Well kudos to actually admitting you were wrong.... others would have lived and died by their theories.

I'm not surprised here tho, and had been saying it for a while. The form factor was the giveaway. And as the DF video pointed out, if you want any kinda mobile performance you are limited by how much power the system can draw right off the bat.

Then there were other cues like LPDDR4 which is the kinda memory used in smartphones specifically for their much lower power draw.

This all basically means that the Switch is first and foremost a handheld conosle. With a 1Ghz CPU and a 300Mhz GPU. Make no mistake, every game made for the switch will be optimized primarily with those specs in mind. In doccked mode they can easily get whatever they accomplished in mobile mode uprezed to look better on a 1080p screen. But everything about the console including its memory size had always screamed that this was a 720p console at heart. 

Yep, portable mode is the base they will code/test at and they should. I was really expecting min of ~500GF in portable mode vs 160GF.

However, it wasn't impossible based on the design of the console.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=226861686&postcount=2358

Nintendo could have pushed higher and been fine, but Nintendo is very conservative as demonstrated with all of their hardware choices over the years. They'll prefer to go below just to ensure there are no hardware issues due to heat. 

In the end, this is a console that is more powerful than WiiU, portable, has insane local multiplayer capability, insane controller configuration possibility, great 1st party line-up (especailly this year as 3DS is put to rest) and I would assume better 3rd party options than WiiU had just going on what 3DS received.

More tech support in-coming...

http://wccftech.com/nintendo-switch-supports-vulkan/

Some fairly significant limitations on both the CPU and GPU if true ...

Will really need to have it's own versions of the game separate from the HD twins and PC ...

I very much understood what the ramifications of it being a portable platform it was going to be ...

Respect to you for admitting your mistake; a lot of people would have either vanished into thin air, or denounced the Eurogamer report and buried their head in the sand.

I know disappointments suck, but like ripping off a bandaid, it's good to just get them over with.

People need to remember portable mode will be much more usable now with better battery life. 5-8hrs now looks much more likely. Also the portable performance is pretty much aligned with last generation. The nvidia architecture is definitely going to outperform the radeon in the wii u at 176 gflops and the cpu performance is probably somewhere between 360 and ps3 in real terms a huge upgrade on wii u. Not forgetting 4GB of memory which will make downscaled/downgraded versions of PS4/xbone games possibly although I still think we may only get a small number of those.

I personally see nothing negative here. It has prevented the portable mode being awful to be quite honest.

The difference in gpu performance between portable and docked is so large that perhaps not only a boost to 1080p but maybe even 60fps over 30 fps for some titles.

I really think this is capable of some amazing VR experiences too. Skyrim VR, Fallout 3 VR, Call of Duty VR etc.

Smh..... it just deosn't work that way.

Every switch game will be made FOR its portable mode. The portable mode is the primary spec of the switch. This is why its important locking the CPU clock across modes. 

Having 2.5 times the GPU power does not equate to double the FPS!! Especially when the CPU clcok remains locked. Just look at the PS4pro for proof, it has exactly 2.33 times more GPU power and even a 40% boost to the CPU clock, that also does not equate to games that couldnt run at 60fps on the core PS4 suddenly running at 60fps.

And VR experiences? Now I can't tell if you are serious or joking..... so I will just ignore that one.

Like thre are sooooo many things that have to come together when looking at the performance of hardware. Everything that is different from the switch to the HD twins just represents another serious issue that fevs will have to overcome just to get a port running on nintendos hardware. Here are a few differences.

Switch GPU is 6 times less powerful than the XB1 GPU and 10 times less powerful then the PS4 GPU in its uncoked mode (which is the core spec that devs will build their games for). Switch has 3.2GB of available ram to 5GB of ram for the PS4/XB1. More importantly you have memory bandwidth, switch peaks at ~25GB/s which is less than half of what the XB1 has and almost 9 times less than the PS4 memory bandwidth. And the CPU, 4 cores clocked at 1Ghz compared to 8 cores clocked at 1.6+Ghz? 

I really don't know what kinda magic you are expecting devs to be able to do. The sooner you start looking at the switch as a very versatile and powerful handheld machine, the sooner you start putting your expectations in check.

in docked mode, the switch has more GPU power and the option of a higher memory clock which would result in higher memory bandwidth. Translation? having the GPU power to render at higher resolutions and the memory bandwidth to accomodate that while keeping framerates locked. Do not expect things like better textures cause the extra ram isn't there, but you will see sharper textures, better AA, and all round better GPU based effects. In the undocked mode devs could even totally do away with things like AA.

I think you have completely mis-understood what I wrote. I'm not at all expecting ps4/xbone games experiences. I'm expecting last gen quality games while portable, higher resolution, higher frame rate versions of the same when docked and VR experiences again around last gen performance or below.

The Switch has over twice the cpu processor power of wii u whether portable or docked and furthr optimisations for 64bit code can be made which might give it 2.5x over wii u. It also has a small advantage over 360 and ps3. Graphics performance is going to be similar based on its much later architecture and feature set. I don't think its unreasonable to expect it to perform as well as a last gen home console as a portable based on its spec.

The VR experience may actually work as if docked giving the full 400 gflops performance with a usb power lead. It's certainly not unreasonable to think that configuration couldn't do full VR versions of last gen titles without problems especially with the generous memory.

Admittedly if VR is limited to battery power then its probably between wii and wii u performance and any last gen games made to run at something like 70fps will only be able to do so with a reduction in graphic quality.

When you look at something like call of duty black ops II you see the wii u struggles to maintain over 30fps a lot of the time but 360 is rock solid at 60fps with the ps3 hovering more around 50-55 fps.

Remember the Switch is only going to be providing a low resolution VR experience. Probably something like 640x720 per eye. Same as the original Oculus beta units.

Many people are happy with the google cardboard VR experience and Nintendo will offer an upgrade on that in both game quality and convenience. 

No one is saying its competing with PS4/xbone/PC on a technical level. It's just a nice platform for portable gaming, basic home console and entry level VR nothing more. As a home console its a big upgrade on wii u. 2.5x cpu, 3x gpu, 3x memory. It's not unreasonable to expect a version of mario kart running at 1080p 60fps at home, 720p 60fps portable and 720p 70fps in VR.

I don't know what the maximum refresh rate of the tablet screen is but I suspect it's unlikely to go much above 70hz.

Regarding the locked cpu speed. It's pretty clear they will provide some headroom in cpu requirements for portable mode to allow for an increase in cpu load when docked. Whether that means portable is 720p 30fps and docked is 1080p 30fps, 720p 60fps or even 1080p 60fps. I'm sure you know that a game engine producing 60fps over 30fps does not need 2x the power. The game engine is generating the data constantly and how the frame rate is delivered based on that data is not a huge difference. The ps2 as weak as it was generating 60 frames per second for most games but only output half the interlace lines of one frame and then the alternate scanlines for the next internally generated frame. 720p - 1080p needs a big increase in gpu performance but 30 to 60 fps does not in the same way, yes it still needs a greater performance level but not to the same magnitude. The gpu may even have functionality to create interpolated frames.

With regard Virtual Reality, Nvidia's maxwell architecture supports VR direct with all the api's for enhanced VR functionality.

There is a ton of stuff in maxwell architecture that is leaps and bounds over older consoles including wii u, ps3 and 360. This will make Switch punch above its perceived performance level. 

I honestly think it will be a nice product with some great games. 

No, this is wrong. I will try and explain this in the most generalized basic way possible.

A game engine is split into CPU and GPU tasks. Lets call the X and Y respectively. Now lets take Zelda. To run zelda at 720p/30fps in tablet mode, X and Y must complete all relevant tasks in 33ms per frame. 

You need to increase the power of the CPU by at least 30-50% if you plan on doing the core CPU tasks that are tied to the framerate of a game in half the time. You need to literally double the GPU power to do the same tasks in half the time at the same resolution. 

So basically, if the were to try taking zelda from a 720p/30fps game to a 720p/60fps game they will need at least 40% more CPU and two times the GPU.

Going from 720p/30fps to 1080p/30fps does not require anything on the CPU side. Its purely a GPU bump and as such is signicatly less taxing than upping the framerate. 

Look at it this way, if you take the switch spec undocked, then take it docked with the clock bump to the GPU.... thats exactly what you need to do to render almost twice as many more  pixels than 720p to get it up to 1080p.

You have massively over-stated the required level of performance boost and you are totally at odds with the reality of what is achieved by games in general. Including a huge range of 60fps games by both Nintendo and other publishers. With exceptionally low cpu resources the wii u has provided many rock solid 60fps games but has struggled to achieve 1080p resolutions. Many games including fps games like black ops 2 have maintained 60 fps games. I think part of the issue may be you are taking a PC perspective where games simply push more frames based on the hardware performance level rather than a game developed from the ground up to achieve a certain frame rate with given hardware where the engine will be fully optimised to work at a certain frame rate. 

However even if your figures are right and it is as high as 40% which I don't believe for a minute it is for a game designed from the ground up for 60fps. The wii u already runs games like mario kart at 60fps with a rubbish 32bit 9000 mips cpu and the Switch has a far superor 64bit quad processor of 19000 mips approx which probably can achieve 2.5x approx performance. Huge amount of headroom there. For the ps3 and 360 the 360 was also about 19000 mips in total but the older architecture gpu needed much more assistance from the cpu plus again older 32bit architecture. Again there is headroom there to achieve higher frame rates. 

I honestly don't get what your problem is the Switch has extra cpu performance, huge amount of extra memory, a much later gpu architecture with a huge amount of features that will assist both cpu and gpu performance. So your saying when DICE did Black Ops II on 360 they lost getting on half the cpu performance by going to 60fps. How can you even give a figure of 40% when the cpu performance of different systems varies enormously and is not a constant with some systems having a higher or lower ratio of cpu power compared to their gpu. The game engine itself would dictate how much extra processing is required per frame and this would never be a constant compared to the all the other logic processes going on depending on game.

Not forgetting the Maxwell architecture is based around optimised VR performance and reducing the load on the system.