Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[Pemalite]

Chrkeller said:

This, regarding the bolded part.  That is a premium chipset but will also (at least) double the cost compared to the Switch 2.  Nintendo sacrificed power in favor of price point, which btw is the smart move.  Nintendo was never going to go premium at $600+.  Nintendo does not sell niche products; they sell wide appeal mass market products.  My house has two units, one for me and one for my daughter.  At $600+ we wouldn't own two of them, and my daughter would be buying a lot less software.  

I get that it's a premium part... But it falls into that "price" argument, that you get what you pay for.

The Switch 2 doesn't exist in a bubble where it offers the best price/performance for every single person.
The Switch Lite is half the price and has an amazing game library...
Or you could spend a bit more than the Switch 2 and get 40+ years of games and a dozen console platforms with a PC handheld.
Or you can go all out and get the most powerful handheld device on Earth that can play PS5 games at PS5 quality settings.

So any argument that the Switch 2 is a "premium" device is just blatantly false.

There are many people who can't justify the Switch 2's price when they can buy 2x Switch Lite consoles instead.

Soundwave said:

No one cares about premium, premium is a niche, tiny ass market.

You literally said the Switch 2 is a "Premium product" in a previous post.


The literal mind-games and backflips is pretty hypocritical.

Chrkeller said:

The bolded part, exactly.  If someone wants to say it outclasses the ps4, fair, it does.  If someone wants to argue it outclasses the ps4 pro, questionable, but still acceptable.  But the attitude that it is leaps and bounds beyond the ps4 is absurd.  

The Switch 2 has multiple hardware advantages when compared against the Playstation 4 or even Playstation 4 Pro.
The Playstation 4 being based on Graphics Core Next hasn't aged particularly well when it comes to newer rendering methods.
The lowest and slowest discreet GPU's today, even on a 64bit memory bus... Will beat a Radeon 7850 that is the PS4-equivalent.

I.E. DLSS decimates Checkerboard.
RT is far better suited to the Switch 2's GPU over Graphics Core Next due to that architectures lack of low-precision math. (Even when accounting for PS4 Pro's RPM path)

Chrkeller said:

The ps4 pro has a more powerful CPU compared to the Switch 2.  The Switch 2 fits between the ps4 and ps4 pro, but with newer tech like RT.  So, calling the S2 a ps4 pro with bells/whistles is just accurate..  and ironically is exactly what the vast majority of us predicted.  Nintendo sacrificed power for price, as we all said they would.  It isn't a premium product, because if it were, the unit would be 16 gb ram, not 12 gb.    

The Switch 2's ARM A78C cores are significantly better than Jaguar.
A78c is based on ARMv8.2-A with better branch prediction, wider execution, larger caches... I would peg the IPC of A78c to be around 3x-4x that of Jaguar at the same clock.

Thus the PS4 CPU would need to operate in the range of 3ghz-4ghz to match the Switch 2's CPU's and not the paltry 1.6Ghz clock.

The Switch 2 also offloads some CPU processing like decompression, which would consume a core or two on last generation hardware, significantly increasing available CPU resources for other tasks.

The Clock on the Switch 2 whilst only at 1ghz... Sucks. It's not the end of the world.

It falls significantly short of AMD Zen however.

Soundwave said:

I also said many times also this was not a budget hardware and would likely cost $400 only if you were lucky, likely $450 or more looking at the component leaks. 1536 CUDA cores, 12MB RAM, 256GB high speed internal storage, 8 inch display, this was not some rinky dinky bargain basement cheap hardware, but you had a lot of people here thinking $350 was in play (lol). Because I was looking at the actual leaks and the components therein, not basing thingson a stupid "dur hur Nintendo cannott make gud hardwarez this is will beeez just like da Wii You again when Ninty fans got too excitied" line of logic. 

It is budget hardware.
It's not even using a fully enabled Tegra Orin chip, it's using a cut-down chip.

The full Tegra Orin is a 2048 SM part running at 1.3Ghz.
Switch 2 is a 1536 SM part running at 0.561Ghz mobile, 1Ghz docked.

There are instances where the Switch 2 will have less than a THIRD of the performance of a fully enabled Tegra Orin chip.

And that ignores the other white elephant in the room... That Tegra Orin is old and outdated in nVidia's Tegra product stack as nVidia has Tegra Thor on the market which would have given Nintendo 2-3x~ the performance for the same 1536 SM chip.

12GB of Ram is small and budget.

The Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 released with 16GB of Ram.... 5 years ago.
24-32GB seems to be the sweet spot for DRAM in most devices, even PC handhelds currently.

The 8" display is utter cheap garbage, it's blurry, it's got poor contrasts, colour and response times. It can't even do HDR properly, it is the worst part about the Switch 2.. And I would argue should have been the most important part.
There are much better LCD panels on the market.

Soundwave said:

Switch 2 has features from Ada Lovelace as well direct from Nvidia's own documentation which is an even newer architecture than Ampere isa". 

What features? Name them.