sc94597 said:
bonzobanana said:
The original Switch had 5 different development kit specs I think and I believe before it was launched their were leaks of those boards which had more more memory and more performance. I think there were development kits with both 6GB and 8GB of memory. I'm not convinced at all that the Switch 2 will launch at the height of people's expectations. I think Nintendo are benefitting from people confusing development kit spec with final retail spec which will be much weaker. Why go for a cheap 8Nm fabrication process if you are going to push for such a high spec that will burn through battery life quickly? It doesn't really matter what the t239 is capable of at maximum performance, like Intel and other chip makers they simply reduce active functionality on the silicon to have extremely high yields. If they want half the active Cuda cores for battery life, cost and reduced heat that is a choice they can make. Development kits normally have a feature to test at retail spec even if the development kits are much stronger in performance. I remember when I had a wii u almost from launch and it was something like 5 years after the 360 and PS3 that happened. Many games were much weaker on wii u than ps3 or 360. Sonic transformed was something like 640p compared to higher resolutions on the other consoles. The sound wasn't as good and loading was longer. The frame rate wasn't brilliant either it suffered from some dips which the ps3 also suffered with but the 360 provided a much more consistent performance. There were many third party games that suffered like that compared to the other 2 much older consoles. The PS3 was offering amazing surround sound in 7.1, but often the wii u felt like it was purely 2 channel. Relying completely on optical disc meant much slower loading. People claimed it had a much better GPU that wasn't utilised but in the end it was confirmed it had a 176 Gflop gpu much weaker than those consoles in raw power and there was never any debate that the wii u had lower CPU resources. The only thing it really benefitted from was its 1GB of memory for the gaming side. Thanks to Nintendo's great optimisation of weak hardware though it still had a good version of Zelda Breath of the Wild. I still think Zelda Windwaker on the Gamecube is a visually stunning game and I think that GPU was only around 8 Gflops. Nintendo knows how people's expectations work and it is in their interests to allow them to think one of their systems is more powerful than it actually is. |
The original Switch didn't have a fully custom chip. It inherited its chipset from the Nvidia Shield. Disabling some memory and reducing core-clocks is very different from halving the core-count when you could've designed to have a 6SM chip in the first place because it is totally new hardware.Â
We don't know if the chip is 8nm. I am still a bit partial toward Samsung 5nm given what we know about handheld mode's clock rates. But from the specs we know the CPU is heavily underclocked to make up for a high GPU clock. Not impossible on 8nm, given that the docked mode is actually below expectations. And again the Wii U situation is very different from the Switch 2's. It inherited a lot of its CPU architecture from the Gamecube/Wii. Regardless though, there are some games on the Wii U (mostly exclusives) that were noticeable improvements over their PS360 counter-parts. Bayonetta 2 probably would have to have compromises to run on the PS360, as an example.Â
You can't directly compare Gflops across architectures. A game is more than just floating-point compute. About a third of all compute are integer calculations (according to an Nvidia estimate a few years ago) and even if all compute in games involved floating-points, theoretical maximums can be cut down by bottlenecks. But yeah, the Wii U really doesn't have anything to do with the Switch 2's specs. They are very different systems with very different goals. |
For some reason I thought it was near enough confirmed as 8Nm but not sure why I think that to be honest. I'd thought I'd seen it somewhere. I only quote Wii U because of how Nintendo goes for cheap designs with limited uncompetitive performance as a commercial decision. Gflops is a rough guide to graphics power I think its useful. I'm not a fan of Bayonetta 2 and while very well programmed I don't think it does anything the 360 and PS3 couldn't do. Bayonetta 2 isn't realistic graphics, its fairly basic texturing and its controlled progression in the game. I just don't see it as something other consoles couldn't do. I've seen a few games on ps3 which I thought couldn't be done on wii u or 360 because those games have made as much use of the cell processors as possible so there is a huge amount of game logic and stuff going on, on screen like the Resistance games. Where there were a huge amount of weather effects, explosions and more realistic texturing, full surround sound and lots of decent enemy AI. I've never seen anything like that on wii u or Switch to be honest. There is just such a huge amount of stuff going on, on screen from signs blowing in the wind, flags, dust, light, craft above. I was truly amazed when I first played the game and how much was going on. I don't think I ever had a moment with the wii u where I was wowed by the game engine being impressive. I loved the art style of breath of the wild but they were fairly simple cell shaded type graphics a bit like upgraded windwaker. Don't get me wrong a beautiful game but I never thought that game couldn't be achieved on 360 or PS3 and in fact in someways they probably could have improved it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPsOuZGQYa8
Essay Pro