How Will be Switch 2 Performance Wise?

[Pemalite]

JRPGfan said:

Leynos said:

Lol damn made me remember back in the day when people had dual Nvidia 8800s.

SLI days? :)

I remember back when video cards where stand alone, and 3dfx cards where these "extra" cards, that you also ran, side by side, with the video card.
You then had a vga cable, that hooked from your video card, into the 3dfx card, and out, towards the monitor.

That was how you ran 3D games back then.
Before it was called Nvidia.

My bro got a voodoo card, I was jealous of what it could do.
I remember being blown away, seeing games run in 3d, back when everything else was 2d.

3dfx was an outlier in that regard and it was an issue just for a couple of cards, it wasn't the norm.

S3 (Virge, Savage), Matrox (Millenium, Parhelia) , ATI (Rage, Radeon), Rendition (Verite), 3DLabs(Permedia, GLINT), Intel (i740), STMicroelectrics (Kyro), Trident (Blade, 3D Image) and more could all do 3D and 2D just fine.
Even 3DFX with the Voodoo Rush and Voodoo Banshee could run SOLO in a PC as it included 2D acceleration.

Otherwise, 3dfx did require an extra graphics card for 2D acceleration (And sometimes an extra card for OpenGL/DirectX) whilst the card handled 3D graphics duties, which even then was best left for 3DFX Glide. ...OpenGL and Direct X could run, but later on, specifically with the Voodoo 4 and 5, TnL was sadly missing, so it wasn't Direct X 7 compliant which would later hamper the ability to run more modern games.

The restriction with the Voodoo 1, 2 and 3 is that you couldn't render 3D in a window due to the lack of 2D acceleration.

I actually still have my 3dfx Voodoo 2's 12MB in SLI mode, paired up with an Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB of SD Ram and a Radeon 9500 Pro.
Voodoo's are only used for Glide, everything else on the Radeon.

Leynos said:

SEGA of America's plan for Dreamcast would use a 3DFX Voodoo2

And it's a shame they didn't... Because several things would have happened.
3DFX would have retained the revenue they needed to stay in the market... And the Dreamcast would have been significantly more potent from a technology perspective, with easier porting of 3DFX Glide games which looked incredible at the time.
It would still be behind the Original Xbox and Gamecube as they could do pixel shaders and the like...

And Sega may have gotten some extra brand awareness, especially amongst the PC userbase.

Sega was also planning on using a derivative of nVidia's NV1 for it's Dreamcast console at one point as it supported Quadratics, which would have benefited developers who were used to Saturn.
At this point in time, nVidia was almost bankrupt with less than a months worth of cash reserves, Sega actually probably saved them with a $5 million dollar cash injection.

HoloDust said:

Well, a lot of folks ran only one card, be it S3 Virge, ATI Rage or Matrox Mystique (or some of the later models, video card market was very turbulent in late 90s with cards releasing every year)...those initial 3D cards pretty much all sucked compared to 3dfx Voodoo, but they had 3D accelerators on board along with standard 2D circuits for that time.

nVidia's first graphics processor, the NV1 relied on Quadratics and was an abstract failure, it actually shared a lot of similarities with the Sega Saturn on the graphics front... But once Microsoft threw it's support for Polygons with Direct X, nVidia's first graphics processors fate was sealed until they released the Riva/TNT cards.

sc94597 said:

3. This allows Switch 2 to maximize efficiency in handheld mode for longer battery life while retaining graphical effects without losing much perceived image quality or performance. 

Using those Tensor cores comes at a cost of power.
There is no "extra efficiency" or battery life.

The GPU core is still pegged at 100%, with extra processing required to bolster resolution/upscaling.

What it's enabling is higher visual fidelity.