AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution now on Switch

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

JRPGfan said:

Captain_Yuri said:

I was talking about this the other day in the PC thread and had a wild idea. I'll post that here:

One thing I will say is after seeing the Steam Deck, it will be interesting to see if Nintendo goes AMD and x86 instead of going Nvidia and Arm at some point in the future.

The benefit would certainly be that it will be even easier to port games over to the switch and x86 is getting to the point where the power efficiency is good enough. And considering the Volumes Nintendo is able to sell their products vs someone like Valve, I am sure they would get a bigger discount than what Valve is getting with their Steam Deck.

Even if the Switch 2 has Zen 2 + RDNA 2 specs similar to the Steam Deck, it would be quite powerful as we have seen the Steam Deck being able to run Ghostrunner with Max settings + Ray Tracing at above 30fps. With the low level API and optimizations you can do on a console, they can get even more juice out of it while having decent battery life. Of course the problem would be that whatever Gimmick Nintendo would plan would sink into the cost. So that would probably be the biggest issue unless they want to sell the Switch 2 for $400.

AMD Ryzen 7 6800U is 15-28watts TPD (Zen3+, 6nm APU)
It 8 cores /16 threads, @ 3,4 ghz (8cores) and upto 4,7ghz with 1-2 cores.
The iGPU in it, is called Radeon 680M (RDNA2), and it tops out at 3,4 Tflops (FP32) and 6,8 Tflops (FP16).
It uses dual channel LPDDR5....  and has USB4.

Might be a slight exageration, but I think this would be like 10 times the performance of a Switch.
If Nintendo choose to use a chip like the 6800U for a Switch 2.

Next year, there should be a 7000 series, thats on the 5nm, with Zen4.
At some point, if nintendo decide its time for new hardware, they can do a hardware jump of x10 quite easily imo.

The question is, what is nvidia doing in this mobile space?
Do they have anything compairable, at these wattages? Havn't heard of anything new in the mobile space, from Nvidia in awhile.

Yea Nvidia has been pretty quiet/secretive in the mobile space. They are investing into ARM cpus for the future for their server division but we have yet to see many low end candidates as of yet.

sc94597 said:

Captain_Yuri said:

I was talking about this the other day in the PC thread and had a wild idea. I'll post that here:

One thing I will say is after seeing the Steam Deck, it will be interesting to see if Nintendo goes AMD and x86 instead of going Nvidia and Arm at some point in the future.

For some reason I don't think it is likely. When I try to justify my impulse, I think that while Nintendo has gotten overwhelmingly better in the Switch generation when it comes to considering ease of development for third parties, they think much more in terms of power-efficiency when they develop the hardware of their platforms, at least that has been their philosophy since the Wii. ARM is just much more power efficient than x86 at the 7-20w range, which Switch's successor will likely target. Just look at what the arm-based Apple M1/M1x/M2 is (will be) doing in that range. While AMD's low power options keep up near the top of that power range, they need to be cooled much more since they need to stay at that top of the range more often. 

Many of Nintendo's less talented first/second party developers (like Game Freak) are also more comfortable with ARM, they've been using it since the Gameboy Advance era, and struggle with change. 

Furthermore, the distance in game support is going to decrease between x86 and ARM in the future than it was in 2017 and is today. Steam just released native ARM support in September. Developers are also quite use to ARM as an architecture, which wasn't quite true of the PowerPC processors that were present in the consoles before the switch to x86/ARM. It isn't as hard to port to ARM as it was in those prior generations because almost every engine supports it today, while engines often had to be proprietary then and therefore ported before porting the game.  

I think Nintendo is going to stay with ARM unless their next platform goes into the 25-40w range when docked due to a heftier cooling system in the dock. If that is the case, then they might go with AMD because AMD is quite competitive in that wattage range. 

Apple's M1 vs AMD's current CPUs isn't really a good comparison when it comes to Arm efficiency vs x86 imo. The reason is that M1 is on TSMC's 5nm while AMD's CPUs/GPUs are on TSMC's 7nm. Now while I agree that Arm should still be more efficient in the same node... The architecture, node and etc matters a lot which is why we see such a big gap in battery life between Intel's Laptop CPUs and AMD's Laptop CPUs even though both are on x86. A proper test on efficiency against M1 will be with next generation of AMD's Zen CPUs that should be coming out sometime this year as that will be on the same node as M1.

I do agree that porting games to Arm should be very easy for developers and such. But what I am wondering if making it even easier to port to the switch by going x86 will make companies like Rockstar finally release their games onto the Switch. Like you look at a game like GTA V, that game ran on the PS3/360 and the switch is much more powerful than both. Yet even though Rockstar is continuing to release GTA V for PS5/SeriesX/S, still no switch announcement. Is the reason they aren't porting GTA V because Rockstar hates Nintendo or is it because it would take too long to port a big game like that to the different architecture? Because we see that with Apple's M1 example, there is a pretty big performance gap when a game/app is properly optimized to run on M1 natively vs going through a translation layer.

If we can have the Switch 2 be x86 using AMD's very efficient CPU/GPUs, then we would have a scenario where the Switch, Series S, PS5 and Series X are all using the same architecture which in theory, should make porting even easier. But of course, Nintendo should only do this if third parties like Rockstar say they will port games to the Switch 2.