| Pemalite said: TSMC is definitely more expensive than Samsung. Gflops and Teraflops is bullshit. Just going to leave it at that... It doesn't tell us integer throughput, says nothing of geometry/pixel/texel fillrates, doesn't account for Ray Tracing capabilities or A.I. inference performance, alone it's a useless metric.
It also highlights a level of risk for all three companies in the event of a console failing... For Nintendo it's a massive impact, which is why they don't subsidize hardware, so even if they had poor sales, they are still making money and reduces risk so they can justify a successor. |
I honestly don't think TSMC is that expensive compared to Samsung and in fact it seems like TSMC is on a different scale of orders to Samsung's fabrications. Even the cheapest nastiest tablets and smartphones have chips fabricated by TSMC which admittedly would be a older fabrication process but you only have to step up a bit to see fabrications better than Switch 2 on far cheaper devices. It is Nvidia that sells the T239 chip to Nintendo so obviously it is Nvidia that deals with the fabricator and places orders and of course in recent times they have switched from Samsung to TSMC for their later chips but the T239 was designed around Samsung's 8Nm (really 10Nm mainly) process which is what Nvidia were using at the time for their PC chipsets and Nintendo might already have been in possession of 100s of thousands of pre-fabricated T239 chips anyway from the aborted Switch Pro model. Also the size of the Switch 2 T239 is mid-level it is neither small or large in die area there are more complicated chips out there.
Gflops is still widely used, yes everyone knows its a general indication only but its widely used, Geekerwan used it with their comparison, Techpowerup still lists it for all graphics chipsets etc. No one is saying it is perfect but often gflops is criticised in forums because a person wants to blur everything and create a defence for weaker graphics cards. We all know results will vary depending on how game engines use that graphics card, if its used on a fixed platform and what other resources the gpu have but it is still a widely used metric for the industry despite its weaknesses. We all know there are other huge factors like memory bandwidth and upscaling technologies, ray tracing etc. There is absolutely no point constantly saying gflops isn't perfect as we all know that but it still is the only generalised part of the spec that can be used. You can't compare a Switch 2 to a Steam Deck visually directly because the Switch 2 version is custom designed from the ground up to work with the hardware where as the Steam Deck just gets a generalised PC version. Lots of things are scaled back for the weaker hardware. The whole industry still uses gflops despite its huge flaws to give a GENERAL indication of potential power independent of the CPU typically and it will be in the right ballpark area. Each GPU architecture has strengths and weaknesses which of course is not incorporated in a simple gflops figure and even the gflops figure itself is split into fp16, fp32 and fp64 and those figures vary with different cards so one card good at fp32 maybe considerably weaker than the other card it is being compared to at fp16 for example but generally it is the fp32 figure compared which is used most often in game engines.
On the Switch 2 I've seen enough developer reports on how they optimise for Switch 2, they simplify code, remove some minor features with high GPU or CPU requirements to create a game engine with good fps on weaker hardware which has always been the case for fixed platforms. They drive the hardware better with more direct access to the chipsets. They create a conversion with not much important missing so a good game experience. It's not that the Switch 2 has amazing magically hardware that isn't shown in the gflops figures its just fixed platform optimisations. Same was true of PS4, Switch 1 and all fixed platforms basically. The Switch 2 chipset was designed back in 2019/2020 and its release was stalled for many years. It's an old architecture now which has been improved upon a few times in later chipsets.
Comparing my old RX 580 to my gaming laptop with RTX 2050 mobile. The gflops figure is about the same but the RX 580 is much, much older but a desktop GPU with more memory bandwidth but lacks some of the modern features of the RTX 2050 mobile. The RTX 2050 is far superior to the T239 on just about every level but still performs lower than the RX 580. This is often the case with mobile chips which are more power restrained.
https://technical.city/en/video/Radeon-RX-580-vs-GeForce-RTX-2050-mobile
It's like sometimes you read postings where the person is pretending that just because the architecture is newer it is magically superior on every level that certainly isn't true. I absolutely love my RTX 2050 laptop, it was £350 well spent but it doesn't quite perform as well as my dusty old desktop pc. I was playing Cyberpunk on that card what seems like 5 years ago now with 40-60fps with decent detail settings.
