end its a very nice unit with sufficient performance to get the job done and its portable functionality can only improve with each revision of the console. In fact improvements in the later firmware, perhaps usb hard drive support and other features will enhance it too. 

Yeah the <500MB available to games was the primary bottleneck of PS3/360, and frankly it's amazing that their most graphically accomplished games look as good as they do under such brutal memory limitations.

Switch's 3.2GB available to games (according to DF) gives it a big advantage in terms of things like higher resolution textures, a greater number of different assets in play at once, etc.

It also means the Switch's CPU doesn't have to work as hard, since it doesn't need to stream and unpack data as aggressively as PS3/360 do.

By chance this video came up this morning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ljTX9R5QhA

Again it shows the Switch have limited draw distance with lots of popping compared to ps3. From what I understand there is a CPU component to animated objects in the distance and both portable and docked Switch cpu performance is the same and have the same issue. So in this one regard it does look like the Switch's limited cpu performance is having some effect. GPU can't be a factor because surely docked is comfortably stronger than ps3 by some margin. Memory bandwidth is another possible cause but I'd go with cpu myself although it could be a factor. On paper though the Switch cpu performance always looked a bit weak and was much reduced compared to the Tegra's maximum mhz. However as that video states there are few games of that era that required such high CPU resources.

It doesn't detract from the great overall package the Switch is becoming and I still feel there is a possibility of unlocking some cpu performance with a later firmware as later Switch revisions are using improved fabrication. I use PSP as an example of this. They improved the mhz in a later firmware that had a knock on effect to the earlier PSP's battery life in some games but by that time developers were needing a bit more performance to handle more ambitious games. I think originally locked at 222mhz but went to a 333mhz speed for some games with a later firmware revision. It would be nice to see a docked cpu speed increase anyway.

It's likely a later Switch will have a dedicated customised Tegra chip unlike the current off the shelf chip and will see many background improvements I'm sure. One likely improvement is wifi that doesn't tax the console as much to allow improvements in multiplayer frame rates. 

I honestly feel some of these games like Skyrim and LA Noire could be improved with time as Nintendo improves the firmware to unlock some more performance.