haxxiy said:
It's not as much of a market ploy (as in, an unreachable boost clock) as much as it is how RDNA3, Ampere, and Ada work. All these architectures have doubled FP32 instructions per INT32 inside their GPU cores but that affords little benefit in real-life workloads and hence isn't relevant for gaming. That's the reason a lot of people are going to be bamboozled when they see a 36 TF PS5 Pro or a 4 TF docked Switch 2 thinking they are thrice as fast as a Series X or equal to a Series S... when they aren't. |
The gap between a Series S and a Switch 2 is going to be considerably lower than the gap between a Switch 1 and XBox One though I think.
If Nintendo was just happy releasing a "now you have Mario and friends but in PS4 graphics" I mean there's an awful lot of puzzling, expensive design choices being made here.
You don't need a 12SM Nvidia chip for that, 8SM or probably even 4SM would cover that.
You don't need LPDDR5X RAM and 30%+ more bandwidth of just LPDDR5 that's in devices like ROG Ally that can run games like Alan Wake 2 and more.
Even UFS 3.1 ... I mean is that bleeding edge? No, but it's pretty fucking fast all the same, that's still being used in $1000+ flagship phones and 256GB is basically the amount you would want if you want to accomodate any kind of modern gen game and still have room left over on the base device in any kind of scenario.
A fan inside the dock ... why would you want that if you don't care that much about performance?
Even "4 teraflops" if that's what we're getting here, 4 teraflops for a system that's going to be heavily likely tied to DLSS and utilizing very low rendering resolutions ... that's an awful lot of horsepower if all you want is PS4 tier Super Mario games.
It does seem to me like they do want more 3rd party content on the next system or they just have conveniently by coincidence made a system that checks a lot of the "well what do you need to just run this game at a native res of 540p DLSS undocked and 720p docked?" boxes. Well the Series S runs all/most current gen games with just 8GB, so 12GB would give you a decent overhead on the "how much RAM is really needed?" question. Bandwidth your choices for a device that has to be portable obviously are going to be different but if you're more interested in current gen ports, you would want LPDDR5X over LPDDR5, the extra bandwidth is important.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 10 May 2024