Pemalite said:
haxxiy said:
That would mean 120 GB/s of bandwidth, consistent with the GeForce 2050 in laptops, which is expected to be more or less similar to the Switch 2 GPU. Of course, the laptop GPU wouldn't have to share bandwidth with the CPU too, but still.
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7,600MT/s is 486.4Gb/s.
486.4Gb/s X2 (Two chips) = 972.8Gb/s.
972.8Gb/s /8 (8 bits in a byte) = 121.6GB/s.
For comparison sake...
Playstation 4: 176GB/s.
Playstation 4 Pro: 217.6GB/s.
Xbox One: 68.3GB/s
Xbox Series X: 326GB/s.
Xbox Series S: 224GB/s.
So it definitely beats the Xbox One, but falls short of the Playstation 4.
HOWEVER... There are a ton of caveats to this which the raw numbers which everyone clings to doesn't tell us.
Things like Delta Colour Compression, Mesh Shading, Improved Culling and compression and even things like Tiled-based rasterization that the Playstation 4 and Xbox One didn't have... Means that it has more bandwidth to play with than the 121.6GB/s of memory bandwidth implies.
The real disappointment is the 12GB memory buffer, it's not enough.
But like all things... This is all rumor and not fact at this point.
Soundwave said:
12GB LPDDR5X RAM is basically the best of the best for portable devices and that's quite a lot of it, it points to a powerful chip to need that much bandwidth too, this is way faster than the RAM in the Steam Deck (88GB for SD versus 120GB/sec for Switch 2) or stock ROG Ally. To put it in perpsective this is the same RAM the new OLED iPad Pros just announced this week use and those are $1000+.
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Not really. It depends how wide you want to take it... Because you can implement LPDDR2 in such a way that it offers more bandwidth than LPDDR5X.
LPDDR5X also does go higher than the rumored 7500MT/s. - 8533MT/s, 9600MT/s, 10700MT/s exist for example, so Nintendo wouldn't be using the latest and greatest in DRAM.
10700MT/s would put the bandwidth at 171.2GB/s which is in spitting distance of the PS4 and more in line with an RTX3050 which would be preferable.
I would have rather liked to have seen 16GB of memory at the very least... The current layout ensures we will have a 96bit or 192bit memory bus, likely 96bit to keep costs down or a silly clam-shell memory layout.
And 12GB is not a lot of memory in 2024, let alone in 2025 and beyond.
16GB is considered the minimum these days... And we need to also keep in mind that Nintendo's OS tends to be memory hungry and will likely steal 2-4GB of that 12GB leaving 8-10GB for developers, which is a pittance.
Remember the Series S is very memory starved and that has over 8GB for developers out of 10GB.
Things like DLSS, Ray Tracing and more want more Ram.
Comparing it to iPad's and Phones is doing the device a disservice, they are utilitarian devices, not purely gaming devices. Ram and GPU is the priority in a gaming device which reinforces the need for different priorities in hardware.
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12GB is more than the XBox Series S in total RAM, LPDDR5X is only used right now in premium $1000 mobile phones and tablets, it will have more bandwidth than a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, 120GB/sec is enough to feed a GPU running in the 4 TFLOP docked range. I'd rather have 12GB RAM @120GB/sec instead of 16GB @a lower bandwidth of 80GB/sec.
Nintendo's engineers once put it best, even when you give people reasonably speced hardware techies miss the point and just want more, more, more, there's no satisfying that audience.
This is pretty darn good tech and I think a lot of people will appreciate this much power in a portable device, this is nothing like the Wii/DS days where Nintendo used completely ancient hardware, this is more like the NES/SNES/N64/GameCube era, reasonably powerful hardware for probably a fair price but I think this is not going to be that cheap, $449.99 is my guess to launch with and that's fair given that this is a huge leap beyond the $349.99 OLED Switch which is selling just fine even now.
Nintendo will sell more than the Playstation and XBox again if they have their software ducks in a row and it looks like Switch 1 given the extra little time will cruise past and crush the PS2's LTD record too. This should be powerful enough to handle plenty of PS5/XBSS/SX ports with the help of DLSS. A fan in the dock this time is interesting too, it tells me they are going to push this chip probably harder than the current Switch.
I'm pretty happy with this news, I was expecting LPDDR5 only like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, and maybe 128GB internal storage of UFS 2.2 or something like that, UFS 3.1 is still for today quite fast and 256GB is comfortably enough to download even the largest monster PS5 game and still have room left over for probably several Nintendo games. That's more than I expected. Also was not expecting a fan in the dock, thought it would just be another hollow dock that does nothing but HDMI pass through, a dock with an actual cooling solution inside can push a chip much harder, even with the existing Switch we're learning the Tegra X1 can do some crazy shit when pushed at higher clocks, like running Switch software at 4K resolution even.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 09 May 2024
