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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Ventura Beat: Nintendo Switch are based on Nvidia's Maxwell Architecture not Pascal

Jranation said:
Im expecting a rumor everyday from Jan 1 to Jan 12.

Haha, that's for sure! xD



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KLAMarine said:
As long as it's more powerful than the WiiU, that's enough for me.

It ain't about power baby: power hasn't exactly prevented this gen's PS4 and X1 from being hit with disappointments.

I loled. What a quote! xD



Interesting video I ran across. Highly technical, somewhat too technical for me so I cannot completely attest to this video's accuracy but give it a watch anyways if you care.

TL;DW: Pascal and Maxwell architectures aren't very different as far as the games that were tested were concerned.

GoOnKid said:
KLAMarine said:
As long as it's more powerful than the WiiU, that's enough for me.

It ain't about power baby: power hasn't exactly prevented this gen's PS4 and X1 from being hit with disappointments.

I loled. What a quote! xD

I'm serious man. One of my all-time favorite games, Resident Evil 4, is a much better game than Resident Evil 5, a game released on more powerful hardware.

Perhaps polygon counts isn't what make a game great?



SonytendoAmiibo said:
Nintendo never uses stock off the shelf chips. They ALWAYS have a modified chip made. So even if it is X1/Maxwell it will be a custom version. To get to the 1TF maybe there are two of them sandwiched in there. Even when Nintendo pulls the curtain back next month they wont talk about the system specs. They never do.

Nvidea might want to talk about it. I wouldn' t be surprised it was part of their deal with Nintendo. Bragging rights . Nintendo may not care, but Nvidea is trying to sell Tegra chips on their end. I wouldn't be surprised the NS would be best known tech of Nintendo's consoles.



In the wilderness we go alone with our new knowledge and strength.

Well, I'd love to say I was shocked, but I said it was going to be the X1 from the beginning so..... Not shocked at all.



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Unfortunately I think he's using the FP16 number to get that 1 TFLOP total, at FP32 which is what the XBOne and PS4 use a Maxwell Tegra is 500 GFLOPS.

I dunno about this news to be honest, I think Nintendo would be better off holding off for Pascal since a March release isn't really a matter of life and death (I mean the all important March ... uh ... shopping season). If they were going to miss 2016, they should've just gone with Pascal.

It's far more battery efficient even if they want the same power envelope, you would get better battery life.



LOL why people afraid if it's Maxwell or Paschal, Nintendo fans will buy the Switch no matter what the spec is.

The switch doesn't need 1 TF. It already runs great for Zelda and other games, hell even if it's end up on par with Wii U it's marvelous for a portable factor.

Remember with great power comes batteries capacity, and thermal problem. And u guys forget that Switch is a dedicated gaming machine unlike Nvidia Shield Tablet or other Tablet device, The Switch run on optimization close to the metal , it doesn't need universal API like Android or iOS or Windows Surface. And all games will be made for one spec in mind so it will be fully optimize.

And also we cannot compare Nvidia and AMD teraflops it's very different architecture . And also we talking about Nvidia a company that sell their chip at a higher price and then combine that with Nintendo level headed for the price factor. If the Switch run for 1 teraflop with that small factor and with  longer batteries live,  without getting thermal problem, then the price will be around 400 to 500 USD.



curl-6 said:
Going with older, cheaper tech does fit Nintendo's MO for the past 12 years, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if Switch's GPU is a modified Tegra X1.

Article saying that Pascal chips were not ready for Switch on time.

"Nvidia introduced its new Pascal architecture earlier this year, but that technology is not ready for the Tegra chip going into the Switch.

In the meantime, however, some fans might find it disappointing that Nintendo is using the Maxwell chip in the Switch instead of Pascal. But the timing just didn’t work out for Nintendo. Sources told GamesBeat that the Kyoto-based Japanese company is in such a rush that it can’t wait for the Pascal version of the Tegra. That’s both because the publisher wants to replace the failing Wii U and because it wants to strike quickly with its hybrid concept before a competitor can introduce a better product. That happened with the Wii U when — after years of development — Nintendo introduced its tablet-like Gamepad to consumers who had been using Apple’s iPads for the previous 24 months. If Nintendo decided to use Pascal in the Switch, it would have no choice but to delay the system and risk a similar situation."



Meelow said:
Before anyone freaks out...

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=226619995&postcount=504

"I have a few immediate thoughts after reading through the article:

Firstly, it's worth noting the difference between Maxwell and Pascal is almost entirely down to the manufacturing process. Maxwell was made on 28nm (and in the case of the TX1, 20nm) whereas Pascal is made on 16nm. The actual architectural difference between the two is minimal, and aside from improved color buffer compression, largely irrelevant for a device like the Switch.
Despite that, the article never makes any mention of the manufacturing process. I find that extremely strange, as it's obviously the defining difference between the two sets of GPUs.
In fact, the article gets the difference between the two completely the wrong way around, saying "Nintendo’s box is relatively small, and so it has to fit into the heat profile of a portable device, rather than a set-top box. That’s another reason that explains the older Maxwell technology, as opposed to the Pascal’s state-of-the-art tech." Pascal is literally a more power efficient version of Maxwell, so the incentive would be the other way around.
The author says "we expect the Nintendo Switch to be more than 1 teraflop in performance", which is notably higher than even those of us who were expecting Pascal were considering (I literally posted earlier today with a 500-750 Gflop estimate). If this is a Maxwell chip, then that would mean at least 4 SMs (512 "CUDA cores") at 1GHz, as they're not going to be able to push much past that on 28/20nm. This is a much larger GPU than most people would have been expecting.

I see a few different scenarios here:

The Switch SoC uses Maxwell at 20nm, and simply has a much larger GPU than anticipated to account for the performance.
Nintendo looked at the feature-set planned for Pascal when design started, realised that the new features were largely irrelevant, and decided that they would save time and just use a straight-forward die shrink of Maxwell to 16nm instead. That would technically be a Maxwell GPU, but would be almost completely indistinguishable from Pascal in terms of performance.
The sources are wrong about Maxwell, the 1 Tflop performance, or both.

Basically, if you're to take the article as being accurate, then the only worthwhile takeaway is this quote:"

Yup definitely is something strange and he has point, article saying power more than 1TF while realistic expectations were around 500 Gflops.



I almost feel like they should've waited, maybe not until as late as November 2017, but how about August/September 2017 (like the SNES and N64 and GameCube in Japan launched)?

It's not even like Zelda will be ready. March again, just seems like such a weird and arbitrary date to rush towards.