By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 20 July 2019
Edit Thread
curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

That's a marketing decision on their part, but this actually is a fairly decent power improvement. It's not just a "battery increase" ... because shrinking the die node means the chip can achieve higher performance now at previous wattages.

For example the new Switch can likely run games at docked performance (over 2x performance increase) portably with this new model if the user is willing to have battery life more akin to the original Switch for that title. Which would be a nice choice for some games that run really badly in portable mode.  

And even docked, the old Switch could not run the Tegra X1 chip past 77% ... this new one would be able to go to 100% performance at least, possibly more because it's higher clocked (1.2 GHz max clock versus 1 GHz). 

Even the new LPDDR4x RAM increases memory bandwidth. 

The question is will Nintendo allow devs to use these higher performance modes ... my guess is yes they'll allow it eventually, but it'll be done quietly. 

All of that is in theory though. A smaller fab process means the potential for better performance, but honestly, it's not really a big enough boost to be worth selling the system as a "Pro" on, especially when better battery life is a better selling point for a device like Switch. 

Honestly, I think you greatly overestimate the importance of power when it comes to the Switch. People aren't buying it for its graphics. 

I mean in portable mode being able to double the performance potentially is pretty large. We'll see how that goes. 

Switch isn't driven by graphics per se, but it also is not the Game Boy or Wii where it's like "the graphics suck ass and are 10 years outdated but it doesn't matter one bit!" type of deal either. It's some where in between those two extremes.

Part of the appeal is that it can approximate large modern scale gaming experiences like BOTW, Xenoblade, DOOM, Skyrim, Dragon Quest XI, The Witcher III, Mortal Kombat, FIFA, NBA 2K, and be able to take that experience anywhere. You don't want that gap growing too large I think, when it gets to other systems being two full generations ahead you lose that aspect of the appeal and it kinda just becomes a glorified 3DS at that point.