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Soundwave on 12 September 2023
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Pemalite said:
Soundwave said:

And the PS5/XBox Series X could have used the 6000 series AMD cards which were launching in fall 2020 ... but no one says those are badly outdated at launch (definitely were behind the Nvidia 30 series). 

Microsoft did. Sony's is a little more custom, but may as well be a Radeon 6000 (RDNA2) derived part.

Soundwave said:

I also think Nintendo was targeting holiday 2016 for Switch they just barely missed it. They had nothing for holiday 2016 and were forced to release the NES Classic to kind of fill in the lack of product they had to sell, they just couldn't release Switch at that time probably because the software would not have been ready. 

You think? So you don't have evidence for this hypothesis?

Soundwave said:

The bottom line is the Tegra X1 was still on the very high end of mobile chips for late 2016/2017. It was a better chip that the Apple A10 that was in expensive iPhones and about on par with an Apple A9X which a monster of a chip for an $800 iPad Pro. 

Other chips could beat it in memory transactions, CPU performance (by a country mile) and storage performance.

Adreno 530 could beat the Switch's Tegra X1 as the Tegra X1 in the Switch operates at only 30-75% of it's original clock... And considering the Adreno was already able to outbench Tegra in some benchmarks and get close-enough in others despite the Tegra being in a higher TDP form factor and thus not throttling...

You get the idea.

I think it's a little bit of a misnomer that the Tegra X1 was the best chip for the Switch. - After it got it's clocks massively castrated... It simply wasn't.

You might as well also litigate that the PS5/XBX should have used Nvidia 30 series cards which are better than what they have under the hood and were available in 2020. 

From 2016:

https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-820-benchmarks/

Taking a look at the Manhattan scores above, the Adreno 530 manages to beat nearly every device out there in terms of scores and ties up with Google's Pixel C; which comes with Nvidia's Tegra X1 on board.

It wasn't able to outperform a Tegra X1 in the gold standard GFX 3.0 Manhatten test despite coming out after the Tegra X1. And this is a GPU mind you that was going into like $800 flagship phones, I know because I had the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge which had this GPU. 

Now you can nitpick all you want, the bottom line is no way was the Tegra X1 not a top end chip, even when Nintendo chose it there was little available that was better for 2016 and the alternatives were basically being used in premium high end iPads or top of the line Samsung phones. You can argue you'd rather have this, but it's not like somehow you'd be playing Witcher 3 at double the resolution if the Switch had an Adreno 530 in it. It is an contemporary of the Tegra X1, not a successor level type hardware. Tegra X1 was on launch date absolutely the best of the best, later in late 2015/early 2016 Apple and Adreno (Snapdragon) were able to catch up, but that doesn't mean the Tegra X1 was some terrible chip. 

If Sony made a PSP3 with an Adreno 530 vs a Nintendo Switch with a Tegra X1, you're talking about like PS5 vs a XBox Series X, some people will claim one hardware is better, some people will claim the other, the fact is neither is in a class outside of the other. 

This isn't a Subway sandwich store where you get to chose everything you want in pre-built hardware. You have to give the hardware maker some leeway in making their hardware decisions, it's not "I want exactly X, Y, and Z". If that's what you want, you want a PC, not a prebuilt config of anything, it's not reasonable to hold a hardware manufacturer (Nintendo, Sony, MS, Samsung, whoever) to that standard. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 12 September 2023