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Forums - Nintendo - Nintendo Switch 2GB or 4GB?

Alkibiádēs on 23 January 2017
curl-6 said:
Alkibiádēs said:

Arms looks a lot better, just look at the texturing on Master Mummy compared to the low poly enemies of Halo 4. Besides, you took a capture from a stream versus a direct capture. 

Halo has far better lighting, shaders, and effects, and more detail. ARMS looks very basic graphically, hell I'd even say 2008's Gears of War 2 looks better.

You can't really discuss with you when it comes to Nintendo, always too negative, just like how you were sure Breath of the Wild was going to get cancelled on Wii U. 

Here's a screenshot of Gears of War 2:

Not sure why you're comparing shooters to an arena fighter though. Not to mention that Halo 4 and Gears of War 2 look dated on a big TV these days. And boy, it looks like the Gears of War developers didn't have access to more than 5 colors. 



"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" - Thoukydides

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curl-6 on 23 January 2017
Alkibiádēs said:
curl-6 said:

Halo has far better lighting, shaders, and effects, and more detail. ARMS looks very basic graphically, hell I'd even say 2008's Gears of War 2 looks better.

You can't really discuss with you when it comes to Nintendo, always too negative, just like you were sure Breath of the Wild was going to get cancelled on Wii U. 

Here's a screenshot of Gears of War 2:

Not sure why you're comparing shooters to an arena fighter though. Not to mention that Halo 4 and Gears of War 2 look dated on a big TV these days. 

I'm simply comparing looks, not style or genre.

And I'm not saying Switch is weaker than PS3/360, (Mario Odyssey looks better than anything on those systems) just that this one particular game, ARMS, looks very unimpressive graphically.



Pemalite on 23 January 2017
curl-6 said:

Halo has far better lighting, shaders, and effects, and more detail. ARMS looks very basic graphically, hell I'd even say 2008's Gears of War 2 looks better.

Halo 4 achieved what it did because it used lower-poly assets for things like rocks, buildings, etc'.
Allot of Halo 4's lighting, shaders and shadow effects were baked/pre-calculated. Not dynamic and real time.

Halo 4 achieved what it did not because of technical wizardry or unlocking some amazing hidden potential of the console, but because of fantastic Art and an intelligent use of finite resources.
It actually has multiple graphics regressions from Halo 3 which had Tessellated water, double buffering, HDR lighting.

ARMS is using more dynamic, real-time effects.

It's also why the jump from last Generation to this Generation wasn't seen as a massive jump in graphics by some, dynamic, real-time effects are freaking expensive and held back the perceived graphics jump.
But ultimately they do look better in motion and makes development easier.

bonzobanana said:
4GB seems a funny amount of memory when the memory bandwidth is meant to be 25.6GB/s and the GPU gflops are sub 400 or 150 approx when portable. It seems like too much memory for the rest of the system. 2GB would be ample for this performance level for a console. I guess it depends on how much memory the OS takes.

One of the big issues with Tegra based systems was memory amounts. 2Gb systems seem to struggle.
3Gb and 4Gb allows the system to breathe.

Raw bandwidth and flop numbers are not telling the entire story.

monocle_layton said:

Must have been cheaper to go for 4gb since most mobile developers ship their phones/tablets with 4 gb of memory. Going for 2gb probably would've Made more problems that can be avoided by just going with 4.

Ram is cheap. 4Gb isn't that more expensive than 2Gb these days, plus the console needs to be a little-forward looking.

fleischr said:
How would the Switch be more powerful than WiiU with only 2GB of RAM? Even with better architecture?

Because RAM has zero processing components?

bonzobanana said:

Well it is actually fairly close in power to wii u/ps3/360 in portable mode but gets a boost to graphics only in docked mode to allow higher resolutions. It isn't significantly more powerful than wii u anyway but can run code off cartridge and the OS in the background may be significantly simplified compared to wi u. wii u actually used 1GB of its memory for the OS which is huge and not the norm. 

It is vastly superior to the Wii U, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Yes. Even in Portable mode.

arthurchan35 said:
its almost cetain its 4gb, but no sure its ddr4 or ddr3

Doesn't matter. It wouldn't be using DDR4 or DDR3. It will be using LPDDR4 or LPDDR3, but with the bandwidth figures we have, they would both be the same speed.
LPDDR4 however does use less power and thanks to scales of economy should end up cheaper than LPDDR3 over the long run.


bonzobanana said:

The switch cpu performance is about 2x wii u

Nope.

bonzobanana said:

switch gpu is about 150 gflops in portable mode compared to 176 gflops for wii u plus possible 24 gflops if the wii gpu can assist.

Your use of flops in this context is pointless, you are not telling anyone about the systems performance capabilities.

bonzobanana said:

Memory bandwidth is likely to be 25.6GB/s shared for Switch compared to 12.8GB/s for wii u but the wii u also has a 32MB pool of high speed memory at about 70GB/s I think.

Raw numbers indicates squat. You do know Switch uses various forms of compression to garner more bandwidth than the raw number implies right? Compression technology that the WiiU doesn't support at a hardware level?

bonzobanana said:

Looking at game performance for Zelda between wii u and Switch in portable mode we are seeing same resolution and possibly a more consistent frame rate on Switch but we will have to see final software as it was an early build of the wii u game.

They are roughly equivalent with that game.
Which is to be expected, Zelda was built originally as a Wii U title, not a Switch title, the fact that a launch game on the Portable-mode Switch looks as good as end-of-generation Wii U says allot.
Wait for Digital Foundry to do a proper analysis on the release, you might find the Switch in portable mode has more consistent performance.

bonzobanana said:

 It is struggling to increase the resolution of 720p portable games to 1080p docked as expected with many falling below at 900p native resolution. This may indicate a memory bandwidth issue when docked or some other currently unknown issue.

Bandwidth is certainly a key issue in driving up the resolution, but it's not the only one.
But with that in mind, you do know there is more to graphics than just the resolution, right?

bonzobanana said:

Lets not forget if the wii u has 176 gflops for its main gpu and up to 24 gflops asisst from its wii gpu plus 70GB/s of high speed memory for its frame buffer that is pretty good compared to 150 gflops and 25.6GB/s shared memory. When I say a overall 30% increase I'm not exactly being unfair I'm giving the nvidia alot of allowance for its later architecture possibly too much.

Again. There is more to performance than flops.
You are ignoring the superior Polymorph engines, Render-Output-Pipelines, Texture Mapping Units, CPU capability, Integer performance, Half Precision and Double Precision floating point performance, compression, culling and so much more.

The Switch's GPU is far more efficient and can do far more effects.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

Alkibiádēs on 23 January 2017
curl-6 said:
Alkibiádēs said:

You can't really discuss with you when it comes to Nintendo, always too negative, just like you were sure Breath of the Wild was going to get cancelled on Wii U. 

Here's a screenshot of Gears of War 2:

Not sure why you're comparing shooters to an arena fighter though. Not to mention that Halo 4 and Gears of War 2 look dated on a big TV these days. 

I'm simply comparing looks, not style or genre.

And I'm not saying Switch is weaker than PS3/360, (Mario Odyssey looks better than anything on those systems) just that this one particular game, ARMS, looks very unimpressive graphically.

Arms looks much better than Super Mario Odyssey, but that's to be expected as it's an arena fighter and doesn't have huge open levels like Super Mario Odyssey. Still I have to cringe when I see flat textures of grass like in Halo 4, Gears of War 2 and yes, also Super Mario Odyssey. Not to mention all the jaggies that were visible in the city and the trailer only being 720p. The forest world in Super Mario Odyssey had very poor ground textures and the humans in the city level were also very basic.

The only negative I can see with Arms is that the cheering crowd in the background is poorly animated and in a lower framerate as well I think. Won't be noticable when you're fighting though.



"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" - Thoukydides

Ljink96 on 23 January 2017
SmileyAja said:
bonzobanana said:
Do you have a link, I can't find it. Still no confirmation. Nintendo confirmed the wii u 2GB back at launch but have been quiet on the Switch memory. No one seems to know for sure. There was a rumour of a foxconn employee seeing 2 chips on the motherboard but this could still be 2GB or even 1GB.

But he got battery precentage right, dock details right (even the fact it has no fan, which LKD at the time was certain of), weight details right, the fact that the Joy-Cons are very complex inside right, the Joy-Con color variations (though he called it orange and not red, but the "red" Joy-Con really looks more pink-ish orange than red) and I've probably missed some stuff. I might have missed other things he got right, but for more info check SpawnWave's video out here;

And I don't see why 4GB would be overkill, if Switch were to get ports from other consoles, which use half the RAM for the OS and the other half for games, Switch is seemingly going to have a very simple OS to conserve RAM, so if it consumed around 500 MB to 1 GB, developers would have around the same amount of RAM to work with as they do on other consoles. And 4GB isn't that much more expensive than 2GB, they're definetly not paying a premium. You have 200 dollar phones with 6 GB of RAM, it probably doesn't cost as much as one would assume. 

Hehe, you watch Spawn Wave too! Cool! 

You also make a really smart point. Switch's OS seems very simple and maybe that's why Nintendo has passed some online functions to your smart device, such as voice chat. But since it is so simple and if it does use 500MB-1GB of RAM for the OS, having access to 3GB Ram is about what devs on PS4 and Xbox one have to work with. 

But....where the hell did you see a 200$ phone with 6 gigs of ram??? Google Searches...dear God, you're right! Those phones seem to be from Honk Kong or Shenzhen but still, that's crazy! Most flagship phones these days are only equipped with 3 gigs and they still cost a fortune...



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rjason12 on 23 January 2017
bonzobanana said:
Wyrdness said:

Again where are you getting those numbers? You're asking for sources but not giving any, the threads on this very site with people like Permite or what ever his name debated this and came up with the twice the power speculation. If you're basing this on EG's speculation they're already out of date Foxconn is now the most legit leak as they gave details that can't be guessed about the Switch and they had the Switch at better performance than what EG speculated, EG even admitted they sat on their own info for months.

Switch for a start isn't a device you can estimate from flops and such this was debated in the other threads, for one Nvidia flops are do more work per number than AMDs, secondly the Switch may have access to Nvida's architecture, shaders and all which Wii U doesn't further widening the gap. Thirdly you're using a game that is a port, Aonuma confirmed BOTW didn't land on the Switch until last April making it a quick port of something built for a different architecture and all.

Well the original eurogamer article on final spec is here.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nintendo-switch-spec-analysis

and the analysis of the other leak is here;

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1334549

It seems to me the original eurogamer spec is more accurate. 

While I agree the Nvidia gpu is more capable than its gflops figure indicates compared to wii u its important you don't just run away with ridiculous performance claims. The same comparison was made with the wii u over ps3 and 360 and the end result was not that the wii u easily beat them despite the lower gflops figure it actually struggled despite the generational difference. Remember the gflops figure is an indication of its performance level allowing for its later architecture. What was fantastic performance of 250 gflops in 2005 is pretty much base level now. 

Lets not forget if the wii u has 176 gflops for its main gpu and up to 24 gflops asisst from its wii gpu plus 70GB/s of high speed memory for its frame buffer that is pretty good compared to 150 gflops and 25.6GB/s shared memory. When I say a overall 30% increase I'm not exactly being unfair I'm giving the nvidia alot of allowance for its later architecture possibly too much.

The Foxconn rumor is the true one, not eurogamer. They're the only leak that knewabout the neon color controllers.



curl-6 on 23 January 2017
Alkibiádēs said:
curl-6 said:

I'm simply comparing looks, not style or genre.

And I'm not saying Switch is weaker than PS3/360, (Mario Odyssey looks better than anything on those systems) just that this one particular game, ARMS, looks very unimpressive graphically.

Arms looks much better than Super Mario Odyssey, but that's to be expected as it's an arena fighter and doesn't have huge open levels like Super Mario Odyssey. Still I have to cringe when I see flat textures of grass like in Halo 4, Gears of War 2 and yes, also Super Mario Odyssey. Not to mention all the jaggies that were visible in the city and the trailer only being 720p. The forest world in Super Mario Odyssey had very poor ground textures and the humans in the city level were also very basic.

The only negative I can see with Arms is that the cheering crowd in the background is poorly animated and in a lower framerate as well I think. Won't be noticable when you're fighting though.

ARMS looks poor across the board frankly; characters and stages lack detail, effects lack pop or flair, character designs are generic, not a single thing about it is impressive graphically. I'm actually surprised to see a first party Switch exclusive looking this bland, it's not even up to the standard of many of their Wii U games.



Pemalite on 23 January 2017
Alkibiádēs said:

Arms looks much better than Super Mario Odyssey, but that's to be expected as it's an arena fighter and doesn't have huge open levels like Super Mario Odyssey. Still I have to cringe when I see flat textures of grass like in Halo 4, Gears of War 2 and yes, also Super Mario Odyssey. Not to mention all the jaggies that were visible in the city and the trailer only being 720p. The forest world in Super Mario Odyssey had very poor ground textures and the humans in the city level were also very basic.

The only negative I can see with Arms is that the cheering crowd in the background is poorly animated and in a lower framerate as well I think. Won't be noticable when you're fighting though.

If you take a look at Super Mario Odyssey though you will actually see they are using modern techniques like Tessellation, you can tell by the little pieces of rock debris on the roads in the city scenes, they are their own pieces of geometry, not something baked into the texture work.
They are also using light amounts of DoF.

Sadly they did skimp on filtering and used a Post-Process filter for Anti-Aliasing, which gives the image a soft look.

The lighting seems to be far far better than what we typically saw last generation as well.

Considering it's a launch title, I am fairly impressed considering the hardware Nintendo is running it on. (And I am a massive critic of the hardware.)




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

curl-6 on 23 January 2017
Pemalite said:

Which is to be expected, Zelda was built originally as a Wii U title, not a Switch title, the fact that a launch game on the Portable-mode Switch looks as good as end-of-generation Wii U says allot.

Good and overlooked point. If first year Switch games can look like Mario Odyssey, titles late in its life should look nice indeed.

By the way, what's your take on Odyssey's resolution? Do you think they'll bump it to 900p or 1080p docked, or will it be 720p in both modes...?



Pemalite on 23 January 2017
curl-6 said:
Pemalite said:

Which is to be expected, Zelda was built originally as a Wii U title, not a Switch title, the fact that a launch game on the Portable-mode Switch looks as good as end-of-generation Wii U says allot.

Good and overlooked point. If first year Switch games can look like Mario Odyssey, titles late in its life should look nice indeed.

By the way, what's your take on Odyssey's resolution? Do you think they'll bump it to 900p or 1080p docked, or will it be 720p in both modes...?

Doesn't bother me either way. But I would like to hope they would push for 900P at a minimum.
Or if they stick with 720P, dial up the AA and AF.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite