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

curl-6 on 23 January 2017
Pemalite said:

Or if they stick with 720P, dial up the AA and AF.

It's so weird how Nintendo are so adverse to AA and AF, even on hardware that can easily handle it.



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

Or if they stick with 720P, dial up the AA and AF.

It's so weird how Nintendo are so adverse to AA and AF, even on hardware that can easily handle it.

I know right? They should embrace the glory that is AA and AF. :P
It doesn't always need to be expensive to use either.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

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

It's so weird how Nintendo are so adverse to AA and AF, even on hardware that can easily handle it.

I know right? They should embrace the glory that is AA and AF. :P
It doesn't always need to be expensive to use either.

It always baffled me how so many of their Wii U games lacked AA when it's so cheap nowadays. Heck, even Splatoon2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Switch have no AA.



bonzobanana on 24 January 2017

Skyrim should be a good test for Switch it will make use of the very latest improvement of the engine and have all the advantages of best assets plus both nvidia and arm chipsets are well documented and developed for and no reason it shouldn't be a good indicator of the performance level of Switch compared to earlier consoles. On paper they are very roughly at the same performance level as an average overall. I expect to see it as a bit of a mixed bag performance wise. It will be interesting to see how the arm chips perform with such a cpu intensive game. Possibility of missing content on Switch too and also see how Switch deals with having to install patches knowing Bethedsa past record.



bonzobanana on 24 January 2017
Pemalite 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.

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.

You don't get to read many completely one-sided and hugely biased comments like yours on this site. Frankly you are utterly clueless. Each time you answer with some ridiculous belief that the Switch will perform well above its specification. You need to step back and try to get a grip on reality, Nintendo isn't your friend its a commercial business its doesn't need such ridiculous loyalty and bias.  



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linkhouse on 24 January 2017
arthurchan35 said:
its almost cetain its 4gb, but no sure its ddr4 or ddr3

 

It is LPDDR4  (LP = Low Power)



SmileyAja on 24 January 2017
Ljink96 said:
SmileyAja said:

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...

Yeah, it might seem bonkers but while RAM is fairly important it isn't as expensive or limited these days for mobile devices as it used to be, most flagships these days have 4 or 6 GB of RAM, and the new Zenfone will have 8 and budget phones from China will follow in a period of a few months. Though you will find that RAM isn't a good measure for performance, these cheap phones have noticeably weaker processors and GPUs which is more important than RAM by quite a bit.

Yup, love SpawnWave, glad he embraced the Foxconn leak.



Pemalite on 24 January 2017
bonzobanana said:

You don't get to read many completely one-sided and hugely biased comments like yours on this site. Frankly you are utterly clueless. Each time you answer with some ridiculous belief that the Switch will perform well above its specification. You need to step back and try to get a grip on reality, Nintendo isn't your friend its a commercial business its doesn't need such ridiculous loyalty and bias.  

Oh giggity. Personal attacks. Here is an idea, have an intellectual discussion first (If you can), leave the drama at the gate.

I constantly ridicule Nintendo's anemic hardware, I also haven't owned a Nintendo device in years, so there is certainly zero loyalty or bias, if anything I am more Xbox Leaning with a primary preference for the PC. Master Race and all that.
I also will not be buying the Switch because it is underpowered, overpriced and I dislike the form factor.

And when I am comparing the Switch, I am comparing it to Graphics Core Next 1.0 and AMD's older Very-Long-Instruction-Word based architectures, it's common knowledge nVidia's Maxwell and Pascal beats AMD around in efficiency. - That difference in efficiency is almost embarassing when compared to older Architectures like what is found in the Wii U (Which is VLIW).

Even before the performance downgrades, the Switch was between the Wii U and Xbox One in terms of performance, with the downclocks, it's still in between the Wii U and Xbox One, it's just a little closer to the Wii U, this is something I have stated multiple times. - If that is being "Loyal" and that I need to "Get a grip on reality". - Then I simply don't care about your opinion.


SmileyAja said:

Yeah, it might seem bonkers but while RAM is fairly important it isn't as expensive or limited these days for mobile devices as it used to be, most flagships these days have 4 or 6 GB of RAM, and the new Zenfone will have 8 and budget phones from China will follow in a period of a few months. Though you will find that RAM isn't a good measure for performance, these cheap phones have noticeably weaker processors and GPUs which is more important than RAM by quite a bit.

Yup, love SpawnWave, glad he embraced the Foxconn leak.

The fantastic thing with having a ton of Ram is that, Android will unload things less often, so when you switch browser tabs, the device doesn't need to load the entire tab again, it's instant.
Or if you are switching apps, it doesn't need to relaunch the app.

RAM features zero processing capabilities however, so will not typically "speed" things up, rather just prevent them from halting to a crawl as things are sourced from slower storage devices.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

fatslob-:O on 24 January 2017
Pemalite said:

I know right? They should embrace the glory that is AA and AF. :P
It doesn't always need to be expensive to use either.

AA is usually a bad idea aside from maybe the temporal variants since most engines feature deferred renderers which will skyrocket the cost of G-buffer rendering and the shading cost since your shading closer to sample rate ... 

AF also isn't as cheap especially on mobile devices which are likely to have stringent amount of bandwidth and texture sampler resources ... 



Ganoncrotch on 24 January 2017

I heard it's expandable, you can have a separate 4gb in your phone which the switch can access via a separate app as a part of Nintendo Live Gold Plus subscription.

Please note, satire! Just reading some of the posts in this thread and feel that might need to be pointed out!



Why not check me out on youtube and help me on the way to 2k subs over at www.youtube.com/stormcloudlive