By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Nintendo Discussion - More leaks; Nintendo Switch to use costum Tegra X2, 1.5Tflops, architecture unveiled

CrazyGPU on 03 November 2016

People please come back to earth. Switch is a handheld device. Its a big tablet. And with 0,75 Teraflops of FP 32 is near half as powerfull than a XBOX ONE.
Is faster than any smartphone, and awesome for a handheld device, but nowhere near a 1.84 Teraflops 3 year old ps4.
It will be better than Wii U of course, and it will have awesome games.

But there are power and size limitations that are obvious. I mean, Battlefield 1 runs at 720p at times on XBOX ONE. This Hanheld wont be able to run a game like that at 720p without serious downgrading.

And there is also the issue of the compatibility. PS4, XBOX and PC are X86, how many companies are going to port every game for an ARM incompatible CPU?. Maybe some games, but I don´t think that we ´ll see a massive 3rd party migration towards Nintendo.

I think is an awesome portable device, but in two years the decision will be, do I want a portable device that can be used as a 720p downgraded console? or I would play on 2160p Scorpio or 1440p or 2160 checkered PS4 pro with better visuals, lighting and texture?. Me, Im sorry for Nintendo , but I go with the big guys. I dont care playing on the bus, I like to play at home in my living room or in the bed.

But the switch would be a good present for my kids christmas tree if he doesnt brake it in pieces in a couple of weeks.



Around the Network
haqqaton on 04 November 2016
CrazyGPU said:
RAM is not like Cache. A CPU can read from cache and if there is a cache miss it looks for data on ram. But a CPU doesnt reed directly from HDs. Thats why there are memory management units since 1985 on the 80386 chip. These units make the conversion between logical adresses and phisical ram adresses and bring pages from virtual memory (disk) to RAM. Then the CPU can read the data. CPU reads DATA from RAM, not from HDs, so RAM IS NOT CACHE.

Yeah, I understand why you think this way. We usually refers to the CPU cache when we say "cache". And you're right when you say that RAM is not a cache because there are no instructions to READ or WRITE directly to the disk. Conceptually speaking though, it is.

The CPU cache keeps a small portion of data and instructions that were previously on the RAM. In the same way, RAM keeps a small portion of data and instructions that were previously on the HDD. The entire memory hierarchy model on computers is based on this idea. In each level we have a "cache" for the slower memory on the level below.

You can change a instruction like:

MOV $ADDRESS, EAX

to access $ADDRESS on the disk instead of the RAM even if it needs do go trough the memory converter-disk controller.

One of the main reasons you need to work with virtual addresses is because today you have dozens of proccesses using the memory concurrently on your PC. In the ancient machines - and some specific ones today - the memory address used was the real one.

That's what I was talking about. Conceptually speaking, the RAM is like a cache for the disk.



Dulfite on 04 November 2016
CrazyGPU said:
People please come back to earth. Switch is a handheld device. Its a big tablet. And with 0,75 Teraflops of FP 32 is near half as powerfull than a XBOX ONE.
Is faster than any smartphone, and awesome for a handheld device, but nowhere near a 1.84 Teraflops 3 year old ps4.
It will be better than Wii U of course, and it will have awesome games.

But there are power and size limitations that are obvious. I mean, Battlefield 1 runs at 720p at times on XBOX ONE. This Hanheld wont be able to run a game like that at 720p without serious downgrading.

And there is also the issue of the compatibility. PS4, XBOX and PC are X86, how many companies are going to port every game for an ARM incompatible CPU?. Maybe some games, but I don´t think that we ´ll see a massive 3rd party migration towards Nintendo.

I think is an awesome portable device, but in two years the decision will be, do I want a portable device that can be used as a 720p downgraded console? or I would play on 2160p Scorpio or 1440p or 2160 checkered PS4 pro with better visuals, lighting and texture?. Me, Im sorry for Nintendo , but I go with the big guys. I dont care playing on the bus, I like to play at home in my living room or in the bed.

But the switch would be a good present for my kids christmas tree if he doesnt brake it in pieces in a couple of weeks.

1) Nintendo is only trying to be the main console for their core group, of which they have millions of Wii U/3ds owners that are used to technology that looks like a joke compared to Switch. The Switch alone doubles the ram of the Wii U, has DDR4 (I think?) so the ram type is even better, and has roughly 3-4x more flops of power than the Wii U. And the Wii U makes the 3ds look like a joke in power. So, if we are comparing power here, the only thing that matters to the core Nintendo fan, you know those of us who don't own a ps4/xbox one, is how it compares to Nintendo's own devices. I could care less what a ps4 looks like in comparison because I'm already pretty stinking happy with my pc that has a gtx 980 ti that makes the ps4 look like a joke.

2) Other than their core group, Nintendo knows that they seel a lot, if not MOST , if not the vast majority of their devices as secondary gaming devices. The key to a good selling secondary device is to make it novel (playable on the go for at least 2-3 hours at a time) and to make it cheap enough that people will be good with buying it to play the Nintendo exclusives. IF you released a 2160p Switch, and it costs $500, is this group of people going to buy a device for Nintendo stuff alone? No, because $500 isn't worth just Nintendo games to these people (remember, this group already has the multiplatforms on their primary gaming device).



haqqaton on 04 November 2016
setsunatenshi said:

This is kind of a no shit sherlock... yes, in theory you can build a machine without RAM, it just won't be a gaming machine. 

[Yes, it could be a RAM less console.] 

So why exactly bring it up when we are discussing something as specific as a console?

It would be too long of a post to go through every minutia, so let's just get the short version...

Your example of the media being loaded off the cd is pretty much invalid as every modern console will install the game into the drive for quick access to the game assets. That goes exactly into my previous point of having a faster hard drive having a benefit on LOADING TIMES. That is it and that is all.

[That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Having faster reading times from the media means that I could let some things to be loaded on demand instead of loading it five minutes before using it. In another words, the way I use the RAM available is in some way affected by the speed of the media. That's our point here, you said RAM has nothing to do with the media but it has.]

If any game developer is reading this, please feel free to correct me in case I'm saying something wrong, but the RAM needs to hold the most immediate resources for what current level of the game is being played are. If the game needs to go back to the storage (hard drive, sd card, bluray, etc) to pick up new resources the game either will stop to load those same resources into the RAM or just simply glitch out.

[I have a bachelor degree on Computer Science, a master degree on Computer Networks; I'm a software developer on my work and an indie game developer as a hobby but I think that you still won't believe me but... you're wrong. The game goes to the BD or HDD to read assets all the time - specially on big games. It's called asynchronous (concurrently) loading: the loading is happening while you're already playing the game and usually keeps that way until you turn it off. The RAM can't store all the game data. Think of Witcher 3 or Skyrim world: when you goes near a building it is loaded into the RAM but it's discarded when you're far from it (specially on older consoles). Another example of it are the pop-ins (but not all of them).]

There is simply no way in hell you can give the tasks of the RAM to the storage media unless you ran out of RAM. The developer would simply program the game around the RAM limitation and make sure they will only load exactly as many resources as they are absolutely needed in order for the game to play. This can simply mean lower resolution textures, fewer objects, etc.

[I'm not saying that Switch can use the cartridge as a RAM. I'm saying that the developer could benefit from having a faster media while using the RAM available. In that way, having a faster media could mean different usage of RAM even on the same game in different consoles.]

So please let's stop with theoretical scenarios and just look at things realistically. And that means, no, having a faster ssd/sd card, will not compensate for some lack of RAM while running a modern game. 

[I'm using practical scenarios. I can understand what you are trying to say. I'm not saying that the cartridges on Switch will compensate it not having 8Gb of RAM. What I'm saying is that a game can use the read speed of a faster media in his favour and get better usages of the RAM space that doesn't need to be used as cache anymore.]


etking on 04 November 2016

This basically confirms that the Switch will only be capable of playing IOS/Android quality games. No way you can run PS4 games on such a slow ARM CPU. It also confirms that the CPU-part of the system is slower than the Wii-U although the GPU-part may be faster.

But the slow CPU will be a bottleneck thart prevents console games from being ported (It is technically impossible to port CPU-heavy games without completely rewriting the engine). But we will se a lot of Iphone / Android games coming to the sysrem. The technical architecture could also allow Nintendo to release all 1st party Switch games on Android / IOS in order to make investors happy. You could then use the Switch controller as a bluetooth remote control. My bet is that this is the unannounced secret feature of the switch and that Skyrim and Zelda will release on Android / IOS too.



Around the Network
bonzobanana on 04 November 2016
etking said:

This basically confirms that the Switch will only be capable of playing IOS/Android quality games. No way you can run PS4 games on such a slow ARM CPU. It also confirms that the CPU-part of the system is slower than the Wii-U although the GPU-part may be faster.

But the slow CPU will be a bottleneck thart prevents console games from being ported (It is technically impossible to port CPU-heavy games without completely rewriting the engine). But we will se a lot of Iphone / Android games coming to the sysrem. The technical architecture could also allow Nintendo to release all 1st party Switch games on Android / IOS in order to make investors happy. You could then use the Switch controller as a bluetooth remote control. My bet is that this is the unannounced secret feature of the switch and that Skyrim and Zelda will release on Android / IOS too.

I'm not sure what you mean the wii u has 3 terrible 32bit powerpc cpu's that only run at 1.2ghz and are capable of about 9,000 mips combined that were designed back in the last century (no joke). Even the leaked development kit specs which people are saying are too low has 4  arm A57 64bit cores at up to 2ghz which is  36,800 mips. In cpu terms the wii u is absolutely pathetic well below the 360 and PS3.  

Even if the Switch can't match the xbox one and ps4 visually it has a fighting chance of running the same game engines if any developer/publisher can be bothered that is but with much inferior graphics.