Switch TFLOPS : 1,024 ? 0,79 ? 0,393 ?

[Nate4Drake]

Mr Puggsly said:

Pemalite said:

It can be CPU bottlenecks that hit the dynamic resolution as well, especially when the CPU cannot keep up with the number of draw calls.

Whether the CPU or GPU is the bottleneck will obviously vary depending on game engine, resolution, framerate targets, what is displayed on scene and other aspects... And will constantly switch between the two.

The Playstation 4 Pro version is scaled back from the Xbox One X version...
But without proper profiling of the game and it's engine, it's difficult to say with any quantifiable certainty as to whether the CPU or GPU is the main culprit, I wouldn't be surprised if it's both.

But the fact is, some CPU-loads have been removed/reduced from the jump between Just Cause 3 and Just Cause 4... And the developer also made their physics engine more heavily threaded to take advantage of the Jaguar core counts.

With that said, the game does suffer from some technical limitations, such as short draw distances on shadowing and objects that will pop-in frequently.

I am not saying they are incapable... I am saying they are terrible relative to other hardware.
Comparing Jaguar against say... The Cell or Xenon it's advantages become abundantly clear... But once you start comparing it to any modern x86 CPU, heck even ARM CPU's, it really does look antiquated.

Next gen will be interesting... We could be looking at a 5-10x fold increase in CPU capability, which is larger than the CPU jump between 7th and 8th gens.

To be fair, 5th and 6th gens had terrible CPU's as well.
The Original Xbox probably got the most right during the 6th gen on the CPU side of the equation... But it's Pentium 3/Celeron hybrid chip @ 733Mhz paled in comparison to AMD's Athlon XP 1900+ or Pentium 4 1.8ghz chips that were available at the time.

Agreed. The Switch's lack of GPU power is a massive hindrance, but not only that... It's DRAM bandwidth isn't helping matters either.

I will still argue that the Switch is a more balanced machine overall, it's GPU capabilities isn't orders-of-magnitude greater than it's CPU. - That doesn't mean it doesn't need more GPU though.

Lack of DRAM bandwidth will hinder fillrate and thus resolution though. - With today's compression and culling technology... Around 50GB/s of memory bandwidth is probably what you would ideally want to try and target in a Switch revision to hit higher resolutions with a step up in fidelity.

It's not always about GPU brute force, otherwise AMD's GPU's would always win. :P

Generally speaking we know the PS4 and X1 are about equal on the CPU side, but lower resolutions are on the X1 due to GPU limitations. So generally speaking, it evident low resolution is mostly a GPU issue.

As long as games keep pushing visual quality complexity on machines with limited capabilities, pop in is always going to be an issue. At best pop in less of an issue this gen than the last, but I anticipate it will be an issue next gen as well. Frankly, I'm annoyed some modern games don't leverage the extra power of X1X or Pro to improve draw distance.

Pentium 3 was a pretty capable CPU though, developers seemed to struggle with OG Xbox's limited GPU power and RAM in later titles.

Switch's ability to run games like Ark, Fortnite, Doom, and Wolfenstein II is impressive. Especially at a solid frame rate. However, the massive visual compromises (480p, 360p and lower) tell me the CPU is much more capable than the GPU. So again, I feel the Switch is more imbalanced than X1 and PS4.

Pop in will always be an issue if Devs don't address the power in a "balanced way".  Of course a very weak hardware has much more problems, and if you wanna eliminate significantly pop in, the overall geometry, tessellation and IQ would be so poor that Devs prefer to keep more significant pop in, and a clear example is The Legend of Zelda on Nintendo Switch.

 So, what about pop in, when PS5 and Next Xbox will be out ? It could always be an issue if Developers aim for the maximum geometry, details, effects, good tessellation in the medium/long distance and big scale and complex environment, to an extent that frame rate would significally drop with zero pop in. It's only a matter of resource management, and it will be always an issue, regardless of the power available.  The good thing is, with PS5 and Next Xbox, you might have games with far better graphics, more advanced physics, AI, Animations, effects, and further reduce pop in, if devs want.

PS: Do you remeber what kind of pop in we had in racing games on PSX, Sega Saturn and N64 ? :D

Last edited by Nate4Drake - on 23 January 2019