Hopefully Switch doesn't continue the Wii U tradition of a bloated OS that hogs memory.

Given the spec they're apparently going for, 3.2GB is plenty. 

I never bought the excuse that Nintendo just showed a bunch of random games during that trailer and that the "real" games would look 5x better or something. I think this is a pretty good gauge on the graphics the Switch can produce:

It would just be stupid to go out of your way to debut your system with graphics purposely worse than what the system could actually produce. 

Basically I think Nintendo is fine with this level of graphics, they don't care for much better for the forseeable future. 

3.2GB is plenty, but if they devote half their RAM to the OS again, that would be crappy.

Its certainly not record breaking amazing by any means but "will absolutely die in the west" is certainly an exaggeration.

Not entirely sure about PS3/360, over 100 million though.

Does doing something once make it a tradition?

Call it what you wish, but wasting 1GB on an OS that wasn't really any better than the 32MB Xbox 360 OS is a horrible move that nobody should want to see repeated with Switch.

I didn't say it wasn't

* Memory bandwidth gets reduced by 20% so from 25GB/s to 20GB/s. (Optional.)
nVidia pegs the bandwidth gain thanks to colour compression to be around 25% for Maxwell. - So you still come out slightly ahead of where the numbers lay.

* CPU performance isn't worth mentioning. It's blatantly terrible. - Still waiting for a console company to take CPU performance seriously for once.

* GPU is the nasty part. 30.2% GPU clock reduction.
Making it 393Gflop or 786Gflop in double precision.
Mobile mode it becomes 157Gflop or 314Gflop double precision.

Welcome to the Portable Wii U. (Kidding.)

Developers will be forced to use double precision more often on the Switch than the Xbox One/Scorpio/Playstation 4/Playstation 4 Pro, complete with massive image quality hits.

And even though mobile mode is extremely limited, it should still offer better texturing, lighting, geometry etc' than the Wii U.

Obviously Nintendo was worried about battery life... And instead of just throwing a larger battery at the problem, got aggressive with clock rates instead.

A full clocked Maxwell Tegra was doing last generation titles via Android at 1080P 60fps, that's your baseline.
Something with half the CPU clock, less bandwidth and only 40% of the total GPU throughput is going to have a seriously compromised experience.

But those are also last generation non-hardware optimised titles, they wouldn't be using Tegra's Tessellator or taking advantage of newer shaders for instance.

No. Far better than the Wii U.

As I have said all along the Switch will sit between the Wii U and Xbox One. This doesn't change that.

They make a massive difference.

A.I won't be as complex and damanding, Physics won't be as full, particulates will be less, Alpha effects will less, Shaders will be simpler... List goes on, and that all impacts the immersiveness and believability of a world.

It is entirely possible. It's just not going to happen. Obviously.

The Xbox One is using 5+ year old 28nm Graphics Core Next hardware, it wasn't even high-end, new hardware even on release.

Mobile has come a long way during that time, especially with 16nm Pascal.

It has more bandwidth than the raw numbers imply.

The Vanilla Xbox One and Playstation 4 feature HDMI 1.4. - Pretty sure they aren't doing 4k video?

64bit vs 32bit isn't that big of a game changer. 64-bit, real 64-bit tends to consume more memory due to memory pointers being a little bigger.
Performance wise, 32bit in a few edge cases can be faster and use less power than 64bit, but that is typically less of an issue these days with chips counted in Billions of Transistors rather than only Millions.

This is nVidia we are talking about. They aren't cheap, they see themselves as a "Premium" brand.

There is a reason why Microsoft and Sony wen't with nVidia once and never wen't back again.

Allot of people weren't expecting an Xbox One in the palm of their hands. They were expecting "Close enough" or "Good enough" where the difference is perceived to be irrellevent.
With that in mind, technology has come a long way since the Xbox One's half decade old technology was first released on the market, nVidia has made great strides in efficiency.

It's not Wii U levels.

High-end Android and iOS mobile devices and even Intels Atom X7 z8700 should be able to beat it.
They are all getting last-gen ports these days as well.

Probably 1/4th to 1/2 of the Xbox One, depending on the devices "mode" and game.

The Ram capacity is a big bonus. Hoping half of that isn't eaten up by the OS and background duties.

You can't compare flops like that. It's blatantly inaccurate and wrong.

Tegra does more work per flop than the GPU's in the Xbox One and Playstation 4 thanks to it's Maxwell derived architecture.

It will be better than the Wii U. Probably more than 2x. You should stop basing performance on flops alone.

Do you understand how flops relates to rendering a game?

I am hoping Nintendo releases a "Stand alone" version of the switch, ditching the screen, detachable controls so people can leverage the switches game library and use it like a regular console, the hardware would also run at full speed.

Half correct.

For chips that don't meet specific clock rates and power characteristics... You can just throw more voltage at the problem.
The switch being a mobile chip though... That would be counter productive, voltage has a direct relationship with power consumption and heat.

Why is this still up for debate? The Wii U is 176. It's been analaysed to death already, die shots taken, cat paws touched.

The answer to that is a maybe.

If Nintendo decides to save money on cutting back on battery capacity to reduce costs, then you will not get better battery life. But you will get a lower price if they don't eat it up in profits.

That would be true if it was using A72.
But it's not.

It will be A57+A53 as per Tegra X1, which comes up short.
Not to mention... Not all 8 cores can be used at the same time, it is a Big.Little configuration that swaps between four slow cores and four faster cores depending on load.

Actually. You are half correct.
FP32 is used more often on the PC and consoles as it's higher quality with higher precision.

FP16 is typically used in mobile because it's faster, uses less power even at the expense of quality.

So the Switch, if it follows the typical Mobile development paradigm... Should run with FP16 for a large proportion of titles whilst "Mobile".

Performance doesn't always scale like that.
Even though 1080P is just over double 720P's pixel count... Some Architectures will only see relatively small performance penalty.
And some may be hit with a performance penalty of 5x or more.

Where does Tegra fall into that? Well. You can't just take raw numbers and compare it to the Wii U anyway, they are vastly different hardware, but the Tegra should be able to handle higher resolutions better than the Wii U due to a myriad of reasons.

The Wii U also has eDRAM, which further muddies everything up.

It is a good thing it is using a mobile chip designed to run on battery power.

Nintendo should have wen't with a more efficient and newer SOC.

Without a doubt, mobile mode will beat the Wii U.

There is more to energy efficieny than just fabrication node.

Graphics Core Next is far less efficient than Maxwell or Pascal, even when Graphics Core Next has been shrunk down to 16/14nm... This is why Polaris is such a dud, it cannot compete with nVidia's superior performance per watt.

My tablet has a 10,000 MaH battery, screen plays a massive part in power consumption, most 720P panels will have a power efficiency edge over higher resolution displays.

The fact is, they could have gone with a newer SoC. - nVidia doesn't build these chips overnight, they knew years in advance.

Plus, Nintendo/nVidia did not need to get as aggressive with clocks as they did, and still had good power consumption with more aggressive binning.
Which I think is ultimately the crux of the issue. People wanted more, Nintendo didn't deliver.

Things are a little different these days.
The 3DS and Vita aren't just competing with themselves, they are now competing with iOS and Android.
It wouldn't be a terrible argument to state that the switch is competing with Vita/3DS/iOS/Android/Xbox One/Playstation 4 and other derivatives.

Geometry should be a big step up. nVidia's Polymorph engine should be vastly superior to the Wii U's Tessellator. (Either full or Truform based.)
Texturing should be a massive leap, thanks to the increase in DRAM.

Lighting, Shading and other effects can be a hit or miss, depending on precision used.

******

All in all I think we can confidently continue to say that the Switch is between the Wii U and Xbox One. (Like I have said all along.)

Whether it gets ports or not is likely entirely dependent on how successfull the device will be, if it sells a ton of units, it's hard for business's to ignore the sound of money being spent.

I mean in terms of support the system recieves.