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

I don't recall any rumour said 2GB of RAM.



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bonzobanana said:
superchunk said:

Its 4GB. Every rumor maker who has been right on every other account is stating its 4GB.

There is no confirmation of that surprisingly at this stage. Nintendo announced the 2GB memory of the wii u quite freely but with Switch they aren't being as clear. It's also higher than the more powerful competition using the same chipset and rumours also suggested it was originally going to be 2GB but the retail version would match the development kit with 4GB. I'm not totally convinced and won't believe it until Nintendo states 4GB or we see it in the tear-down. It just seems too much for a console of this performance level. With the Nvidia shield box only having 3GB yet meant to be a gaming centric box supporting 4k and hdr  and yet the lower spec Switch has more memory all of which needs to be powered by battery in portable mode and lowering runtime it just makes no sense at all. The Switch has its 4 main cpu's running at half the speed of the Shield and doesn't feature the other 4 little arm chips at all yet needs even more memory?  It's a strange design choice if nothing else. It made total sense the dev kit had 4GB as headroom for developing and a final retail version would be down to 2GB to extend battery life and reduce costs. In a few weeks we will know anyway. 

Only reason they reveal Wii U RAM is because Wii U had more RAM than PS3/Xbox360, but Switch with 4 GB will again have twice less RAM than XB1/PS4 so its not something to brag about compared to Wii U vs PS3/Xbox360.

Evre believable rumour said 4GB, actually I don't recall that any rumour suggested 2GB of RAM. More RAM is always better and prices of RAM today are very low.



About the GPU stuff:
-Little Pascal doesn't have that much efficiency improvements over Maxwell, besides VR related stuff. I don't think that there's a big difference between both if manufactured in 16nm.
-Tegra Drive PX2 only has more GFLOP/s because of more clock.
-Foxconn leak talks about a GPU clock of 921MHz. With 256 shaderunits that's 460 FP32 GFLOP/s.

Now the important part:
You can't compare GFLOP/s from different GPU architectures. Maxwell and Pascal are way more efficient per GFLOP than the GPU's Xbone and PS4 are based on. And lightyears ahead of the VLIW5 shaders the Wii U GPU was based on.
It's not so farfetched that 460GFLOP's for Switch would equal half the Xbone power. And it would be a big leap over Wii U's 176 or 352 GFLOP/s, depending on how many shaderunits you think it has.
And even if the Eurogamer stuff is true Switches GPU would be way faster with 384GFLOP/s.

So yes, there's a use for more RAM.

So, RAM:
-It's quite ceap. Well, if you use standard stuff as Nintendo did. Now, 1600MHz leaves as with 12.8, 19.2 or 25.6GB/s depending on the memory interface.
-That memory interface means you'll need a certain amount of chips.
-Clock, bandwidth and memory interface tell us it's not 3GB. Tegra is a bit memory hungry and 4GB aren't much more expensive than 2GB.

Basically, Switch can make use of 4GB RAM and yes, the GPU is way more capable than Wii U's GPU, at least docked.
But i can tell you that even in tablet mode Zelda and Mario Kart run better than on Wii U.



fatslob-:O said:
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 ... 

Even on Wii U though they omitted AA completely in some games, despite other titles showing the system could handle various AA methods just fine.



curl-6 said:

Even on Wii U though they omitted AA completely in some games, despite other titles showing the system could handle various AA methods just fine.

AA is not free, not even the post process types ... 

Do you know the specific numbers for how much each game spend a portion of their frame times with AA enabled ? 



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fatslob-:O said:
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 ... 

Talking in general.. As even Nintendo's Home Consoles typically used minimal/non-existent amounts of the stuff.

Plus "Morphological" works fine with deferred renderers.

captain carot said:
About the GPU stuff:
-Little Pascal doesn't have that much efficiency improvements over Maxwell, besides VR related stuff. I don't think that there's a big difference between both if manufactured in 16nm.
-Tegra Drive PX2 only has more GFLOP/s because of more clock.
-Foxconn leak talks about a GPU clock of 921MHz. With 256 shaderunits that's 460 FP32 GFLOP/s.

You are pretty correct.

Pascal basically took Maxwell and improved upon it, rather than revolutionised it.
Pascal did improve on things like Delta Colour compression for instance... And got reworked to help drive higher clock rates to help take advantage of Finfet.

nVidia is releasing a "Pascal 2.0" this year. I am interested to see what that entails.

captain carot said:
So, RAM:
-It's quite ceap. Well, if you use standard stuff as Nintendo did. Now, 1600MHz leaves as with 12.8, 19.2 or 25.6GB/s depending on the memory interface.


Don't forget Delta colour compression which gives it more bandwidth than the raw numbers implies.
The only other console with a similar technology is Playstation 4 Pro.

Plus, the Switch has a "mode" that developers can toggle which drops the memory speed down to 1333mhz, which Eurogamer did touch upon.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

Pemalite said:

Talking in general.. As even Nintendo's Home Consoles typically used minimal/non-existent amounts of the stuff.

Plus "Morphological" works fine with deferred renderers.

Morph is post-process though ... 

Most of these post-process methods are anything but anti-aliasing when they don't even try to sample in geometry space ... 



fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:

Even on Wii U though they omitted AA completely in some games, despite other titles showing the system could handle various AA methods just fine.

AA is not free, not even the post process types ... 

Do you know the specific numbers for how much each game spend a portion of their frame times with AA enabled ? 

I never said it was free, but considering how cheap the post-process stuff can be, and the fact that most Wii U games used at least some kind of AA, it seems weird to omit it for some games. I mean, even if you have to slightly cut back in other areas, going without AA in a 720p game isn't a good look.



fatslob-:O said:
Pemalite said:

Talking in general.. As even Nintendo's Home Consoles typically used minimal/non-existent amounts of the stuff.

Plus "Morphological" works fine with deferred renderers.

Morph is post-process though ... 

Most of these post-process methods are anything but anti-aliasing when they don't even try to sample in geometry space ... 

But it's still better than nothing.
Plus it's cheap. Super cheap.
Last gen consoles used and abused it because of that fact.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

curl-6 said:

I never said it was free, but considering how cheap the post-process stuff can be, and the fact that most Wii U games used at least some kind of AA, it seems weird to omit it for some games. I mean, even if you have to slightly cut back in other areas, going without AA in a 720p game isn't a good look.

The cut backs aren't at all "slight" when you have to hit an aggressive target of 16.6 ms per frame ... 

Just spending 3 ms on a rendering pass means you've already blown 18% of your frame time budget ... 

There is a good reason behind why software engineers make these trade offs ...