Alternate history: Switch a generation earlier

[Pemalite]

HoloDust said:

Pemalite said:

It's not the same GPU as the iPad.

Vita used: PowerVR SGX543MP4+
iPad 3rd Gen: PowerVR SGX543MP4
iPad used: PowerVR SGX543MP2

The "MP4 and MP2" denotes how many cores they have for the graphics chip.
The "+" signifies some customizations to the core for Sony.

So whilst they share the same graphics core architecture, there are differences.

Asus Transformer is also not the most optimized or updated variant of the platform either.

Yeah, I know what MP stands for, should've said "has about the same GPU as Vita", since, obviously, Sony did some customization to 543MP4. And even if not, if anything else, I think Vita has dedicated VRAM.

Point of those benchmarks is mostly in comparing 543MP4 to Tegra 3 in real life examples of similar products (with former easily dominating Tegra 3) - and Vita, packing 543MP4+, is probably best you can hope for out of handheld from that time, so Nintendo's a la Switch handheld doubtfully would be  as fast, unless they actually made something like Vita as well. And while Vita was able to pull some impressive games (and even some ports), I don't think that PS360 to Vita difference was as low as PS4XBO to Switch, so any Nintendo's Tegra 3 based "hybrid" would fair even worse.

Vita certainly does have dedicated VRAM. 128MB. But it's only 3.2GB/s... System Ram uses Samsung 256MB LPDDR2 at 1ghz chips so we are probably looking at around 2.4GB/s.

Tegra 3 can accommodate up-to 2,048MB LPDDR3 Ram at 6.4GB/s. Massive difference.

Anything that uses lots of heavy textures, alpha effects and higher resolutions, the Tegra 3 would pull ahead of the Vita, it's simply a better environment for that kind of work load.

Although the Vita with it's tiled based deferred renderer can punch above it's numerical weight... Which is not something that Tegra adopted until Kepler if I recall, maybe even Maxwell.

We also need to remember the development environment back then, nVidia's API's and drivers were far less mature than PowerVR's and the development environment tools were rudimentary at best, it's not the case these days, it's helped that Android has matured.

We also need to remember that in non-offscreen benchmarks, Tegra 3 is very competitive with PowerVR. Offscreen has never been Tegra's strong point.