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[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Pemalite said:

Doesn't help that the Switch didn't leverage the latest and greatest nVidia Tegra SoC on it's release... So it was already outdated. Pascal could have offered 50% more performance at the same powerlevel and not added much to the cost.

But that 4GB of LPDDR4 1600Mhz memory is NOT doing the switch any favors in 2021, that bandwidth is limiting fillrate and keeping resolutions low and developers are struggling to work with 3GB of work-space. (As the OS gobbles a chunk.)

The Switch is a fantastic device, it's just not aging well visually, especially as we venture forth into the Global Illumination/Ray Tracing era.

Not sure if using the X2 would have resulted in that much more performance, (pure GPU performance was ~50% higher, but when both CPU and GPU were used, the margin tended to be much lower between the two chips iirc) but it would have been the better choice for sure, especially with it's larger memory bandwidth.

I expect NVidia to create a new Tegra chip soon. Not just for the Switch, but also for the Jetson Nano and NVidia Shield devices, which use the same chips as the Switch does. In fact, I believe that without the chip crunch NVidia would already have done it and it would have been the basis of the new OLED model.

It won't be much more than a die-shrinked X2 probably (to 12nm out for originally 16nm), but that alone could result in up to 50% more performance compared to the current model. Most interesting would be that the memory could be increased to 8GB on the next model, which could definitely help some games.

Nah. Improvements were big between Maxwell to Pascal in terms of performance gains.

On the CPU side you went from...
A57 Quad-core @1.9Ghz.
A53 Quad-core @1.3Ghz.

To:
Denver2 Dual Core @2.0Ghz
A57 Quad-Core @ 2.0Ghz.

However Tegra Maxwell only had the A57 Quad-Core unit enabled...

Tegra Pascal you would run the super high-performant Denver cores... But the design also required the use of at-least a single A57 "Core0" core for I/O and interrupt, plus some other tasks.

Denver2+One ARM A57 generally provided twice the throughput in benchmarks compared to a quad-A57 cluster.

Obviously Carmel makes them both out to be a joke... But we are talking about available chips on the Switch's release.

On the GPU side of the equation...

Maxwell @ 1ghz
vs
Pascal at 1.5Ghz.

Same power envelope... 20nm vs 16nm.
Remember, TSMC's 16nm process is basically 20nm but with Finfet... Pascal from the very outset was designed to push 50% higher clockrates at the same TDP as Maxwell.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/6

So even when both are on 16nm, Tegra Pascal will have a clockspeed advantage at the same TDP... As that was nVidia's original design philosophy with that GPU design, increase clocks, keep the same amount of functional units and features.

Conversely... Tegra Pascal brings forth improved delta colour compression, so it has more usable bandwidth available... But also allows for more than twice the memory bandwidth as Tegra Maxwell. (25.6GB/s vs 59.7GB/s)

And memory bandwidth is one of the biggest hindrances of the Switch from being able to achieve more than 720P in most titles, especially when allot of heavy use of Alpha effects are being thrown around.

So I am probably actually being a little conservative at stating a 50% performance improvement.