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curl-6 on 13 July 2019
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Mr Puggsly said:
curl-6 said:

RAM capacity is definitely Switch's biggest advantage over PS3/360, and it does make game development a lot easier, but let's not overlook the advantage of running a GPU 10 years more advanced, which also helps a lot. That's how you get a lot of Switch games running much of the same current gen rendering tech as PS4/Xbone games, stuff that the ancient DX9 era cards in PS3/360 wouldn't cope with. Saves devs the trouble of having to redesign effects and such, you can just turn the settings down instead.

I agree, other aspects of the hardware help simplify port work. However, developers have redesigned effects or removed them to boost performance on Switch. That was also common in cross gen (6th/7th or 7th/8th gen) or PC to console ports to use completely different effects or omit them.

Its the RAM of Switch that allows ports to happen without having to make significant changes to how the game essentially works.

I think Shadow of Mordor is a good example of porting a game without enough RAM. Huge changes were made to the actual game and it looks like there was no room left for textures.

Switch ports from PS4/Xbone do tend to retain most of the 8th gen rendering techniques though, whereas PS3/360 versions of crossgen games almost universally axed all that stuff.

But yeah, RAM followed by GPU were the biggest differences from PS3/360 to PS4/Xbone/Switch, whereas it's looking like the biggest gain going to Scarlet and PS5 could be CPU.

DonFerrari said:

Witcher 2 run on X360 with a lot less RAM.

That's not quite an apples to oranges comparison though; Witcher 2 wasn't open world for one thing.

Pemalite said:
curl-6 said:

Speaking of hardware, on the CPU side what kind of leap are we most likely looking at going from the Jags in the Xbone to the Zen 2 in Scarlet? 4 times the performance? 5 times? 10 times?

It depends on the instructions being used. - But an 8-12x increase is more than possible in an ideal scenario. (I.E. AVX)
Otherwise 5-6x increase in more conventional workloads is probably a good guesstimate...

In saying that, we have absolutely zero idea on clockrates, so it could be substantially higher if Microsoft/Sony dial those clocks home. Or lower.

So a big leap then. Thanks, I was curious as while it interests me I'm not an expert on technical stuff.