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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Is Switch's processing power important to you?

 

Is it?

Very, I won't buy it if it's weak 171 25.26%
 
Moderately so 281 41.51%
 
Not really 127 18.76%
 
No, power doesn't matter to me 63 9.31%
 
No, cos I'm not buying one 35 5.17%
 
Total:677

I don't see why anyone needs the "most powerful system evah". The fact of the matter is that the most powerful systems have always been a let down in the past, and power has NEVER been a guideline for how good the games would be.

The PS2's Final Fantasy games were twice as long as most of the PS3/PS4 versions.
The WWE games from a decade ago had more characters and options than any of the current gen versions.
The Order 1886, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Halo 5... the games were made for console many times more powerful than the previous generation, yet none of them live up to the legacy created with weaker hardware.

Nintendo don't need the most powerful hardware to be a success, which they proved with the Wii. But as long as they make great games and great experiences, that is all we really need.



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curl-6 said:
Miyamotoo said:

In some way, Nintendo will make great looking games with power thats stronger than Wii U, they made good looking game even with Wii hardware and great looking games with Wii U hardware. Whats important for Switch is that technically will be very modern console, that really couldn't be said for Wii and Wii U.

I agree with the first part, Nintendo have proven they don't need high end specs to make pretty games. Mario Galaxy and Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, case in point. I'm sure they'll do the same on Switch.

In terms of power though, Switch doesn't look like it will be any stronger for its time than Wii or Wii U were.

Don't even try to count how many times Wii was less powerful than Xbox360/PS3 (20-30x maybe), Switch will be probably around half of power of XB1, so of course that Switch will be more powerful than Wii in its time.



It's a piece of the pie. I don't care about raw numbers or if it's the most powerful thing out there, but I do care about visible progress, it needs to be something worth getting over what I have today. What's more important though is the systems overall concept, and that part about the Switch is pretty shaky. The other big piece is, obviously, whether or not it'll have good games and for now besides that it'll have a 3D Mario, it only has stuff I already have (or will have with Zelda) or didn't get because I didn't want them.



3rd parties are able to port games to it! That is the problem.
I love Nintendo games, but I also want to play others games!



Soundwave said:
bonzobanana said:
I'm still going with the 2-3x wii u performance upgrade but you have to factor in the wii u performance was at a very low level. It will not be competitive with ps4 or xbone in either gpu or cpu performance. As crap as the x86 processors in the ps4/xbone are they still will comfortably outperform the arm's of the Switch I expect. It's all a grey area though as we don't know the final spec of Switch but I'm confident Nintendo will compromise it slightly to reach a certain manufacturing cost. I still think gflops performance of around 400 gflops, only 4 cpu's and slower older ddr3 memory or single channel ddr4. If it's shared memory I expect there will be something in the main SOC to provide enough space for the frame buffer plus a bit more, perhaps 32 or 64MB of fast memory, cache etc. This memory may well replace some of the cpu or gpu units.

Clearly Zelda is looking very similar across both consoles so I doubt there is night and day performance differences.

I am expecting cartridges to be smaller than people are expecting so I think there will be some issues there.

It's not going to get decent versions of major third party games. Even if it sells huge numbers its technically much weaker and they don't sell too well on Nintendo platforms. It will be the same situation as wii. Cartridges ensure it will be expensive for third party developers and history shows us such games sell badly so its a non-starter.

It's not as bad as the Wii, the Wii was a full generation behind the 360/PS3 and didn't have any kind of modern shader technology that really made that HD next-gen go. 

Switch should be able to run a fair number of PS4/XB1 games, hell the PS3/360 even can (MGSV is still one of the better looking next gen games if you ask me, but it's also able to run on the PS3/360) ... Switch should be more powerful than a PS3/360 without much fuss and has 6x more RAM to boot (if we're talking 4GB RAM with 3GB reserved for games). So a fair number of ports should be doable. Some won't be, probably more ambitious titles like The Witcher 3. 

Don't expect even performance though, things are going to have to be sacrificed. 

I agree with your points on a technical level but I feel its commercial reasons why the Switch is unlikely to get many big third party games.

1. Cost of cartridges for publishers with limited storage plus Nintendo's history of high royalties and unfair terms and conditions

2. Low sales due to wrong userbase and poor performance compared to other versions of same game

3. Additional development time and additional optimisations  required to get games running on low performance arm based console which increases costs

4. Optical discs can be heavily discounted because manufacturing costs are low and publishers can be flexible with retailers regarding sale or return or discounting plus easier and cheaper digital delivery systems where as cartrige game prices remain higher for longer.  Result is ps4 and xbone versions will be much cheaper after the launch window. End users would be paying more for much inferior versions.

5. Nintendo's online infrastructure and DRM system is basic and dated compared to Microsoft and Sony meaning online functionality will be more problematic and not ideal for many games where online play is important.



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bonzobanana said:
Soundwave said:

It's not as bad as the Wii, the Wii was a full generation behind the 360/PS3 and didn't have any kind of modern shader technology that really made that HD next-gen go. 

Switch should be able to run a fair number of PS4/XB1 games, hell the PS3/360 even can (MGSV is still one of the better looking next gen games if you ask me, but it's also able to run on the PS3/360) ... Switch should be more powerful than a PS3/360 without much fuss and has 6x more RAM to boot (if we're talking 4GB RAM with 3GB reserved for games). So a fair number of ports should be doable. Some won't be, probably more ambitious titles like The Witcher 3. 

Don't expect even performance though, things are going to have to be sacrificed. 

I agree with your points on a technical level but I feel its commercial reasons why the Switch is unlikely to get many big third party games.

1. Cost of cartridges for publishers with limited storage plus Nintendo's history of high royalties and unfair terms and conditions

2. Low sales due to wrong userbase and poor performance compared to other versions of same game

3. Additional development time and additional optimisations  required to get games running on low performance arm based console which increases costs

4. Optical discs can be heavily discounted because manufacturing costs are low and publishers can be flexible with retailers regarding sale or return or discounting plus easier and cheaper digital delivery systems where as cartrige game prices remain higher for longer.  Result is ps4 and xbone versions will be much cheaper after the launch window. End users would be paying more for much inferior versions.

5. Nintendo's online infrastructure and DRM system is basic and dated compared to Microsoft and Sony meaning online functionality will be more problematic and not ideal for many games where online play is important.

1. We dont know if publishers taking costs of cartridges or that will be done buy Nintendo, also SD cards in bulks of millions are dirt cheap. There will not be limited storage on cartridges, you will have cartridges from 8GB tu 64GB, not to mention that games can easily fit in much less GBs than that they are on XB1/PS4.

4. Flash memory prices (Switch cartridge) are constantly falling like a rock.

5. We dont know about infrastructure and DRM system for Switch, we know DeNa is helping them.

 

Its most important that Switch is technical very modern console that supports all modern engines, so from technical point evre PS4/XB1 game could be ported to Switch without problems. If we talk how much 3rd party support Switch will actualy have, that mostly depends from popularity and sales of Switch itself, if actual sales and become popular Switch will have more 3rd parties and more 3rd party games.



Considering the type of system it is, not really.



                
       ---Member of the official Squeezol Fanclub---

Power is important because it can bring third party support. It doesn't need to be the most powerful, but powerful enough to receive support.



When it comes to Nintendo consoles, power wouldn't matter to me. PlayStation and Xbox it does matter.



Miyamotoo said:
bonzobanana said:

I agree with your points on a technical level but I feel its commercial reasons why the Switch is unlikely to get many big third party games.

1. Cost of cartridges for publishers with limited storage plus Nintendo's history of high royalties and unfair terms and conditions

2. Low sales due to wrong userbase and poor performance compared to other versions of same game

3. Additional development time and additional optimisations  required to get games running on low performance arm based console which increases costs

4. Optical discs can be heavily discounted because manufacturing costs are low and publishers can be flexible with retailers regarding sale or return or discounting plus easier and cheaper digital delivery systems where as cartrige game prices remain higher for longer.  Result is ps4 and xbone versions will be much cheaper after the launch window. End users would be paying more for much inferior versions.

5. Nintendo's online infrastructure and DRM system is basic and dated compared to Microsoft and Sony meaning online functionality will be more problematic and not ideal for many games where online play is important.

1. We dont know if publishers taking costs of cartridges or that will be done buy Nintendo, also SD cards in bulks of millions are dirt cheap. There will not be limited storage on cartridges, you will have cartridges from 8GB tu 64GB, not to mention that games can easily fit in much less GBs than that they are on XB1/PS4.

4. Flash memory prices (Switch cartridge) are constantly falling like a rock.

5. We dont know about infrastructure and DRM system for Switch, we know DeNa is helping them.

 

Its most important that Switch is technical very modern console that supports all modern engines, so from technical point evre PS4/XB1 game could be ported to Switch without problems. If we talk how much 3rd party support Switch will actualy have, that mostly depends from popularity and sales of Switch itself, if actual sales and become popular Switch will have more 3rd parties and more 3rd party games.

The publishers buy cartridges off Nintendo who have to put their own markup on and Nintendo themselves buy them from Macronix and they are not SD cards they are proprietory and not made with the economies of scale of SD cards which is highly competitive with many manufacturers competing. If its like the N64, publishers had to order a minimum number of cartridges, something like 50,000. Nintendo aren't going to be paying for the cartridges (except their own games of course). Macronix do cartridges by Gigabit not Gigabyte and Nintendo announced cartridges of 32Gb and 64Gb in size so will be 4GB and 8GB in size likely with heavy compression.  However many people disagree with me on this so we shall see but I was right about 3DS capacities and suspect I'll be right again with the Switch. Cartridges can only afford to cost  a few dollars and we won't be seeing 64GB cartridges at all I bet or if we do it will be because Switch as sold very well and continues to be sold for many years and we get those capacities at the end. 

Largest 3DS game so far is Xenblade for the new 3DS at 4GB. Games like mario maker are 512MB. List of roms here but note the rom sizes are bits not bytes so share the number by 8 to get the real value in megabytes.

http://3dsdb.com/

I guess xenoblade works out at about half the size on new 3DS compared to the optical disc for wii but compression ratio's have gradually increased as processing power has increased so its possible switch games could have slightly better compression. I'm expecting major Switch games to be 4 or 8GB in size at launch with minor titles considerably less. I think the smallest 3DS titles were 128MB.

I wouldn't be surprised if Zelda breath of the wind is a 4GB cartridge or 32Gb using the normal macronix type descriptions that might provide about 10-12GB of uncompressed data. However I feel 8GB is more likely. Don't assume 8GB though because most of the 3DS games were much smaller than most people expected in rom size including myself. Nintendo will always for the minimum cost to increase margins.