haxxiy said:
That's true, although we didn't have comparable hardware designed to be cheap in the past generation. If it wasn't for the Series S the gap between the Switch 2 and the current gen would probably have been bigger, not smaller than in the past generation. As it stands, though, Nintendo might be in luck, third-party support-wise speaking. |
I don't know if it's luck so much as it looks to me like they have specifically designed a machine that simply can handle modern ports or at least that was of greater consideration in the design process this time around.
Consider even against the PS5, 448GB/sec bandwidth versus the Switch 2 having 120GB/sec is only about a 3.65x gap. The Switch 1 versus PS4 (I'll leave the XBox One out because it used a large embedded RAM buffer which kinda makes it hard to compare directly) was 25.6GB/sec versus 176GB/sec ... that was like a 7x gap in memory bandwidth (huge difference), on top of that you also then factor in the Switch 2 is probably going to be rendering at far, far lower resolutions than the PS5 does because of DLSS.
As I've said I have some serious doubts this is going to be as cheap as $399.99, there's a lot of component/chip choices here that are completely against the idea of the lowest possible cost.
Like a PS5 game that's rendering 1440p natively lets say ... sure it has about 3.65x the bandwidth, but it would also have to render more than 3.65x the pixels per frame as a Switch 2 version of the same game that's running at say 540p undocked (DLSS up to 720p) and 720p docked (DLSS up to 1440p). That has to be part of the equation too, yes, the PS5 has more bandwidth obviously but it also has to render a metric shit ton of more pixels per frame.
They definitely didn't have to choose 120GB/sec RAM (or a GPU that probably requires that much bandwidth) just to have Mario and Pikachu and friends in PS4 quality even at 1440p (which you could just DLSS up from 720p or 900p) ... it just seems to me like a lot of hardware choices here that are way overkill if that was all Nintendo wanted/needed.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 10 May 2024
